Introducing... In "Vertigo"

I've only written about Alfred Hitchcock's immortal Vertigo (1958) once for an episode of the old series "May Flowers" so I thought I'd dig up that old piece now that Vertigo is in the news having been named "The Greatest Film" by Sight & Sound. I always think of Vertigo as an early summer movie. What other movie besides its closest descendants Robert Altman's Three Women and  David Lynch's Mulholland Drive feel more ruled by twin sign Gemini? Hitchcock films generally deserve complete dissertations but we don't have Scottie Ferguson's (Jimmy Stewart) stamina when it comes to fetishizing doppelgangers. So today let's merely glance back at his introductions to Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak).

Ferguson has been hired to follow Madeleine and as he first spots her in a deep rose red restaurant. [Click here to open a panoramic shot in a new window]. Hitchock slow zooms out from Scottie (far right) at the bar and pans left, following his gaze, into the dining area filled with flowers and well heeled customers and even a painting of a floral arrangement framed by floral arrangements before it finally stops at Madeleine (tiny, far left) in her emerald green dress.

As she leaves the restaurant we get Kim Novak's first bewitching close up, carefully calibrated and emphasized by Hitchcock's editor George Tomasini and cinematographer Robert Burks. Scottie likes what he sees but this is a job.

Some enchanted evening
you may see a stranger
you may see a stranger
across a crowded room.
And somehow you know
You know even then
that somewhere you'll see her
again and again.

-"Some Enchanted Evening" from South Pacific which opened two months before Vertigo

Scottie will be seeing Madeleine again and again. His interest is thoroughly piqued. Hitchcock sees Ferguson's obsessive spiral coming long before the man himself does. When Scottie next follows Madeleine she enters a door in an alley way and he enters, not knowing what he'll find there.

my favorite scene in Vertigo (1958)

I thought about choosing Vertigo as a "Best Shot" entry early on in the series but I already knew that this stalking sequence would include my all time favorite shot and I had already written about it right here. Hitchcock gives us Scottie's POV as we head into a dark hallway and peek through a backdoor and suddenly the room is bursting with color as Madeleine shops for florals and then our POV shifts back to omniscient as we peer on Scottie drinking Madeleine from the shadows.

This is psychologically astute visual storytelling. Once he's in pursuit, Scottie is cast into shadow and suddenly it's all color, flowers, woman. This, too, will be happening to Scottie again and again, albeit not in the literal sense. His personality will darken (obsessive bullying voyeur coming right up) and soon his life will be entirely focused on colors (it must be the gray suit! the hair must be blonde!), flowers (his eyes darting from bouquet to bouquet) and this particular woman. All he will be able to see is Madeleine.

Or Judy as the case may be...

Scottie also first "meets" (okay, stalks) Judy, who looks suspiciously like Madeleine, in a setting bursting with colored petals. His eye is drawn to a floral shop by a familiar bouquet... And then he spots Judy, introduced with a right profile closeup just like Madeleine. Her introductory shot isn't as elegant but she's from Selina, Kansas. What did you expect?

Though she lacks Madeleine's class, she's practically a fraternal twin. Scottie will force the issue until she's identical. Hitchcock, Novak and Stewart aren't afraid to commit to unlikeable characters (pity that neither actor was Oscar-nominated for this but it took a long time for Vertigo to achieve its current lauded status) and the movie is richer and darker for it.

Vertigo makes you dizzy with its duplicate women, tripled bouquets -- oops, I didn't mention the third woman, Carlotta Valdes, and that painting that hypnotizes Madeleine?

No?!

We can't venture there, lest we be sucked into the knotty insane spiral of all of these doppelgangers. We don't want to end up like Scottie or Madeleine who'll violently toss her flowers into the river before jumping in herself.

This movie was all too much for her.

In the week since the Sight & Sound announcement, which Vertigo moment has relodged itself in your head? Without watching it again would you already have a "best shot" in mind?

Comments

[Jordan]

The moment I'll always come back to is the sweeping 360-degree shot of Scottie and Madeleine kissing in the green-lit hotel room inter-cut with them kissing in the horse stable(?) at the mission. With Hermann's gorgeous score underlying it, the scene gives me chills of orgasmic proportion every time.

[Michael C.]

I just posted it on Twitter. The silhouette of a dejected Judy sitting in the hotel room swallowed up in eerie green light, vanity and beauty products well lit in the foreground

[James T]

Nathaniel - Maybe that can be your new big project. A "Greatest Films of All Time According to the FilmExperience Team and Readers.
We can email you (or message you via facebook or whatever but stating our real names) our all time top 10's and you can put grades accordingly etc and then have a top10 or top100 or whatever.
Oh say you'll do that. It will be hard for all of us to decide what our top10 will look like but it would be awesome!

[cal roth]

My favorite shot is a lateral close-up of Judy, but the one in which we know the truth about her. Scott leaves her alone, she looks at the camera, and we know what happened. I love this shot because it's a replay of a magnificent shot in Shadow of a Doubt, in which Teresa Wright realizes Joseph Cotten is a serial killer. We see Cotten from the same angle and he looks at the camera. Of course I haven't seen both movies in a long time, but I had seen Shadow of a Doubt before seeing Vertigo and this shot seemed the same. I love when movies of the same director dialogue.

[Kromowidjojo]

@ Jordan That's also my pick, plus the build-up as Scottie waits for Judy to come out. The swelling up of the music literally gave me chills and perhaps cemented that "whoa, this one of the greatest movie ever" notion, on me at least.

[denny]

Best shot in Vertigo is SO easy.

Other than the patented Vertigo trick shot, it's that nun rising out of the darkness at the end. Scared the shit out of me when I first saw the film in my very early teens (as part of a Hitchcock marathon on TCM; I went through at least four VHS tapes taping everything I wanted to see), and today I see it as the film's central image. For me, it's the most haunting moment of Hitch's most haunting film.