Dizzyingly good

Vertigo runs deep

by Charles Taylor

In the opening scene of Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo, Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), a police detective who's been pursuing a suspect across the San Francisco rooftops, slips and dangles by his fingertips from a collapsing gutter. A cop who tries to help him falls to his death while Scottie watches. The look on Scottie's face betrays sheer mental and physical agony; the relief is, literally, at his fingertips. To end his suffering, he need only let himself fall.

Vertigo is temptingly easy to let yourself fall into; some of us who did have never quite found our way out. It's not enough to say that there's no other Hitchcock like it. There is no other film like it. Vertigo might be described as a romantic thriller or a romantic melodrama. But that doesn't account for its dreamlike quality or the hypnotic spell it casts, a spell that can pull you back to the movie over the years the way its tragic lovers are pulled back toward the past.

Beset by his fear of heights, Scottie quits the force. An old friend, Elster (Tom Helmore), asks for help with his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), whom he fears has become possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother, who'd gone mad with grief. Scottie doesn't buy Elster's story but agrees to shadow Madeleine and keep her from harm. He and Madeleine fall in love, but he loses her in an accident that recalls the opening calamity. Afterward, wandering the city, a ghost of himself, he sees Judy (also played by Novak), a young woman whom he remakes in the image of his dead lover.

Part of what makes Vertigo unique is its combination of operatic emotionalism and mesmerizing poetic delicacy. This is the only Hitchcock film driven by passion. Hitchcock worked out his movies so meticulously beforehand that he liked to say shooting them was an anticlimax. In Vertigo, Hitchcock, like Scottie in the grip of his perverse passion, surrenders to what can't be explained away or controlled. The more that's revealed to us, the more richly ambiguous the movie becomes. The recurrent verbal and visual motifs -- enveloping darkness, melancholy wandering, the past returning to cloud the present -- resonate poetically instead of schematically. The long, nearly silent section where Scottie follows Madeleine is like watching two rootless spirits moving through a dream world. Robert Burks's cinematography has a misty predawn light. Stewart and Novak might be apparitions that will burn off with the sun. No film has ever conveyed the masochistic romanticism of urban isolation so powerfully. It's as if, somehow, Edward Hopper had collaborated with Seurat.

That visual design, and the lush ominousness of Bernard Herrmann's brilliant score, comes through smashingly in the restoration of Vertigo by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz, the wizards who restored Lawrence of Arabia and Spartacus. I don't know what Vertigo looked like in its original Technicolor release, but it has never looked like this in my lifetime.

Vertigo might not have the same emotional effect if it weren't for James Stewart's courageous and devastating performance. Playing a man whose passion for a dead woman calls forth hidden spirals of fear, desire, and dementia, Stewart evokes the sort of debilitating neuroses that Hollywood would usually accept only from actresses. And he gets you on his side. In the grip of a sick ardor, Stewart makes you believe in the necessity of his obsession. Novak, not as skilled as Stewart but very touching, makes that obsession easy to understand. She creates two completely different women and, as Judy is slowly claimed by the spirit of Madeleine, captures the melding of personality that Bergman only suggested in Persona.

Vertigo has long been a film loved more by filmmakers and critics than by audiences. Maybe that's because we recognize that Hitchcock was asking what it means to live a life creating illusions. Movies -- shadows and light projected on a screen -- are illusions that exist right in front of our eyes; that's just what Madeleine, a woman who doesn't exist, is to Scottie (and Judy). To surrender to those illusions is to withdraw into a world of private obsessions, as Scottie does. Yet, cured of them, "healthy," he seems more a broken man than ever. For those of us who've given over a portion of our lives to movies, watching Vertigo is like seeing, simultaneously, our worst fears and our most alluring fantasies. Vertigo calls up the terror and the rapture of the moment we realize that all we have to do is dream.