a thread for hitchcock's 'vertigo'

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Schools may have shown it and some bootleg prints were apparently available in the years it was withdrawn, but I never had the opportunity to see it til the '84 re-release.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

Because Cary Grant was so much younger. Or younger at all in the first place.

well, there's the irony.

and you've all seen the "censorship" ending? talk about a third nipple...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imbLXT2K--M

kinda glad that scene exists because i always wanted to know what happened to midge!

glad it wasn't in the actual movie, of course, because the actual ending is jesus christ wtf just happened here oh god no.

holy crap, why did they do that?

also midge deserved better

well the idea was the audience has to know that Gavin Elster is punished.

No one is thinking about Gavin Elster in the last 5 minutes.

lol true. but even then, it's pretty lame - they're going to extradite him from the south of France? come on!

also I like the interp that Scottie jumps to his death right after the fadeout.

I like the interpretation that the nun blows him away.

well, then it mighta made ke1th u's list

I kid, but The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein was sooooo bad

That's very weird--I'd never seen that. (I was thinking it was some user-generated parody at first, concocted from DVD extra footage, and that something preposterous was going to be spliced in.)

but yeah, i mean, it could be because that original ending to me is absolutely all-time undefeatable, but the alternate ending is just ugh

Yeah, Hitch really stuck the landing with Vertigo.

but still Hitchcock put in a joke with the radio guy: students "pshing a cow up the steps"... just like Judy!

pUshing

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.