What's The Matter With Vertigo? --- Part One

Here's more wallpaper marked Vertigo. When do we finally get past interest in reading about this one? The pic must be great for so much text it generates. I'm self-conscious dipping in a well others surely have drained, having this week Verti-gone over published content in hopes GPS won't parrot what wiser heads have writ. Three at least devoted books to Vertigo. The BFI Film Classics Series tendered Charles Barr's analysis. Then Dan Auiler gave us a "Making Of" account. Frisco locales are then-and-now'ed in a beauty called Footsteps In The Fog by Jeff Kraft and Aaron Leventhal. From such fine work does Vertigo obsession spring ... that plus fact Cinemax runs it often on HD sub-channels ... lately via "5 Star Max" with 5 AM broadcasts, for which I give thanks for salvation of DVR (how many of us used to set alarms for late, late shows? --- I even did it once to see A&C in The Time Of Their Lives).

First impressions die hardest. Mine came with ABC prime-time around 1970. By then, I'd seen Rear Window, NXNW, Notorious --- so expectations ran high. The rooftop opening was this sixteen-year-old's idea of sensational --- from such sock must come Hitchcock's best. Lurching from first commercial break to endless more  slowed pace beyond measure AH calculated (did he ever watch these network cleave-fests?). Vertigo really suffered for hawking of dog food and (back then) cigarette pitches. For over an hour, I waited for something more to happen. Was this a ghost story? That seemed untypical of Hitchcock even for one less exposed to his backlog. The finish upon belated arrival (two and a half primetime hours) left me chilly as reviewer/patrons who'd gone on thumbs-down record in 1958. I learned to like Vertigo only by going inside Hitchcock's skull via bios and deep-dishing read since. It's his "best" if you're an AH student --- in fact, to call Vertigo such is boasting insider knowledge of what drove the man --- but don't imagine you can spring the pic on general viewers, for therein might lie replay of 58's summer freeze-out.

I've seen so many come away sour from Vertigo. Not a few regard me a phony for maintaining it's good, as though I were courting membership among ones who "get" the Master's masterwork. Always instructive is going back to first-run reactions. Too often we dismiss these as proof of unawareness and lack of sophistication --- wasn't it the repressed 50's, after all? My guess is that Paramount sales did panic on receipt of this oddest-duck among Hitchcocks. A first strategy was to sell hard to youth (52% of theatre patrons are under 20 years of age, said Para to trades), so there were ads blanketing college and high-school newspapers. Teen Pace-Setters included girls who read Seventeen magazine, so issues of the latter were salted ... all in service to frankly twisted expression of icky old men both behind and in front of cameras stalking romantic prey. Teenagers hated it, reported showman Jim Fraser of Red Wing, Minnesota ... this in addition to exhibs who said Hitchcock was losing his touch and Vertigo was "too arty." That last played like a chorus among lay critics trading (hopefully) tickets for coin.

That's not me calling Vertigo icky, but I'll bet the word passed lips of many a junior miss exposed to overage Jim Stewart playing out his director's singular vision. The latter would click when served with scares two years later in Psycho --- this time out, and sans humor or suspense set-pieces, there was no buffer twixt viewers and Hitchcock's morose take on losing at love. I tried watching through eyes of Paramount's (if not Hitchcock's) target audience. After all, if you weren't reaching kids in 1958, neither would you reach break-even. Vertigo was maybe a last full-out indulgence for Hitchcock. I'm guessing its failure made him study closer what drive-inners preferred in thrillers, data he'd gather leading to all-time pay-off of Psycho.

Hitchcock had always vetted scripts and casting with wife Alma. By the late 50's and his own approaching sixties, it might have profited more to follow AIP topper Jim Nicholson's example and run ideas by daughter Pat and friends. The reddest flag of my-trip-back-to youth's viewing of Vertigo was Stewart's miscasting as obsessive Scotty. The man was too old for the part as written. Exposition places him not many years out of college. Barbara Bel Geddes (b. 1922) is tendered as Jim's classmate. Now it's one thing to pair older leading men with youthful partners ... that was a 50's constant given plethora of male stars carried over from pre-war and Hollywood's failure to replenish their number afterward. But here's a fifteen-years-younger actress referring to then aged 49 Stewart as the bright young lawyer who was going to be Chief Of Police some day, admonishing his failure to recognize a brassiere she's designing with words to effect that "You're a big boy now."

Scotty seems to have been in arrested development even before his rooftop ordeal. He and Bel Gedde's Midge were engaged once ... for three whole weeks, he recalls. Good old college days, Scotty murmurs --- these having taken place a good twenty-seven years before if Stewart's age and appearance is any indication. I'm still available, he says after reminding Midge it was she who broke off the long-ago betrothal. Why didn't I notice peculiarity of all this before? Could be my own distance from college makes me appreciate how strange it is that Scotty should live so fully in that past. Heck, the whole premise of Vertigo is driven by the character's circle of school buds. Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore ... b. 1904) is ID'ed as a chum Scotty remembers but Midge does not (well, natch --- in any real world, he'd have graduated eighteen classes ahead of her!). I bet none of this went unnoticed by audiences, particularly young ones, in 1958. How much it had to do with poor word-of-mouth (and this was cited as reason for Vertigo's boxoffice drop-off after a strong opening week) is anyone's guess.

Scotty tells Gavin, I don't see much of the old college gang, which set me to thinking, Neither have I, and that was the case for a long time before reaching James Stewart's age when he made Vertigo. Did Hitchcock originally envision a younger man for his lead? That put me to wondering who he could have cast. 1958 Hollywood was barren of age-appropriate stars to enact Scotty Ferguson. I'd wish ... no challenge ... one of you reading to propose a name. The part really called for early-to-mid-thirties casting of the lead. A pre-WWII service Stewart would have been ideal, if less seasoned, for such an intense role. He could even have played it credibly after coming home in 1946, but did Hitchcock have a Vertigo in him so soon as this?

I've considered and struck off names AH might have used. Most guys who made stardom after the war were still too old, or just inappropriate. William Holden, Gregory Peck, Mitchum ... all wrong for differing reasons. Younger names didn't carry their weight in gravitas. Rock Hudson, Robert Wagner, Jeff Hunter --- the very idea of these is ludicrous. What of a John Gavin or Farley Granger? --- but would either, or a Rock Hudson, let a Madeleine/Judy get so under his skin as Stewart believably does? Good as he is at delineating the character, JS was nearly as miscast here as he'd been as Charles Lindbergh in the previous year's Spirit Of St. Louis. Double whammy of these seems to me a beginning of end to Stewart's chart primacy. Hitchcock evidently thought so too --- it was said he blamed Vertigo's (comparative) failure on Jim's aging look, and it was for that reason the director chose Cary Grant instead to star in next-up North By Northwest, a part Stewart counted on till Vertigo receipts drew up short.