The Times (03/Mar/1984) - Hitchcock scales the heights of suspense
(c) The Times (03/Mar/1984)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, James Stewart, Kim Novak, Pierre Boileau, San Francisco, California, Thomas Narcejac, Vera Miles, Vertigo (1958)
Hitchcock scales the heights of suspense
Apart from occasional screenings of pirated prints, surreptitiously advertised as "a Hitchcock thriller with Kim Novak"; "Vertigo" has not been seen in this country for something like 20 years. But despite, or even because of this long absence, its reputation has steadily grown.
This week "Vertigo" returns, legitimately, to the cinema and a generation of film buffs who have not been able to see it will at last be able to make their own assessment. Of the five films owned by Hitchcock and deliberately withheld by him, it is the richest and most intriguing.
The story is taken from a novel by the Frenchmen, Pierre Bolleau and Thomas Narcejac, who are said to have written it with Hitchcock in mind; though, as often happened in the great director's work, the film is substantially different from the book.
James Stewart plays a detective who has resigned from the San Francisco force because of a fear of heights. He is assigned to shadow a friend's wife, who has suicidal tendencies, and in the process falls deeply in love with her. He saves her life once when she tries to drown herself but because of his phobia is unable to follow her up a church steeple from which she falls to her death.
Stewart blames himself for the tragedy and has a nervous breakdown. But he later meets somebody in the street who bears a strange resemblance to the dead woman, though she denies any connection. He develops an obsessive attraction to her and tries to mould her in the image of his lost love. At about this point, Hitchcock inserts a flashback in, which the mystery of the two women is explained. He was much criticized for doing this, for surely he has destroying the suspense he had so carefully built up?
His retort lay in the distinction he made between suspense and shock. Suppose two people were having a chat found a table. Unknown to them, a bomb had been planted under the table which was due to go off in 15 minutes. Now if the audience was as ignorant of the bomb as the characters, there would be a shock when the bomb went off but no suspense. But let the audience in on the secret, and there would be 15 minutes of nail-biting tension.
Applying the same argument to Vertigo, the point is that the audience knows more than Stewart and the spectator's interest the final part of the film is that much greater, following Stewart's gradual realization of the truth, than if the information had been held back.
For his female lead Hitchcock settled, rather reluctantly, for Kim Novak after his original choice, Vera Miles, dropped out when she became pregnant. Though Hitchcock found Novak difficult to work with, she comes across very successfully. François Truffaut in his interview book about Hitchcock, writes of her "animal-like sensuality", accentuated by the fact that, anticipating later liberated fashion, she wears no bra.
Like all the great Hitchcock films, "Vertigo" far transcends the simple mechanics of plot. Within a thriller format, it is a complex study of character and the relationship between Stewart and Novak is psychologically much denser than a superficial reading of the film might suggest.
