FAQ for
Vertigo (1958)

The following FAQ entries may contain spoilers. Only the biggest ones (if any) will be covered with spoiler tags. The contributors assume that no one who is diligently avoiding spoilers will be visiting this page in the first place.

For detailed information about the amounts and types of (a) sex and nudity, (b) violence and gore, (c) profanity, (d) alcohol, drugs, and smoking, and (e) frightening and intense scenes in this movie, consult the IMDb Parents Guide for this movie. The Parents Guide for Vertigo can be found at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052357/parentalguide.

Yes. Vertigo is based on Sueurs Froides: D'Entre les Morts [trans: Cold Sweat: From Among the Dead, a 1954 crime novel French crime writers Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud (aka Thomas Narcejac), writing as Boileau-Narcejac.

"[A] big international thriller, adapted from the novel Flamingo Feather by Laurens Van der Post, to be shot on location in South Africa."

Source: Dan Auiler, 'Vertigo': The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, NY, 1998, p. 2

Not exactly, says Dan Auiler. He wrote:

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Legend has it that Hitchcock was furious when Vera Miles became pregnant and dropped out of Vertigo. Perhaps a more realistic assessment, though, is that [Alfred] Hitchcock and [James] Stewart had been having their own doubts about Miles as a star.

Hitchcock had discovered Vera Miles during casting for his television series, and he was impressed enough to place her under personal contract; yet according to [Samuel A. Taylor], though secure about her acting ability, Hitchcock felt she didn't yet possess that luminous quality that made a star. By placing her under exclusive contract, he hoped to create that quality in her.

From the onset, though, Miles was reluctant to be shaped by anyone--even a director she respected as much as Hitchcock. Her first feature with Hitchcock was not exactly a showcase for the new blonde. The Wrong Man's microscopic focus on the justice process left little screen time for Manny's wife. Dressed down and psychologically shattered by Manny's unjustified arrest, Miles's character is never fully developed. Hitchcock seemed impatient with the wife's story line, and his indifference shows on screen. The film's sanitarium scenes are similar to the scenes in Vertigo, with the same overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of psychological crisis; yet there was little occasion for Vera Miles to do much else on-screen to make an impact.

This film, and the role in Vertigo that was intended to follow, dominate the Vera Miles story. There is much more, though, to the full picture. Her career had begun with small roles in 1951 in Two Tickets to Broadway and in 1952 in For Men Only; Miles effectively used her television performances as audition pieces for Hitchcock--and for John Ford, who cast her in The Searchers a year before she filmed The Wrong Man. Vertigo was intended as Miles's big break--but even before her first screen tests in November of 1956, there were signs of doubt from Hitchcock. A few weeks before Miles reported to Stage 5 at Parmount for hair, costume, and makeup tests, Hitchcock screened The Eddy Duchin Story, a biopic featuring an actress [Kim Novak] who was being molded by one of Hitchcock's crosstown rivals [Harry Cohn].

--Auiler, 'Vertigo': The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, NY, 1998, pp. 20, 21.

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San Francisco.

Where did Raymond Durgnat say it was set? In his 1974 book, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, he mistakenly placed the film in Los Angeles.

We never find out. We can assume that another cop came to rescue him.

This missing bit of information unsettles us from the beginning and gives the movie an air of mystery and strangeness that deepens as it goes on.

The McKittrick Hotel.

The character, played by Ellen Corby, doesn't have a name.

There isn't one.

Scottie (James Stewart) sees Madeleine (Kim Novak) enter the hotel and then open the curtains of her room. Then he enters the hotel himself and asks the proprietress (Ellen Corby) some questions about Madeleine, whom he discovers is renting the room under the name of Carlotta Valdes. Scottie asks the proprietress not to say anything to her tenant about his visit. She replies that Miss Valdes hadn't been there that day.

Scottie insists that he just saw her walk in. The proprietress maintains she had been putting olive oil on her rubber plant leaves and wouldn't have missed anyone coming in. Besides, Miss Valdes's key is still on the rack. Scottie presses her to check the room. She does, and the room is empty. Even Madeleine's car outside has vanished.

Alfred Hitchcock called this an "icebox" scene, meaning it's the kind of scene that hits you after you've gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox. "Hey," says the hypothetical viewer. "How did Kim Novak vanish from the hotel? Did we ever find that out?"

Couldn't there be a rational explanation for the scene? Some viewers speculate that the proprietress and Madeleine are in cahoots. But why? Why bring the proprietress into the scheme, even in a small way, for such a negligible purpose? True, the incident has a profound emotional effect on Scottie, which makes it all the easier to manipulate him; but that's not the sort of thing that could be predicted or planned for. And even if they were in cahoots there seems to be no obvious way she could have slipped out and driven off without Scottie (and us, the viewers) noticing.

Others have thought Madeleine had rented a room under her real name, Judy, or another alias. In other words, the proprietress does not know "Madeleine" as Madeleine. She knows her as Judy (or another name).

But then whom does she know as Carlotta Valdes? Perhaps Gavin Elster's real wife rented a room under the name of Carlotta Valdes! This would explain how Scottie could see Madeleine/Judy enter, explain how she could get her key from the proprietress, and explain why the proprietress insists she never saw Carlotta. It would even explain the empty room: that was Carlotta's room. Judy is still in her own room.

But why does Gavin Elster's real wife rent a room under the name of Carlotta Valdes? Perhaps Gavin Elster was telling the truth about his wife. Maybe she really was obsessed with the past, really was obsessed with Carlotta Valdes. Perhaps she really was going a little mad. Not mad enough to commit suicide, but enough to give her husband an evil idea.

Why does Judy rent the room? That was Gavin's way of keeping tabs on his wife.

How did the car vanish? There's still no explanation for that.

And wouldn't Scottie have noticed if the room the proprietress showed him was not the same one he had seen from the street? Yes.

These speculations are amusing but pointless. Hitchcock gave no indication that he had an explanation in mind. And no theory seems to fit.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

George Bailey (James Stewart) is frantically trying to prevent his customers from pulling all of their money out of the Building and Loan. When the spinster Miss Davis (Ellen Corby) asks for only $17.50, he impulsively kisses her on the cheek.

What is their characters' relationship in "Vertigo"? Scottie Ferguson (Stewart) is far less affectionate with the proprietress (Corby) of the McKittrick Hotel. Their characters are meeting for the first (and probably only) time. And in that brief time, they annoy each other.

Here's one possibility. Scottie is giving her ruse his willing suspension of disbelief. If he allows himself to believe that she is Madeleine he'll also have to believe Madeleine duped him. But when he sees the necklace, his fantasy world turns to ashes. He can no longer fool himself.

Why does Judy jump from the tower at the end? It's more likely she tripped and fell. The most common interpretation of the ending is that when Judy saw the dark figure of the nun, she thought it was the ghost of the real Madeleine and recoiled in horror and fear.

Vertigo is a great film, but not a perfect one. First-time viewers tend to focus on the plot, its implausibilities and a twist that seems to end the movie half-way through.

Second- or third-time viewers can concentrate on the characters; the themes of love, obsession, unrequited love (the Barbara Bel Geddes character), duplicity and manipulation; and the extraordinary depth and beauty that the performances, images and music give to them. Vertigo has a hypnotic power on the viewer who has already solved the mystery of the plot and can now delve into the mysteries of human nature.

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It's difficult to put into words exactly what Vertigo means to me as both a film lover and as a filmmaker. As is the case with all great films, truly great films, no matter how much has been said and written about them, the dialogue about it will always continue. Because any film as great as Vertigo demands more than just a sense of admiration - it demands a personal response.

A good place to start is its complete singularity. Vertigo stands alone as a Hitchcock film, as a Hollywood film. In fact, it just stands alone - period. For such a personal work with such a uniquely disturbing vision of the world to come out of the studio system when it did was not just unusual - it was nearly unthinkable. Vertigo was and continues to be a real example to me and to many of my contemporaries, in the sense that it demonstrates to us that it's possible to function within a system and do work that's deeply personal at the same time.

Vertigo is also important to me - essential would be more like it - because it has a hero driven purely by obsession. I've always been attracted in my own work to heroes motivated by obsession, and on that level Vertigo strikes a deep chord in me every time I see it. Morality, decency, kindness, intelligence, wisdom - all the qualitites that we think heroes are supposed to possess - desert [James Stewart]'s character little by little, until he is left alone on that church tower with the bells tolling behind him and nothing to show but his humanity.

Whole books could be written about so many individual aspects of Vertigo - its extraordinary visual precision, which cuts to the soul of its characters like a razor; its many mysteries and moments of subtle poetry; its unsettling and exquisite use of color; its extraordinary performances by Stewart and Kim Novak - whose work is so brave and emotionally immediate - as well as the very underrated work of Barbara Bel Geddes. And that's not to mention its astonishing title sequence by Saul Bass or its tragically beautiful score by Bernard Herrmann, both absolutely essential to the spirit, the functioning and the power of Vertigo.

Of course, we can now hear Herrmann's score with clarity and breadth that it's never had before, thanks to [Robert A. Harris] and [James C. Katz], the men who worked on the beautiful, painstaking restoration of Vertigo. I'm happy that the Film Foundation was able to play a part in making this important work possible, and I'd like to thank Universal and Tom Pollock for allowing it to go forward and, of course, I'd like to thank the American Film Institute for their invaluable contributions.

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PRO:

A good old-fashioned brew of sock, suspense and surprise... A most handsomely furnished film. -- Peter Burnup, News of the World

It entertains and is admirably photographed. -- Times

Hitchcock in vintage form. -- Frank Jackson, Reynolds News

Hitchcock pulls a major mystery and a bit of a miracle out of his capacious bag. -- Harold Conway, Daily Sketch

The mechanisms and motivations of the male power drive are subjected to the most ruthless and uncompromising critique. -- Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, 1986

In Vertigo, Hitchcock reveals himself to his audience, embodying, in Stewart's character, his own obsessions and desire to make women over. -- Baseline

Of all Hitchcock's films the one nearest to perfection. Indeed, its profundity is inseparable from the perfection of form: it is a perfect organism, each character, each sequence, each image, illuminating each other. Form and technique here become the perfect expression of concerns both deep and universal. -- Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited, 1989

[Hitchcock] was a great visual stylist in two ways: He used obvious images and surrounded them with a subtle context. Consider the obvious ways he suggests James Stewart's vertigo. An opening shot shows him teetering on a ladder, looking down at a street below. Flashbacks show why he left the police force. A bell tower at a mission terrifies him, and Hitchcock creates a famous shot to show his point of view: Using a model of the inside of the tower, and zooming in while at the same time physically pulling the camera back, Hitchcock shows the walls approaching and receding at the same time; the space has the logic of a nightmare. But then notice less obvious ways that the movie sneaks in the concept of falling, as when Scottie drives down San Francisco's hills, but never up. And note how truly he "falls" in love. There is another element, rarely commented on, that makes Vertigo a great film. From the moment we are let in on the secret, the movie is equally about Judy: her pain, her loss, the trap she's in... Novak, criticized at the time for playing the character too stiffly, has made the correct acting choices: Ask yourself how you would move and speak if you were in unbearable pain, and then look again at Judy. -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

A complex tale with supernatural overtones... What is apparently seen may not be what actually happened at all. The feeling of vertigo is communicated in the music, in the overemphatic titles... and in a sequence which visualizes the delirium suffered by the detective. Hitchcock uses a highly elaborate and oddly leisurely style in telling this unlikely tale. -- Gerald D. MacDonald, Library Journal

Vertigo would be pretty preposterous if it weren't for Hitchcock. -- Isabel Quigly, Spectator

Brilliant but despicably cynical view of human obsession. -- Geoff Andrew, Time Out Film Guide, 1998

CON:

The plot is a brilliant box of devilish tricks. And yet the film disappoints. It seems too long, too elaborately designed; the narration of this kind of criminal intrigue sags under such luscious treatment; it needs the touch of the harsh and squalid. As the mysterious quarry Kim Novak makes one of her more lifelike appearances. -- Dilys Powell, Sunday Times

Alfred Hitchcock, who produced and directed the thing, has never before indulged in such far-fetched nonsense. -- John McCarten, New Yorker

Technical facility is being exploited to gild pure dross... [The film] pursues its theme of false identity with such plodding persistence that by the time the climactic cat is let out of the bag, the audience has long since had kittens. -- Arthur Knight, Saturday Review

The old master has turned out another Hitchcock-and-bull story, in which the mystery is not so much who done it as who cares. -- Time

At the risk of sounding slow-witted, I must complain that Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was a little too difficult for me. I had to concentrate so narrowly on the labyrinth of the plot that I never broke out in the cold sweat which is the emotional reward of a good thriller. -- Robert Hatch, Nation

The trouble, I think, is that the ideas which Hitchcock pioneered have since been made commonplace by imitation: great close-ups of an eye, or half an eye, or the corner of a quivering mouth, or a hand holding a pistol, or hair-raising chases up high places. All this amusing Hitch-poppycock is no longer exclusive to him. -- Daily Mail

Tricksy... Vertigo has its moments, all right, but between them stretches a lot of wasted time. -- Philip Oakes, Evening Standard

A film in which character and theme are unimportant, and which therefore relies heavily on plot interest. Unfortunately in this case, the plot is an involved one. -- Monthly Film Bulletin

Murky and pretentious. -- John Simon, 1970s