Pete's Pad:Movies:Hitchcock:Vertigo

Vertigo

Writers:	Pierre Boileau (novel), Alec Coppel, Thomas Narcejac (novel), Samuel Taylor
Composer:	Bernard Herrmann
Director of Photography:	Robert Burks
Cast:
Raymond Bailey	Doctor
Barbara Bel Geddes	Midge
Ellen Corby	Manageress
Tom Helmore	Gavin Elster
Henry Jones	Official
Kim Novak	Madeleine/Judy
Lee Patrick	Older Mistaken Identification
Konstantin Shayne	Pop Leibel
James Stewart	Scottie Ferguson

Based on the novel D'entre les morts by Pierre Boileua and Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo was originally called by its French title, From Amongst the Dead; its final designation came from Hitchcock, despite executives' coolness to what they considered a fancy word. The project was enormously difficult from conception to final cut, and at least two drafts of the screenplay -- by Maxwell Anderson and Alec Coppel -- were found to be unshootable until playwright Samuel Taylor was engaged. His collaboration with Hitchcock resulted in a scenario of great beauty and subtlety.
The transformation from the French novel to the American film reveals many significant and deliberate developments, all of them serving Hitchcock's intentions. The book's Paul Gèvigne -- an unattractive, greasy villain -- has become the elegant and successful Gavin Elster. The brunette Madeleine has become the typically blond Hitchcock doll. Pauline Lagerlac has been renamed Carlotta Valdes and given Spanish-American ancestry. Also in D'entre les morts, detective Roger Flavières, fully aware of his vertigo at the outset, fails to apprehend a criminal and sends an assistant to his death. In Vertigo, however, Scottie's discovery of his condition is an accident, simultaneous with the moment of crisis. Hitchcock thus obliterates Scottie's guilt and makes him more sympathetic than Flavières. The book has no equivalent for the film's forest sequence, for its spiritual theme of "wandering", or for the crucial theme that Madeleine is an unrealized aspect of Judy's own personality. The novel dwells on the World War II ambience (which Hitchcock completely excised) and contains no final retributive fall, no return to a church tower. Flavières simply strangles Reneè (Judy) on a sofa and the novel ends with the crazed man promising somehow to wait for her.
Hitchcock's treatment of the story has, among its roots, the ancient legend of Pygmalion and Galatea. According to the Roman poet Ovid, Pygmalion was a gifted young sculptor who (like Scottie) never married because he detested the blemishes and faults nature gave women. He resolved to fashion the image of a perfect woman to show other men the deficiencies they must endure. But poor Pygmalion went too far with his statue and discovered that he had fallen in love with his own creation.
The legend of Tristan and Isolde is also relevant. When Isolde marries King Mark, the heartbroken Tristan marries another woman named Isolde to keep alive the memory of his former love. The end is tragic, climaxing in Tristan's death and the first Isolde's suicide. The link between love and death -- echoed in legend, literature, and art -- is apposite to Vertigo; and Bernard Herrmann's lush, symphonic score for the film -- arguably one of the finest contributions to the medium -- more than once recalls the "Liebestod" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
But however much Vertigo indicts the tragic and the deadly, it remains a work of authentic beauty and grandeur, a film of astonishing purity and formal perfection in every element. Each line of dialogue, each color, each piece of decoration, each article of wardrobe, each music cue, camera angle and gesture, each glance -- everything in this motion picture has an organic relation ship contributing to the whole. Never has there been presented so beguilingly the struggle between the constant yearning for the ideal and the necessity of living in a world that is far from ideal, with people who are one and all frail and imperfect. Vertigo is a work of uncanny maturity, authorial honesty, and spiritual insight, and if its characters are indeed doomed to a tragic end -- not one of them able to reach the fulfillment of an earthly love -- that is not due to Hitchcock's contempt. It is, in the final analysis, a work of unsentimental yet profound compassion, and a statement of transcendent faith in what cannot be and yet what must, somewhere, be true.