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Boston Globe (25/Oct/1996) - Hitchcock's personal spin on 'Vertigo'

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Hitchcock's personal spin on `Vertigo'

Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (1958) wasn't nearly as popular as either of his two next films -- "North by Northwest" (1959) and "Psycho" (1960). But "Vertigo," being revived today in a restored print, has emerged as the most fascinatingly self-revelatory Hitchcock film of all. Although he became famous for including cameo appearances in all his films, Hitchcock turned "Vertigo" into psychic autobiography, baring his drives, his deepest-seated fears and even his fetishizing of the blondes he invariably chose to star in his films. Love never made the world go round as Hitchcock did in "Vertigo."

He was the first Hollywood director after Anthony Mann to respond to the hitherto unseen dark side of Jimmy Stewart. If Cary Grant was to become the worldly surrogate self Hitchcock wished he was, Stewart became the awkward alter ego Hitchcock saw reflecting his real self -- fearful, repressed, sexually tormented, possessed of a cruel streak that reaches its apotheosis when Stewart's detective bullies Kim Novak into submissively transforming herself into the blonde of his romantic obsessions.

Novak's manufactured woman, Madeleine, willed into being by Stewart's damaged victim, is literally film's foremost sex object -- and, as such, has been the subject of much denigration. But Hitchcock didn't become the master he was by playing to wholesomeness. The voyeuristic eye out of which the opening credits of "Vertigo" spiral mischievously echoes the voyeuristic core of "Rear Window." As he did in "Rear Window," Hitchcock also has Barbara Bel Geddes offer unwanted rational discourse in "Vertigo."

When Bel Geddes talks sense, Stewart doesn't want to hear it. His character, with his fear of heights, is in free fall. You have to go back to the German Expressionist films on which Hitchcock cut his teeth to find such a depth of erotic angst. At the time of its release, "Vertigo" was criticized for being too slow and heavy and dark. But it is precisely those qualities that give it its haunting, dreamlike flavor. Bernard Herrmann's score is appropriately Wagnerian, heavily chromatic. It reinforces the sense that we're watching a film drugged by its own voluptuousness.

"Vertigo" is so dreamy, so druggy, that when it does actually introduce a dream scene, it seems excessive, jarring. And if Hitchcock was able to pick up on Stewart's capacity for relentlessness, he also exploited that side of Stewart's persona that told America it was watching a decent, homespun, plain-spoken guy. Stewart's character gets away with telling Novak who and what to be because he is able to convince us he is, at bottom, an innocent himself -- and a victim.

At the end, when Stewart's duped detective stands at the top of the bell tower, hands outstretched, begging for mercy, his cruelties evaporate in his helplessness. He wants to fall, he doesn't want to fall -- even if he controls the woman for whom he's falling. To live his obsessions, he has to venture out of his defenses, give up some control. Which, to the control freak Hitchcock, was where terror resided. Rarely is a film as filled with personlized iconography as "Vertigo" is. No other film by the renegade Catholic Hitchcock, tormented by guilt and powerlessness arising from erotic fixation, ever got so close.

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