Vertigo (1958) is Hitchcock’s another great film that is characteristic of tricks, suspense, and murder. Compared to Hitchcock’s horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968), Hitchcock does not make this film a visual-based horror genre but a mixture of psycho, art, and technique. Honestly, this film has allowed me to experience both a bright and dark side of humanity in a mysterious atmosphere. We see Madeleine’s husband Gavin has made an elaborate murder plan to kill his wife to get his inheritance. Through making up a series of fake stories to prove Madeleine’s mental illness and hiring a woman looking like Madeleine, Gavin makes his intentions of killing Madeleine visible to the audience. However, when all things for the murder plan are well planed, Hitchcock seems to create some unexpected stories to add the sense of vertigo by featuring Scottie’s falling obsession with Madeleine. Not guided by the ideas about the so-called weird behaviors of Madeline, Scottie follows her and saves her. Hitchcock creates the plot of Scottie’s romanticism and passionate love with Madeline to feature the bizarre situation of their romanticism. That has made me think a lot of techniques used in other psychological thriller genre films.
One scene stood out of the who movie is when Scottie brings Judy to the Bell Tower where Madeleine died. In this scene, Scottie forces Judy to confess her crime behavior and tell whether Madeline is alive not not. It is set inside of the tower and Hitchcock gives a low-key lighting throughout the scene that makes the face and body of the characters not that clearly to be seen. This creates a sense of tension for the plot that hooks the audience to predicate what will happen between Scottie and Judy. In this scene, the shots are also frequently given to the staircase while Scottie is struggling to go to the top of the tower. This has well offered us a visual symbol of Scottie’s mental instability. But he made it, this made the audience to sense the narrowly escape of Scottie from the bad fortune while he has witnessed the death of Judy. Hitchcock has hidden a lot of invisible clues in this staircase scene to connect his lust and the shock of both Madeleine and Judy’s death at the same place.
As the title has implied, Hitchcock has employed a lot of shots that give the audience of a sense of vertigo. The effects of vertigo are not given as what most people have expected the rapid whirl, but rather through giving an intense focusing. This can be witnessed from the title sequence of this movie. Also, the beginning scene that Scottie is struck in the rooftop chase, the shots of Scottie’s facial expressions and the floor have paved a good way resonating with the title sequence as well as the title of the film “Vertigo”. Another key scene gives a sense of vertigo is when Judy emerges as Madeline in the house. The ghostly green miasma around the door makes her luminosity kind of blinding for the audience. This resonates with the title of the film implicitly.
Peter Bradshaw in a post from The Guardian has discussed, “Vertigo also combines in an almost unique balance Hitchcock’s brash flair for psychological shocks with his elegant genius for dapper stylishness.” This critic of this film makes the audience to reread the subtle relationships between the superficially luxurious look and guilty of an immoderate lust and sex in a psycho model. To a large extent, it helps me learn how Hitchcock makes a blonde’s appearance and psychological obsession is mutually connected.
What makes this film has much to do with the use of actors and actresses, the Hollywood classical zooming and 180-degree rule, and the mise-en-scene. Novak both play Madeleine and Judy throughout this Hitchcock film. Her look and costumes transfer over and over through the luxurious scarlet of Ernie’s Restaurant from the beginning to a jarring market with flowers, Hitchcock has crafted her perspectives on the direction of the storyline in a skillful way. Most interestingly, this film is more likely to psychologically thrill the audience by featuring the well-planned murder of Madeleine and Madeleine and Judy’s death at the tower. The themes of crime, sex, and lust are mixed together without blurring the boundaries between the characters. This is one of the best psychological thriller films Hitchcock has made that has heavily affected my ways of appreciating a psychological thriller film in American industry.
Bradshaw, Peter. “Vertigo Review-still spinning its dizzying magic.” theguardian. Retrieved from
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jul/12/vertigo-review-alfred-hitchcock-james-stewart-kim-novak
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/vertigo-the-search-for-a-cure