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It's the greatest movie of all time, at least I think so in certain moods. Tonight we saw this one at the Castro in 70 MM and it looked pretty convincing, almost as though it might have been made yesterday. But it's long, I had forgotten how long! Maybe because the movie breaks off into two more or less equal parts, it's like watching a double feature, a movie that carries its own sequel in its tail. This evening I decided to give myself up to the Bernard Herrmann music--since it's so insistent you listen to it I decided to put my other senses on dull and just go for that total immersion.... The way that Barbara Bel Geddes recommends that James Stewart immerse himself in Mozart ("Mozart is the boy for you," she says, rather infantilizing Mozart if such a thing were actually possible, but that sort of remark reminds me of why Scotty doesn't really appreciate Midge's good qualities, because she's so much like a mother!)--in other words, I let the Herrmann score wash all over me like the high tide that splashes behind the lovers in the climactic kiss scene in Vertigo.
So what happened? I started wondering, that one theme is so dominant and seductive in the score, was it ever made into a pop tune with lyrics, sung by Nat King Cole or Julie London or someone? Help me out there, soundtrack geeks! It's gorgeous indeed, and yet I remember when I was a kid seeing Vertigo for the first time, I didn't like the music, it felt dissonant and distracting. There's that one section of music when Scottie follows Madeline Elster into the Mission Dolores and he turns a corner and finds himself in the graveyard where the music goes sort of "religious" in a really rote way that just wasn't working for me, it made me giggle to myself like, didn't anybody else in the theater get the joke? The Castro crowd was certainly giggling when Midge tells Scottie, "Oh you want the kind of guy who knows about the gay old times in San Francisco back when everything was gay!" But when this mock religious bell tinkle music began I heard nothing from the audience, just awe perhaps.
SPOILER ALERT. Now for my own challenges with the movie.
I was struck by Ellen Corby here as perhaps never before, the hotel manager who wipes her rubber plant leaves with olive oil. How is it that Madeline is in her room, above their heads, and yet Corby swears that she never came today, points to the key dangling from the hook? We have seen her with our own eyes, and it looks like she's undressing, and yet when Corby calls down the stairs, "Mister Detective, do you want to take a look yourself?" Scottie manages to run up the stairs like a trouper and no, she's not there. But why? Corby must be lying, perhaps she is in on the plot but if so, why the mystification here? Why doesn't she just say, "Yes, she's upstairs," and Scottie can wait for her to leave? I wonder if there wasn't some extra plot line being developed here that eventually for cut back from the finished film, in which dematerialization itself would have been used by the criminal cohort? But for those who think that Gavin Elster will get off scot-free at the end because Scottie has no living witness for the substitution plot at the heart of the film, I foresee a crazy Scottie going back to the McKittrick and rubbing Ellen Corby with olive oil until she too confesses her involvement (whatever it is), and voila, Elster led off in handcuffs and Corby sobbing and dripping with emollient.
And also, has anyone thought much about Midge as a possible accomplice to the murder? I thought about it during the Argosy Bookshop scene, where Midge first assures Scottie, oh, Pop Leibel the bookseller, sure, he's a great friend of mine! But when they go to the store, Pop seems only vaguely aware of Midge at best. he calls her Ma'am or Miss as though he's never met her before. When Midge goes back into the store and taps Pop's knee, affectionately saying,"Aw thanks Pop!" a little ping went off in my head and I thought, "She's lying!" It seemed she was lying all through the movie, and once you see it, you can't miss it for the rest of the movie, she just seems guilty of everything! Maybe some of it can be blamed on a certain blatant quality of the exposition, "Midge, we were engaged for three weeks, weren't we? Or am I remembering wrong?" Her pencil snaps, her eyes narrow, female rage threatens to boil over the lens but she's already part of the plot or so I gather. I wish Midge could write out a letter to Scottie apologizing for framing him, the way that Judy Barton does, such a handy device for telling us what went on while we were just grooving with the brooding music and wondering why San Francisco has so many white people in it! There's that one beautiful, tall Asian woman sitting in a corner at Ernie's--just representing, I guess. And maybe a Spanish man or two among the jury panel at San Juan Bautista during the inquest into Madeline's death. However, the Chinese presence in San Francisco is also "represented" by Jimmy Stewart telling Kim Novak about the "Chinese saying" that if you save someone's life, you are forever after responsible for them. My student Leo, from China, says that in the real China that is not an actual belief anyone he knows has ever heard of. Meanwhile the Spanish and Mexican feeling in Vertigo is quite palpable.
How about James Stewart's nightmare? We see him and Gavin Elster triangulating over a beautiful woman dressed as Carlotta in the painting, and we see, it's not Kim Novak at all, it's the original of the painting. Is the actress supposed to be playing the actual Madeline who by this time has been killed? And Scottie's subconscious is somehow pointing this up to him so that he wakes up sweating? What is the name of that actress I wonder? "Regal" isn't the word for her. Is she Vera Miles? No, I think she's too old to be Vera Miles. (Kind informants have told me that this actress, whose eyes can be seen close up in the opening title sequence, with spirals coming out of them, is called Joanne Genthon, who never made another picture!)
So, I don't have time to read all 493 other reviews of Vertigo to see if others have established the guilt of Barbara Bel Geddes, but I did see that one reviewer (at least one) has applied the Alison Bechdel test to Vertigo and seen it fail, since the two female leads seem never to be in the same frame (though we do see Midge driving by Scottie's apartment at the exact same moment that Madeline steps out of his door, and Midge starts muttering behind the wheel and drives away, apparently upset). But perhaps not upset at all, since she has engineered the whole thing? Maybe there's a reason in the plot and not so much in the psychosexual atmosphere, why Judy must not see Midge at this point in time--or at any point, since doing so would make Elster's and Midge's plot collapse in of itself? Does the key to the mystery lie back in Salina, Kansas? I think so. If someone gave me one hundred dollars, I'd find out the truth and tell the world.
Vertigo is also a film in which women show men representations of more than one woman (as though to hint at a "monstrous regiment of women" that might one day bring down the oligarchy)--we have Midge of course gleefully jamming her own face into her version of the Legion of Honor portrait of Carlotta (as though to say, "I did it") and we also have Judy showing Scottie her proofs of identity--her dad in one old photo, and she and her mother in another. Check out that photo of Judy and her mother, what are we really looking at? Was Judy to have been kept away from Midge because she might recognize the face of her own mother? I know it sounds preposterous, but really, when Scottie asks Midge if she remembers Gavin Elster from when they were all in college together before the war, and she shakes her head "no," maintaining her quizzical smile--frankly I don't believe her! The screenwriters link her to Elster, then encourage you to forget about their college days together. Scottie and Elster seem about a million years older than Midge, but if she was in school with them, is she also supposed to be fiftyish--in other words, plenty old enough to be Judy's mother. And in that case, is it too far removed to name Scottie as Judy's father, perhaps conceived during the famous 3 week engagement?!?! I don't think so. Watch Vertigo again with my theory in mind and watch the jigsaw puzzle click together.
Let me add my interpretation of Pop Liebel's "Carlotta story" as a clue. As we hear, the 19th century Carlotta had a child and then the child was taken from her and she was driven to living off the streets and going mad and painfully asking passerby, "Where is my little girl?" Maybe that is the link between "Midge" and "Judy." That hidden link, but maybe Judy is now living in San Francisco because her real mother (Midge) has gotten her there as part of her secret plan to destroy Jimmy Stewart?
I have now watched and rewatched the so called alternate ending to Vertigo, an extra to the DVD (and also readily available on You-Tube). What do you think? For me it is proof positive of Midge's guilt, as she hears the radio announcer report that Gavin Elster has been captured and prosecuted in Europe, and her face grows bleak as she realizes, in my mind, that Gavin will turn state's evidence on her on whatever the equivalent term is in the courts of Italy. She will never get her Scottie, who stands a broken man next to her even if she's cleaned out nearly every trace of herself as an artist. And how about the announcer's report on the three Berkeley students arrested for trying to smuggle a cow up a staircase? Three Berkeley students (Gavin, Midge, Scottie). Staircase? Well, we know what that is. "Cow"? At Columbia that's what Harry Cohn called Kim Novak when he was mad at her or trying to taunt her. An allegory for the secrets of Vertigo?
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Arrived as pictured.
Great buy and must have for any collector. Happy to have this in my video library.
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2013
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