Thursday, March 22, 2012

THE MAIDS 1975


Let me tell you a fairy tale. Once upon a time there was a film producer who believed that movies didn’t have to appeal to the lowest common denominator or always chase the fastest buck. (I told you it was a fairy tale.) In all likelihood under the enchantment of some evil sorcerer, this producer was possessed of the radical notion that films could inspire tastes rather than follow trends, and that motion pictures, in spite of being a populace medium, held the potential for the broader exposure of culture and the arts. From such chimerical fancies was born The American Film Theater (AFT): a limited-engagement subscription series of films adapted from great plays. Over the course of a year these films would screen for one or two days only, two performances each (a matinee and an evening show), after which the films would be withdrawn from release (“Forever!” as the ads intoned). And they lived happily ever after.

OK...OK, we all know I’m not literally speaking of a fairy tale—but I might as well be, given the inconceivability of such an artistically altruistic idea even being broached in today’s Hollywood. The producer in question was the late Ely Landau (producer of the acclaimed 1972 Martin Luther King, Jr. documentary- King: A Filmed Record…Montgomery to Memphis), and The AFT, his cinematic vision of a cultural Camelot, lasted but a brief two years (1973 – 1975) , but managed to produce a lasting film legacy of 14 marvelous plays with once-in-a-lifetime casts.
Click to Enlarge
I was in high school in 1974 and remember wanting to buy a subscription to a season of AFT very badly. But as the films were screened on Monday & Tuesday evenings exclusively, the whole “It’s a school night!” issue rendered the entire matter a closed book as far as my parents were concerned. I did, however, have the AFT poster on my bedroom wall and made myself fairly miserable staring at the diverse catalog of filmed plays offered (A Delicate Balance, The Iceman Cometh, Luther, Lost in the Stars), imagining all that I was missing. 
The film I most wanted to see was the adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids; not because I knew anything about Genet, but because two of my all-time fave rave actresses: Glenda Jackson and Susannah York, were playing the leads. Well, it may have taken 29 years, but The Maids has finally been released on DVD, (in fact, the entire AFT collection - Click here for info: AFT on DVD ) and with it, my adolescent patience rewarded, at last.
Glenda Jackson as Solange
Susannah York as Claire
Vivien Merchant as Madame
With America's history so resolutely mired in slavery, institutionalized racism, and rarely acknowledged socioeconomic imperatives (the rich need the poor); we in the U.S. tend to prefer our domestics sentimentalized (think Shirley Booth in TVs Hazel, Alice on The Brady Bunch, Mr. French in Family Affair, or any TV program in which the "Just like one of the family!"message is reiterated). The social inequities of status or income are never addressed unless crouched in the most cloyingly emotional terms (US domestics work for love, not money...at least on TV), and any expressed resentment or hostility toward one's employer is thoroughly out of the question. The only time we Yanks seem able to relax and enjoy a thoughtful, honest depiction of the precarious servant/employer dynamic is when we're able to put an ocean between us, and even then, only when the events are safely ensconced in the past.
Does it interfere with our appreciation of beautiful surroundings, meticulously maintained,
to consider the lives of those who are paid to keep them that way?

Americans may find a film about white employers and black domestics uncomfortable, but few really expect anything else. Indeed, domestic workers of color are such an accepted cultural conceit that an entire film (1987's Maid to Order) was built around the satiric premise of a white family coveting the status symbol that comes from having a white maid (Ally Sheedy). Since the vast majority of major motion pictures produced in America are for and from the perspective of the white gaze; Stateside domestics (being people of color) are rarely given much emotional dimension. Their role is either to reassure and comfort audiences by being the grateful recipients of white largess, or be the non-complaining supporters of the status quo, happy in their lot. 
Because we reserve humanity for white characters, the oppressed class system hierarchy of European aristocracy in things like Downton AbbeyGosford Parkor Upstairs, Downstairs, are the only environments in which we allow ourselves to listen to the voices of the oppressed from a humanist, non-political perspective. As a country, it seems we find it easier to identify and empathize with the subjugated masses when they're white.  
Although denied by the play's author, Jean Genet, The Maids is popularly believed to have been inspired by the notorious real-life crimes of Lea and Christine Papin; two maids who brutally murdered the wife and daughter of an employer in 1933 France.

If ever there was an artist about whom the words “non-threatening” and “comforting” most definitely do not apply, it is the late, great, poet/novelist/playwright/activist, Jean Genet. His theatrically incendiary play The Maids (written in 1946) and is an acerbic, absurdist treatise on identity and class struggle that plays out like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  and The Killing of Sister George crossed with Harold Pinter’s The Servant.
In the ornately fussy, Louis XV furnished apartments in the aristocratically ritzy Place Vendôme district of France, two embittered live-in domestics work out their hostility toward their mistress (and their own self-frustration for enduring such servitude) by routinely engaging in a ritualized pantomime whenever she is away. Alternately taking on the roles of employer and servant, the maids—Solange (Jackson) and her sister Claire (York)— literally lose themselves in this cathartic ceremony of (self)contempt and emancipation that strives, always unsuccessfully, to culminate in the make-believe murder of Madame.
Truth Games
Madame/Claire: "You only EXIST through me!"
As the film begins, the exaggerated passions of the playacting maids are running at a particularly feverish high, as it appears that their fantasy plotting has begun to take root in the real world. Emboldened by the early morning arrest of Madame’s lover (the result of incriminating letters anonymously mailed to the police by Claire) and invigorated by this small sign of efficaciousness in lives of servile invisibility; the maids determine on this day to make actual, the much dreamed-about, never consummated, death of their beloved/detested Madame.  
Claire: "Now I will order the world about!"
   
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Though not overtly fond of Theater of the Absurd, I do have a penchant for the manner in which art can thrust to the forefront that which is rarely spoken of and scarcely acknowledged about the human condition. Like so many of my favorite films (Robert Altman’s 3 Women, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan), The Maids is about masks, role-playing, and the flexible quality of identity. We each wear masks and play various roles throughout our lives. Often with such regularity and acuity that it can become difficult to remember just what it was the original mask was meant to conceal. Meanwhile the shifting power plays in our day-to-day lives and relationships only serve to reinforce the ever-alternating positions of supplicant and master we find ourselves in. The Maids cleverly uses the banal protocols of domestic servitude (where the feelings of contempt/gratitude/anguish ambiguously co-mingle) to dramatize the interdependent manner in which the way we are perceived by others can come to define the very selfsame ways we see and regard ourselves.
Solange: "When slaves love each other it's not love."
Claire: "No, but it's just as serious."
PERFORMANCES
The '70s was the era of the male "buddy picture," yet, paradoxically, it was also a time (albeit, short-lived) when interesting actors like Glenda Jackson and Susannah York could land major roles in fascinating projects like this. Certainly a film with an all-female cast (Madame's lover is briefly, wordlessly seen) is notable in any era, but because the '70s boasted such a remarkable breed of versatile, intelligent, and unique actresses (Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, Genevieve Bujold, Shelley Duvall), I'm especially thrilled that two of my favorites were paired in a feature. 
Playing sisters of different temperament (and I gather, intelligence) both Jackson and Susannah infuse their complex characters with considerable emotional depth, making palpable the pain behind the often high-flown language. Jackson is dynamic, as always, but the late Susannah York, with her despairingly throaty voice and wounded eyes is even better than she was in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

 Vivien Merchant (Alfie, Fenzy) manages to capture the conflicting characteristics of dominance, condescension, and vulnerability in the theatrically self-dramatizing character of Madame 

  
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
For all its perception, perhaps what’s most brilliant and surprising about The Maids is how terribly enjoyable it is. As a fan of bitchy repartee, I love the film’s near-poetic verbal battles of hurled invectives and raging hostilities. I also take great pleasure in how the film veers, with unexpected bite, into dark comedy. But what I most thoroughly enjoy and what brings me back to The Maids again and again is the finely-honed suspense and dramatic tension which propels the plot along its barely-tethered-to-reality course. There’s a considerable amount of anxiety mined from the current of madness and potential for violence that runs beneath the central conflict of The Maids.
"Naturally, maids are guilty, when madames are innocent."
As the predicament of the maids grows ever perilous, we find ourselves drawn into the paranoia of inanimate objects conspiring to betray them. It is a fact of a maid's day-to-day existence that the dust on the mantle and the unpolished mirror will stand as silent accusers of a job incomplete. When conspiring to kill one's employer, how many small details can be similarly neglected?
Class Distinctions
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
There are so many ways for The Maids to be interpreted, so many levels upon which it works, it’s like watching a new film every time you come back to it. An intelligent, eccentric film, I can’t imagine it being to everyone’s taste (the intentional theatricality of the language and performances can prove distancing, if not confounding); but it is one of those films which rewards each visit with even more information and overlooked details. Both in performance and theme. I think it’s an absolutely brilliant, moving work made surprising accessible by the combined efforts of everyone involved in this film adaptation...chiefly the outstanding performances of Glenda Jackson and Susannah York. 
"The revenger is always born of the maids."


Playwright of The Maids, Jean Genet, passed away in 1986. A fascinating artist with an even more fascinating life, this is one of my favorites of his many quotable quotes:
"I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green."

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES
Signature of Susannah York received at a 2005 performance of her one-woman show, The Loves of Shakespeare's Women
Copyright © Ken Anderson

Friday, March 16, 2012

THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT 1977

You can’t really appreciate the benefits of a film like The Other Side of Midnight until you’re confined to your bed for three days with an ass-kicker of a late-winter flu. Only when one’s energy has been sapped from inactivity, muscle weakness, and a ceaseless intake of liquids (followed, with breathtaking immediacy, by the expulsion of same from every imaginable orifice); when a toxic blend of physical inertia, mental malaise, and miserable weather renders futile all possibility of doing anything remotely productive. Only then can one fully understand what a panacea to the beleaguered spirit is the extravagantly trashy film.
"The Romance of Passion and Power"
Sidney Sheldon (the man who gave the world The Patty Duke Show & I Dream of Jeannie) wrote The Other Side of Midnight for folks who find sociopathology, brutishness, premeditated murder, and abortion-by-wire-hanger to be the stuff of epic romance.

Sometimes it takes a thing like a 100-degree-fever to break down one’s resistance enough to allow for the guilt-free enjoyment of gilt-edged sleaze like The Other Side of Midnight. A film that, at a running time of over 2 ½ hours, is an over-embellished potboiler of love, sex, and revenge so narratively antiquated, so routine and clichéd in execution, that even on first viewing it feels like a rerun. Yet it is nevertheless thoroughly engrossing and strangely reassuring in its by-the-numbers adherence to type and staunch refusal to go anywhere near the unexpected. It's all there, everything one looks for in a soap opera: sex, romance, betrayal, power plays, vengeance, retribution...the whole shebang. Directed with a daring lack of distinction by Charles Jarrot (Lost Horizon), this big-budget adaptation of the 1973 Sidney Sheldon bestseller is a comfort food movie requiring little in the way of attentiveness, and nothing more of your brain than that you leave it on the nightstand and let the glistening images and warmed-over histrionics enshroud you like an electric blanket. Lovely to look at, easy to ingest, and 100% lacking in anything remotely substantive, The Other Side of Midnight is the cinema equivalent of a sugar pill.
Marie-France Pisier as Noelle Page (short a, as in Pajama)
John Beck as Larry Douglas
Susan Sarandon as Catherine Alexander
Raf Vallone as Constantin Demeris
Clu Gulager as Bill Fraser
When Jacqueline Susann, the queen of crass, (and I wouldn't have it any other way) passed away in 1974, she left a sizable void in the supply pool of high-gloss motion picture camp-fests. The last of her novels to be adapted for the screen was Once is Not Enough (1975), a delightfully squalid take on the Electra Complex and May/December romance among the Hollywood elite. Following that, devotees of true highbrow smut had to wait till 1983 for Harold Robbins and Pia Zadora to pick up Susann's tacky torch and deliver the legendarily craptastic The Lonely Lady. Between 1975 and 1983, with the “slick sleaze” landscape populated by the likes of Judith Krantz, Danielle Steele, and Jackie Collins, the one book and film adaptation that genuinely felt like a worthy successor to the Susanne crown was The Other Side of Midnight. A film virtually forgotten today, but heavily promoted at the time and arriving at theaters with an incredible amount of promising advance buzz. A summer release primed to be Fox's big blockbuster hit, it bombed rather stupendously.
Father Knows Worst
"Noelle, war is coming...you have beauty. It is your only weapon of survival. Use it. Let the hand under your dress wear gold, and you'll be that much ahead of the game."
What's the French word for "Ick!"?

A kind of last-gasp, big-screen entry before the TV miniseries came to corner the market on this kind of globetrotting/bedhopping glamour drama; The Other Side of Midnight begins in 1939 and tells the story of Hard-Luck Noelle (Pisier). Noelle is a breathtakingly beautiful French woman (they’re always breathtakingly beautiful in these kinds of books) who, over the course of one remarkably bad year, has her father sell off her virginity to an employer; runs off to Paris and is robbed of all of her belongings within minutes of arrival; gets mistaken for a whore; and has a whirlwind, rapturous love affair with Larry, an American Army pilot (Beck) who ultimately abandons her (pregnant, unbeknownst to him) after telling her to go out and buy a wedding dress and wait for his return.
The Agony & The Ecstasy
Above: Noelle learns of love at the extremely hirsute hands (and back) of horny French couturier, Auguste Lanchon (Sorrell  Booke...yes, Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard).
Below: Noelle's fate is sealed when she falls in love with caddish RAF pilot Larry Douglas (Beck)

Taking a kind of “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude about the cruel objectification she’s suffered at the hands of all these beastly males, the embittered Noelle embarks on a curious course of revenge. One which involves pimping herself out to the highest bidder in an effort to secure enough fame, money, and power to eventually stick it, but good, to her fleetfooted wartime paramour, whom she learns is alive and well (and very married) in Washington, D.C. 
It’s raunchy fun watching Noelle’s Evita-esque bed-climb to the top (wherein she plies her considerable sexual skills on an increasingly unappetizing assortment of men), but it’s only after Larry weds the lovably kooky dipsomaniac, Catherine (Sarandon), that The Other Side of Midnight really shifts into high gear and becomes the vengeance-fueled bitchfest I was hoping for. Only then does it begin to dawn that - for all its travelogue scenery, half-hearted The Best Years of Our Lives subtext (dramatizing vets struggling to adapt to civilian life), and pseudo-feminist parallels drawn by Catherine's climb up the ladder with her brains contrasted with Noelle's degrading use of her body  - The Other Side of Midnight is mostly fancy window-dressing in service of a diamond-encrusted parable on hell, fury and women scorned.
No Wire Hangers
Even fans of glossy trash have their limits, and this hard-to-watch abortion sequence was a real deal-breaker for many

In a previous post, I wrote of my weakness for films whose artistic reach exceeds their grasp. Films whose intentions are at direct odds with their execution. In the case of The Other Side of Midnight: a “love” story, if you can call it that, between two totally reprehensible people (admittedly, poor Noelle doesn’t start out that way); there exists a gross misinterpretation of the source material.

From watching the film and listening to the hilariously on-the-defensive DVD commentary, I’m given the distinct impression that the filmmakers thought they were making an epic love story with a strong, resilient heroine at its center…like Gone with the Wind. Pisier may be a headstrong brunette and Beck sports a dashing pencil mustache, but that is where all similarity ends. Believe me, the self-destructively monomaniacal Noelle Page is no Scarlett O’Hara; Larry, the oafish lout, is no Rhett; and The Other Side of Midnight is no Gone With the Wind…not unless I missed the scene where Scarlett and Ashley make plans to bump off Melanie.
Fatal Attractions
In spite of being an unrepentant jerk of a boyfriend and the worst husband since Guy Woodhouse, Larry has two women who suffer untold agonies to be with him. However, only one of these women is off her rocker.

Given how shabbily she's treated by men, I understand how admirable we are supposed to find it when Noelle decides, at last, she will no longer be anyone's victim. Everyone harbors at least one revenge fantasy (in my case, several), so it's really a lot of vicarious fun watching Noelle systematically plot and carry out her plans. But, given all she goes through to get back at Larry, her eventual "revenge" is rather toothless and a slap in the face to whatever "empowerment points" we've granted Noelle so far, because after one kiss from him (one of those romance novel "Unhand me you brute!" type of kisses, at that), she turns to mush in his arms. 
All sympathy for Noelle goes out the window when she demands that Larry kill his hapless wife, Catherine (who, at this point has been treated so abusively by Larry that the idea seems to benefit HIM more than it does Noelle).

I have a hunch Sidney Sheldon needed some Third Act action and arrived an unsympathetic about-face for Noelle which doesn't wholly support all that came before it. I would have loved to have Noelle and Catherine to eventually meet (at least then the narrative paralleling of their lives would have served a purpose) and, in discovering their mutual woes start and end with the philandering Larry, together plot a way to kill the guy. Now THAT would have been a crowd-pleaser (for me, anyway)!
Larry concocts a batty plan to do away with Catherine

Were The Other Side of Midnight a better film, I would say its moral ambiguity regarding Noelle was intentional (it can’t make up its mind if she is a villain or victim/ her quest for vengeance is sick or empowering) but I really don’t think it is. It’s just one of those overproduced Hollywood “properties” so preoccupied with advancing the plot and giving fans of the book all the glamour, romance, and drama they can muster; no one noticed that the film’s underlying themes come off as comically amoral and wrongheaded, and that the so-called heroine kind of loses her mind somewhere up the ladder of success.
Although The Other Side of Midnight takes place in Europe between 1939 and 1947, war and the events of the world fade into the background for the psychotically single-minded Noelle. Here, seen preening before an open window with a swastika in the distance, Noelle remains blithely oblivious to anyone's suffering but her own.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As Joan Collins would learn four years later with the premiere of the primetime television drama, Dynasty, the bad girls have all the fun and get the best lines. The Other Side of Midnight is no exception. If there's any fun to had in the sometimes drawn-out proceedings that make up the film's dual-story plotline, the fun is to be found in discovering to what lengths Noelle is willing to go to enact her revenge on Larry. That and witnessing her transformation from naive waif to, as one character puts it, "a first-class bitch."
Goodnight and Thank You
Social-climbing Noelle is about to throw over her current director/lover (Christian Marquand) for the bigger fish that is super-rich Greek tycoon, Constantin Demeris.

PERFORMANCES
The late Marie-France Pisier (who first came to the attention of American audiences in the 1975 French comedy, Cousin, Cousine) has the requisite beauty to play the role of a woman who relies almost completely on her desirability to achieve her aims. In this, her first American film, Marie-France is considerably better in dragon-lady mode than in the scenes requiring a conveyance of more subtle emotions. The film was intended to launch her as a major American star, but outside of a few TV mini-dramas, Pisier continued to do her best work in her native country. A true class act, whenever prodded by the press to dish about the tacky film Hollywood chose to launch her US career, Pisier would only say that the studio treated her like a queen and made her feel like a star before she even became one.
The exquisitely beautiful Marie-France Pisier passed away in 2011
Pisier is very appealing, but her performance in The Other Side of Midnight is perhaps too superficial to help the hackneyed narrative rise very far above the suds. For a truly harrowing portrait of obsessive love and a performance that strikes at the self-consuming desperation behind it all, check out actress Isabelle Adjani in Francois Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (1975). 
The Other Side of Midnight is the parallel story of two women who share the same man but never meet.
Susan Sarandon (two years after The Rocky Horror Picture Show) has a relaxed, natural style that stands out in the starchy surroundings, but she suffers from an underwritten role.

Jay Leno, Larry Douglas, & Clutch Cargo
In popular entertainment, a strong or prominent chin can either signify a hero (Roger Ramjet, Dudley Do-Right), or villain (Dishonest John, Dick Dastardly).
Anyone care to venture a guess as to how many villains we have pictured here?

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
After sex and illicit romance, the major drawing card for a film such as this is the promise of exotic locales, glamorous costumes, and opulent surroundings. The Other Side of Midnight makes good use of its French and Greek locations (plus a few obvious studio sets), but perhaps at the price of narrative cohesion. The Other Side of Midnight is a film that purports to disapprove of the ways in which people debase themselves for money, but an entirely different, conflicting message is given when the camera lovingly lingers on the material things all that wealth can provide.
My personal favorite image of extravagance: the over-sized backgammon board

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I suppose it's because I wasn't around during the heyday of the "Women's Film" (the late 30s & 40s) that the glossy soaps of the '60s and '70s hold so much appeal for me. By and large, they are inferior films in most every aspect beyond the technical, but they represent to me a wholly pleasant diversion and return to an old-fashioned (if not archaic) method of filmmaking we're not likely to see again. 
As the years go by and more and more contemporary films start to take on the arid, distancing look of video games and computer screens; old-fashioned trash cinema like The Other Side of Midnight begins to look better and better. By the way, I have no idea what this film's title means. The Other Side of Midnight always reminds me of that old Johnny Carson soap opera satire, The Edge of Wetness.
Here We Go Again
Oh, and for those who care about such things - In 1990, the ever-prolific Sidney Sheldon wrote a sequel to The Other Side of Midnight titled, Memories of Midnight. In 1991 it was made into an indifferent TV miniseries starring Jane Seymour and Omar Sharif. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2012

Friday, March 9, 2012

VERTIGO 1958

I guess it says something about a suspense thriller when you can watch it multiple times, long after the central mystery of its plot has been revealed, with no lessening of engagement or enjoyment. In the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s mesmerizingly bizarre Vertigo, the film itself is so unusual, its subject matter so psychosexually dark, I find myself forgetting the “surprise reveal” of the mystery altogether and just lose myself in what a perversely obsessive vision of romance a major Hollywood studio was able to get away with in the repressed environment of the late-'50s.

As one of five films owned by Hitchcock and removed from circulation in 1973 so his lawyers could better hammer out new deals for their television and theatrical distribution rights (the others being The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rope, Rear Window, and The Trouble With Harry), Vertigo wasn’t available for viewings of any kind, singular or multiple, during my high school and college years.
The deceptively simple suspense plot about a retired detective who falls in love and later becomes obsessed with the woman he's been hired to follow is one of the darkest and most self-revealing films in the Hitchcock canon.
Barely Hanging On
Vertigo is a film about a man's psychological spiral into the abyss

Considered neither a commercial nor critical success in its initial release, by the mid-'70s, interest in Vertigo had grown significantly. This is mainly due to the film’s unavailability and (most significantly) the youth-inspired / New Hollywood reevaluation of Alfred Hitchcock and his works. Spearheaded by the French New Wave and director François Truffaut’s by-now-classic 1967 book of interviews: Hitchcock by Truffaut, a generation of young film enthusiasts have come to regard Hitchcock (heretofore considered a professionally efficient, studio-system director of popular entertainments) as an auteurist maverick in the manner of contemporaries John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles.
This well-taken (if functionally naïve) position was readily adopted by me and most everyone else I went to film school with—the mean age of the collective student body betraying the fact that Vertigo was, to most of us, one of those films more praised in the abstract than actually seen.
Jimmy Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson
Kim Novak as Madeline Elster
Kim Novak as Judy Barton
Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge Wood
As a kid, the full extent of my knowledge of behind-the-scenes motion picture personnel were the opposite-ends-of-the-spectrum names of Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock: two of the most visible and TV-familiar behind-the-scenes faces of the '60s Hollywood. With only the most cartoonish notion of what a director or producer actually did (I had, after all, seen all of the “Lucy goes to Hollywood” episodes of I Love Lucy), thanks to the TV anthology series Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I knew one thing: Disney meant funny, and Hitchcock meant scary. Hitchcock’s The Birds and the deeply traumatizing Psycho had enough of a “Creature Features”/ William Castle vibe about them to satisfy a young person’s notion of what a scary movie should be. But Vertigo (which had its network TV premiere in 1965 and reran consistently), despite Hitchcock’s name and the similar one-word title, was just too slow and kissy-faced to hold my interest.
For Bay Area kids in the '70s, scary movies
meant one thing and one thing only: Creature Features

Once it became clear that Kim Novak’s rigid hairdo wasn’t in danger of a crow attack, or that Jimmy Stewart wouldn’t be donning a dress or wielding a knife anytime soon, I gave up on trying to sit through it. By the time I reached my teens and public interest in Vertigo had renewed my curiosity, it was too late. I ultimately didn't get to see Vertigo until after it was released on DVD, restored and pristine, in 1999.
Alfred Hitchcock's much-analyzed "pure cinema" style is evident throughout Vertigo.
The dizzying spiral motif.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Contrasted with my youthful antipathy towards Vertigo, my adult response to the film was near-obsessive adoration. I immediately fell in love with its absorbingly intriguing plot and the descriptively cinematic methods Hitchcock uses to tell the story and reveal character. A trait shared by most of the filmmakers I admire is their fluency in the visual language of film. They don’t just allow their camera to record events: through lighting, angles, music, and editing, they employ techniques that help to shape the viewer's perception of what is happening and what the characters are feeling.
I’m not always persuaded by Hitchcock’s sometimes jarring shifts from visually striking location shots to patently fake-looking studio sets and process photography, but in a story as subjectively stylized as Vertigo, even artificiality works in the film’s favor.
(My partner, who doesn’t exactly worship at the altar of Hitchcock, thinks the director’s predilection for rear-screen projections and patently sound-studio outdoor sets recall the look of Disney’s live-action films. A running gag is for him to poke me in the ribs at any instance of obvious rear-projection or stagy outdoor sets in a movie and exclaim (in mock sincerity), “Oh look, Ken…a Hitchcock film!”)
Hitchcock was the best at using imagery to convey emotional states

PERFORMANCES
I’ve previously commented on my belief that movie star appeal (as opposed to actor appeal) is rooted in a performer’s ability to consistently project a distinctly intimate quality about themselves from film to film. To, in effect, imprint each role with their personality rather than lose themselves within a character.
I don’t know very much about Kim Novak’s personal life, but of all the '50s sex symbols, she has always struck me as one of the most sad-eyed and reluctant. She never appeared to enjoy the objectification that is the sex symbol’s stock-in-trade. Rather, much like the character she played in Picnic, Novak seemed to be somewhat shy, sensitive and desirous of someone to take notice of something about her beyond her beauty.
Vera Miles was initially cast in the Kim Novak role
but had to drop out of Vertigo due to pregnancy.

Hitch was not happy
It’s this quality Kim Novak brings to the dual characters of Madeline/Judy in Vertigo. A quality one might go so far as to say is exploited by Hitchcock, given how painfully tangible Novak makes Judy’s longing for Scottie to love her for herself.
As compelling as they are, I confess that I find the sequences where Scottie attempts to make Judy over in Madeline’s image particularly painful to sit through. I derive no pleasure from the subtle self-deprecation glimpsed behind Judy’s poignantly eager-to-please glances and nervous smiles as Scottie demands more and more of the real Judy to retreat into his fantasy. These scenes are so difficult to watch because those flashes of resigned sadness in Judy harken back to that dolefulness I’ve always perceived in Novak’s eyes in other films.
Much has been written about Scottie's tortured character, but the character of Judy is equally forceful. A woman who allows herself to be made over not once, but twice, in the image of another man's ideal. The whole "makeover" fetish is a lamentable, psychologically abusive motif standardized in many areas of contemporary pop culture. There's the cliche of the buttoned-down secretary who removes her glasses ("Why, Miss Bracegirdle...you're beautiful!") or the woman with the tightly-pinned hair who suddenly wears it loose after being made "a real woman" by the hero. This redemption through transformation is expected in the fashion and beauty industries, and even romanticized and rendered "cute" in movies like Grease (what an odious message that film sends to girls). I think Kim Novak is marvelously affecting and heartbreaking in conveying the need-to-please/loss-of-self side of her character in Vertigo, and her performance is easily the best of her career.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
As a former resident of San Francisco, I have a weak spot for movies that make the city look like my idealized memories of it. The San Francisco of Vertigo was long gone before I ever moved there, but it’s every bit as picturesque.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”  - Frederico Fellini

Show me a filmmaker who denies his work has autobiographical subtext, and I’ll show you a filmmaker with good reason to try to convince himself of the lie. Back in 1971, Roman Polanski “doth protest too much” when critics took note of his Manson-esque depiction of slaughter in Macbeth. Similarly, Woody Allen took the same tact when the whole Mia Farrow/Soon Yi mess made the 42-year-old man/17-year-old girl romance at the center of Manhattan seem forever icky.

On its own merits, Vertigo is a near-perfect suspense thriller with a devastating tragedy at its center. The lovers are plagued by personal flaws and compulsions that induce them to act in ways that doom their union no matter how many times it’s played out. It’s a strange, deeply romantic film whose themes feel assertively antithetical to the kind of romantic myth typical of Hollywood films in the 1950s.
Top: In Vertigo, Hitchcock takes full advantage of the strange, spectral quality of the color green.
Below: The same eerie hue was used to equally chilling effect in the poster art for my favorite film of all time, Rosemary's Baby

What provides the film with its extra, voyeuristic kick is how closely Vertigo’s narrative hews to what has come to be known about Alfred Hitchcock’s personal obsessions and compulsions. Whether apocryphal or substantiated, the Hitchcock section of the library is loaded with tale after tale of his fixation on icy blondes and his controlling nature. Stories of his professional relationships with actresses Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren read like a character analysis of Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson.
I've never been much of a fan of Jimmy Stewart, but if Vertigo works at all, it's because of his movingly tortured performance. Cast against type as a somewhat unpleasant and haunted character, Vertigo seems to tap into a heretofore unexplored cruelty in the actor, which makes his Scottie so flawed and vulnerable. I've never seen him better.
It’s this personal overlay that gives Vertigo its eerie punch and makes it feel at times as if the film were a subtly confessional probe into the darkest corners of what we sometimes label desire.
Jimmy Stewart & Kim Novak were paired again in the 1958 comedy, Bell Book & Candle. Here they make a cameo appearance on the film's soundtrack album cover in this shameless bit of product placement from the Shirley Booth TV show Hazel. (Both produced by Columbia Studios.)

Vertigo is not my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie (that would be Shadow of a Doubt), but for me, it’s the film in which he most perfectly conjoins the elements of popular entertainment and art. It’s a hypnotically sensual film; cool, yet passionate, that has about it an inescapable air of sadness. Hitchcock is not the most impassioned of directors, but with Vertigo, he bravely explores the darker side of love in a way that feels both very humane and very private. Perhaps too much so for 1958 audiences?

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 = 20012