a thread for hitchcock's 'vertigo'

yeah Alfred, i thought I carefully explained the value of Novak's casting! cheeeee!

Yeah I worry it's status will blind new audiences to how nuts it is. They will expect some austere cool masterpiece and that's not the appeal at all to me.

Novak's performance reminds me that this is one of those films whose flaws seems to resonate. Tho I always did think Vera Miles looked pretty hot in those test photos.

Novak IS well cast but so are Roman and Granger.

but the roles are boring. They kinda had to be cuz Hollywood was not ready for Highsmith.

i do love the first half of 'strangers,' and the ending, but it just feels like there's so much held back.

notorious uber alles

that is my personal fave, but i think vertigo is better. whatever that means.

Vertigo's my favorite by far, and that doesn't diminish his other great movies by any means

Ugh you people. North By Northwest is the WORST!

I'm perfectly fine with settling on Notorious or Rear Window as his masterpiece if not Vertigo, but just stop trying to make Northwest happen.

gay panic

Hate fuck.

(In any case, at least Vertigo doesn't have a queer villain.)

Ugh you people. North By Northwest is the WORST!

― Eric H., Wednesday, August 1, 2012 10:09 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

worse than topaz???

I mean, if someone makes the case for Topaz being Hitch's masterpiece, maybe I'll relent.

fortunately Hitchcock, like the other Old Hollywood Masters, made a bunch of terrible movies for auteurists to revie.

I'll say.

http://ochmonek.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/northbynorthwest.jpg

as David Edelstein wrote today, NxNW "is too much fun."

(oddly left off "for Eric")

really dude, do you hate The 39 Steps too?

definitely prefer notorious, on some days might prefer marnie. love nxnw but c'mon (do prefer that score though). vertigo was one of the ones that was out of circulation right? morbs you're old enough to remember that period - was it really that hard to see them? as great as it is i do wonder how much of a role that lost treasure aspect plus the super prominent 90s rerelease (first s&s poll after that is the first where the hitchcock vote noticeably unifies around one film iirc) played in burnishing rep.

Schools may have shown it and some bootleg prints were apparently available in the years it was withdrawn, but I never had the opportunity to see it til the '84 re-release.

When I finally watched Black Narcissus a few years ago I was surprised by how much Vertigo seemed to have borrowed from it, especially the crazy climax. The nun at the end of Vertigo almost seems like a deliberate reference.

really dude, do you hate The 39 Steps too?

Nope, that's all good. The Lady Vanishes is even better.

I did debate including T39S in my top five.

i could probably watch '39 steps' once a week. it's pretty much the perfect movie.

Plays well projected on the walls of gay bars, tho maybe not quite as good as Sabotage.

vertigo in 70mm or gtfo

so, what about The 39 Steps isn't utterly improved in NxNW?

gay villains are awesome btw

The 39 Steps is trim, isn't bloated, doesn't bend over backwards to shoehorn in irrelevant setpieces, doesn't include among its cast members Cary Grant. Nice opening credits, tho.

xpost you should know, right?

doesn't include among its cast members Cary Grant.

what the.

nearly came to blows once with a friend who insisted that grant was a bad actor. well, not to blows, but we both yelled a lot.

I guess he was serviceable in Notorious.

It's not that he's a bad actor, but my ultimate "do not want" gay archetype.

gay archetype.... Chevy Chase has usurped Eric's keyboard.

"bloated"

oh Eric H. i could have gone the rest of my life not knowing you have no use for cary grant :(

btw Vertigo was not MADE in 70mm. I don't care for the new gunshot sound effects in the first scene either.

"serviceable"!!!

Boy, Vertigo is awesome.

"irrelevant setpieces" [sic] objected to by de Palma/Tarantino fan -- extry, extry!

what gay archetype is cary grant

if you don't like screwball or NxNW there's not much grant left to like!

i used to call him my favorite actor but i think stewart wins by a nose these days.

English, acrobat, likes Irene Dunne

xp

so was Hitchcock lying when he claimed he'd offered Vertigo to Grant first?

Thanks for taking the bait, Morbs.

xpost so not only is it the greatest film ever® it's also the biggest narrowly averted train wreck!

the thought of grant in 'vertigo' is genuinely unsettling.

i am really glad it wasn't Cary Grant in Vertigo because i need to love him

Hitchcock was miffed at Vertigo's lukewarm box office, tried to blame Stewart's age -- we know this, right?

So is Madeleine's escape from the McKittrick Hotel a ghostly enigma, or is Grandma Walton ("Oh, Mr Detective?") in on Elster's plot?

Cool. Feel free to watch THE GREEN FOG when you get a chance.

turns out Maddin put The Green Fog up for free on Vimeo🕸 six months ago

I always wonder if Vertigo, (or the book it was adapted from, which I haven't read) was drawing in some way on this Capek short story.

https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/premedical-society/2020/10/29/karel-capek-vertigo/

Huh! Good little story, and definitely seems like it could be related.

It'll never be my favorite Hitchcock.

Same; it'll always be my second- or third-favorite

I have too many I need to revisit to have a solid ranking. Vertigo's in the top tier. And I think it's distinct — obviously it shares a lot of obsessions with other Hitchcocks, but its vibe is specific and odd.

What are the chances that "Mad Men"'s Matthew Weiner had this film in mind when he created his own character named Midge, who was herself an illustrator/painter?

Very good. I'd never even considered that.

Oh, good call on Midge in Mad Men. I mean, the Mad Men opening montage of the silhouette guy falling is a direct Vertigo reference, right?

I think Vertigo is a great art installation and a middling movie. Your oldest kid is right!

It's an interesting question whether it's supposed to make you feel uncomfortable. Hitchcock wanted his audiences to feel scared, sure, but he was also firmly on the entertainment side, I think if you had suggested to him he was trying to challenge his audience he'd have reacted with disgust. He's def using Jimmy Stewart for shock value in the way everyone's described, but does he want the audience to be freaked out by him? Or to relate to him, while still feeling weirded out by the turns the film takes?

Well, it explains why the film was a box office disappointment.

Yes, and Hitch saw it as a failure because of that. So I don't think his intention was to alienate people.

Most directors make a film which departs quite a bit from what they have been doing.

Saw "Make way for Tomorrow" (McCarey) yesterday and you can see the comedic touch that he displayed in "Duck Soup" which ultimately served other, more tragic, ends and ended up bombing at the box office.

I think this is where auteur theory can really fail as often directors aren't in control, is how I break it down

Oh they often aren't but I think Hitchcock absolutely was throughout the 50's.

Amusing to imagine Hitchcock crafting *that* ending and thinking he had a box office success on his hands.

Yeah I mean, it's hard to say his intention wasn't to alienate people when he a.) abruptly shifts the POV from Scottie to Judy in the last section, and b.) makes Scottie more and more unlikable and crazy right up to the end. Basically daring audiences to follow along. Which was part of his bag of tricks anyway, confounding expectations — but maybe in Vertigo he went farther than the audiences were willing to.

Yeah what I doubt a bit is that Hitchcock viewed the "unlikable and crazy" behaviour of Stewart's character through the same lens we do now; I think he probably thought this dare was less of an ask than we think.

Anyway apparently his own reasoning for why it failed commercially was that Stewart was too old, which, that's a factor but hardly in anyone's top5 haha.