The trade bible Variety and several other showbiz news entities recently roiled Film Twitter™ by announcing that Paramount Pictures picked up a project presented by actor/producer Robert Downey, Jr. and his business partner and wife Susan Downey: a remake of the 1958 romantic thriller Vertigo, one of the Great Films by the director Alfred Hitchcock.
In the digital realm, the usual cries of potential sacrilege went up, and were countered by argument that sometimes remakes of classic films by classic directors indeed to work out: as in John Carpenter’s gore-drenched reboot of Christian Nyby’s The Thing From Another World, De Palma’s operatic expansion of Howard Hawks’ Scarface, etc. (I remember finding myself mildly surprised at my overall enjoyment of Neil Jordan’s 2002 The Good Thief, an amiable and quirky update of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1956 Bob le flambeur, a picture I’d considered utterly untouchable.)
My own objection was and remains that Vertigo is such a perversely personal film that to attempt to remake it without actually suffering from the Hitchcockian pathologies it fleshes out seems entirely pointless.
For all of its particular obsessiveness, however, Vertigo enjoys a magnificent reputation. In 2012, the movie toppled Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in the once-a-decade Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time Poll. Last year, it fell to #2, itself toppled by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, a real consciousness-raising move given, among other things, the ostensible lack of narrative momentum in the three-hour portrait of a woman in trouble.
In its way, Vertigo was just as unusual a Greatest Film of All Time poll winner as Dielman. It’s a monumental piece of work, visually beautiful and incredibly fluent in its use of film language. But it is also genuinely peculiar film, oddly lopsided in its structure, and more prone so (seeming) meanderings than Hitchcock’s customarily tight-as-a-drum cinematic constructions. It contains little in the way of action or violence, or even the particular suspense of which Hitchcock was the studio-proclaimed master.
And, finally, here’s the problematic rub we’re going to scratch a bit here: it is a movie unabashedly morbid in its preoccupations. It is largely this last quality that might make Vertigo “off-putting to the contemporary sensibility,” as Stephen Metcalf once said of John Ford’s The Searchers, or “not relatable,” as Ira Glass once said of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The movie, inasmuch as it is a romance at all, is a romance of necrophilia.
The hero, James Stewart’s John Ferguson — a man of several nicknames, among them “Johnny O” and “Scottie” — is a police detective who retires after an incident manifesting the movie’s title condition, vertigo triggered by fear of heights. After commiserating with pal and former fiancé Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), Scottie meets up with a mutual college pal, Gavin Elster, now rich and running his wife’s shipping business. (Bel Geddes was 14 years Stewart’s junior, Tom Helmore, who plays Elster, was four years Stewart’s senior, and no, oddly enough, the college they all attended together was not grad school. Ah, Hollywood.)
Elster spins a tale of his wife, a beautiful woman who believes herself possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdez, who committed suicide at age 26. The same age this wife, named Madeleine (the ineffable Kim Novak), is today. Scottie tracks her, is smitten by her, follows her relentlessly, and rescues her when she throws herself into San Francisco Bay. Whereupon he drives her to his apartment, removes all of her clothing, and puts her in his bed.
Yes, you read that right. Not how it’s done, generally, but this movie is thoroughly steeped in Hitchcock world. (The movie is also an adaptation of a French novel, D’entre les morts, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcajac; these two also wrote the novel that inspired the 1955 shocker Diabolique, which impressed Hitchcock, not least in a rivals-nipping-at-his-heels kind of way.) Scottie and Madeleine then fall in love and take some long romantic walks during which they discuss the nature of mortality and such. On a day outing that is meant to solve the mystery behind her “possession,” Madeleine breaks away from Scottie. In a voice different from the breathy, mid-Atlantic accented one she’s used for the entire affair, she exclaims. “Look, it’s not fair, it’s too late it wasn’t supposed to happen this way, it shouldn’t have happened.” After which she throws herself from a tower and dies.
Except no. As it happens, the whole thing was an elaborate con, a plot capitalizing on Scottie’s fear of heights. What occurs on the tower is a form of what stunt guys call a Texas Switch: “Madeleine” moves to jump, and instead steps aside as Elster throws his own ACTUAL wife off the brink. In any event, this leaves Scottie a broken man, near-catatonic, tended to, with mixed results, by the more “appropriate” woman in his life, Midge.
Then years later he finds, on the street, a woman who reminds him of Madeleine, named Judy Barton, also played by Novak, whom he pursues doggedly and eventually remakes into the image of his dead love. (When Scottie and the “resurrected” Madeleine kiss, Bernard Herrmann’s score quotes Wagner’s “Liebestod” — literally “love death” — motif from the opera Tristan und Isolde.)
All the while Scottie is unaware that Judy really IS the woman he fell for, an accomplice to murder who was discarded by Elster and left to fend for herself after he accomplished his evil scheme.
In the first iteration of the twisted romance, Scottie falls in love with a created woman, a fiction who “believes” she’s possessed by the spirit of a long-dead (real) woman; the second time around, Scotty falls in love with a real woman he recreates in the image of the now- “dead” fictional one — one he will learn was fictional at just the wrong time. At the end of the picture Scottie repeats what “Madeleine” had said before her “suicide:” that it’s “too late.” And boy is it ever: this movie has the most downbeat and despairing final shot of any Hitchcock film, maybe any film.
In the contemporary scheme of things, more and more we’re told that movies ought to offer positive models for life. Such as, you know, in any alternate world you should really like doing laundry and taxes with Michelle Yeoh. Vertigo’s premise, by contrast, is distinctly unwholesome. It hinges on a death-obsessed erotic fantasy that sees Hitchcock directly telling on himself. The arrogant, bull-headed way that Scottie conducts his makeover of the dark-haired, dark-eyebrowed, earthy Judy so as to transform her into the cool blonde Madeleine is also about image-making in cinema and reflects on a form of abuse that the film industry has perpetrated since practically its origins. And one that Hitchcock himself perpetrated in different ways on the actresses he put under personal contract, Vera Miles and Tippi Hedren.
As it happens, Miles was supposed to have played the lead in Vertigo, and Hitchcock was bitterly disappointed that she became pregnant during the preparations for the film. (He eventually threw her the bone of Lila Crane, the sister-turned-detective in 1960’s Psycho; Miles’ own feelings about Hitchcock might have contributed to her willingness to change the Norman Bates narrative in Psycho II in 1982.) Hitchcock wasn’t crazy about Kim Novak whose sexuality was rather more overt than Hitchcock liked it. His ideal in this respect was Grace Kelly, who had starred in Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, and To Catch A Thief. In the book Hitchcock/Truffaut, the old master rhapsodized to the young New Wave director about the female type his Philly Queen represented in a way that might have seemed a trifle creepy even back in the 1960s, when the book came out: “You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We’re after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom.” Yowzah. Reacting to Hitchcock’s apparent dissatisfaction with Kim Novak, Truffaut says “When you see Judy walking down the street, the tawny hair and makeup convey an animal-like sensuality. That quality is accentuated, I suppose, by the fact that she wears no brassiere.” In classic “Well! Did you evah!” fashion, Hitchcock responds, “That’s right, she doesn’t wear a brassiere! As a matter of fact, she’s particularly proud of that!” Again: Yowzah.
Whether aware of it or not, Hitchcock, while making Vertigo, was living it. In the mid-’50s he brought Grace Kelly to Monaco to shoot the blithe, bouncy Thief, and there she met a Prince, whom she married. This royal union necessitated that she ditch the film business, thus depriving Hitchcock of his favorite Cool Blonde. Bereft, Hitchcock tried to play Pygmalion with model Tippi Hedren, whom he, according to Hedren and her daughter Melanie Griffith, subjected to horrific abuse and harassment while making The Birds and Marnie with her. Whatever value Vertigo might have had as a parable arguing against the objectification of women — and viewed it from a certain angle it’s a poignant and harrowing portrayal of the snares women find themselves in from this kind of attention — was lost on Hitchcock. (The critic Robin Wood, who insisted that Hitchcock was an even greater artist than he knew, said of Vertigo that it “derives from a simultaneous awareness of the immense value of human relationships and their inherent capability of perfect realization.”) Instead, he seems to have grown into a worse monster than Scottie.
Now Vertigo was hardly the last word on the theme. Some would call 1976’s Obsession, directed by Brian De Palma from a script by Paul Schrader, an uncredited Vertigo remake, one which adds incest to its outré mix. And the great David Lynch mined Vertigo’s motifs most productively with two idiosyncratic movies. 1997’s Lost Highway sees kind and concerned wife Patricia Arquette resurrected as the most fatale of femmes, while 2001’s Mulholland Drive shows Girl-Scout-enthusiastic Naomi Watts chewed up, metamorphosed, and eventually spit out by a Hollywood where oily men meet in boardrooms and decide “this is the girl.”
But as with Hitchcock’s film, the engine driving the two Lynch pictures is a deeply personal preoccupation. Yes, we are all boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past, and that’s the universal element of Vertigo. But there’s also something in it that’s not reducible to Intellectual Property, and it should provide enough of a stumbling block to this remake that the project will do the right thing and languish in development purgatory until it is abandoned.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.