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In the US: Vertigo on the Big Screen March 18 and March 21

posted 7 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Turner Classic Movies and Cinemark Classics will show "The 60th Anniversary of Vertigo" in selected local multiplexes on Sunday March 18 and Wednesday March 21.

TCM will have that new "noir movie host" guy introduce it(Eddie something?) instead of Ben Manckeiwicz; Robert Osborne is, alas, long gone.

I'm going. I have to complete "the AFI Hitchcock Four" for a friend of mine and she has already seen Rear Window, NXNW, and Psycho in the past few years via this same series.

All of us know that Sight and Sound critics voted this the Greatest Movie of All Time, and all of us know there will forever be something just plain odd about that.

It replaced Citizen Kane. Which seemed like a fine choice at the time. But why Vertigo and not...Psycho? Rear Window? 2001? The Godfather? (GWTW seems now out of the running and I'm not sure why Casablanca has lost its luster.)

Maybe Vertigo is as fine a choice as any other.

I'd pick Psycho. The world might pick The Godfather. Both of those pictures were far more popular than Vertigo.

In my personal "Hitchcock world," I remain rather intrigued by the status of Vertigo as the Greatest. Rear Window, NXNW, and Psycho were all big hits, blockbuster in two cases(less NXNW.) But Vertigo barely broke even and is an art film.

I guess that's why Sight and Sound chose it.

So I'll always have Hitchcock movies I loved from the start -- Psycho and NXNW uber alles -- and a rather tentative, grudging respect for that oddball Vertigo to haunt me, too.

I do think that Vertigo has the best of the Saul Bass/Bernard Herrmann credit sequences -- one of the best credit sequences of all time; that Herrmann makes the movie as much as Hitchcock(moreso, perhaps than with Psycho, where the shocks rule); and that the gorgeous images of San Francisco, Carmel and thereabouts are "a visual record of Hitchcock's love affair with the Bay Area";

The shot of Kim Novak under the Golden Gate checks off a monument to match the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore in other Hitchcock films(and is a gorgeous shot, to boot.) The sequence where Novak comes out of the bathroom bathed in green light IS a summit(though not THE summit) of the Hitchcock Herrmann collaboration; and the bell tower finale is deeply moving...right up through the final shot of the film...and the final notes of Herrmann's score(compare those final notes to the final notes in NXNW and the final notes in Psycho...all three are perfection for their films.)

I'm going!

PS. It is a sad point that the footage of SF is now heartbreaking given how the city today is a mix of the Silicon Valley ultra-rich and the defecating-on-the-streets homeless.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Saw it.

Small crowd -- maybe 12 or so -- but oh well.

I continue to have issues with a specific segment of the film -- roughly from when Kim goes into San Francisco Bay until Kim and Jimmy arrive at the Mission San Juan Bautista for her "first jump." The difficulty in maintaining the illusion of Madeleine's "being haunted" by Carlotta Valdez(which, I think, Hitchcock fudges even as part of a murder plot -- Madeleine can't commit to being haunted or much of anything other than maybe crazy) leads to one scene after another of Kim acting melodramatically and Jimmy reacting with lugubrious over-solicitious comforting words.

I found myself "flash-forwarding" to the pace and wit that lay dead ahead in NXNW and Vertigo, neither of which have the mood of Vertigo, to be sure, but both of which move faster and feel just as "deep" beneath their surfaces.

Indeed, Vertigo reminded me of a lot of fifties movies I've turned on and turned off -- standard melodramas with good scenery and less than gripping plots -- UNTIL Madeleine jumps and "the real movie" begins: Henry Jones heartless hammering of Stewart(I figure this official feels the real problem is that Jimmy tried to steal Elster's girl) , the nightmare, the catatonia and then the main event: the heartbreaking shift to Judy(happy to be reunited with Scottie, hoping for a reconciliation he can't understand) and Scottie's all enveloping madness (he's so DOMINATING all the time, so ornery, that what he does feels a lot more like abuse in 2018 than it may have years ago.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

The final third of the film paid off with deep emotion for me, and thus does Vertigo still drive me nuts: its neither perfect nor bad, and its not mediocre, either. Its very much its own thing. It pays off deeply at the end -- and I'm always with Novak in that bell tower.

I brought a companion. This was Vertigo the first time for her, she loved it and said to me: "You probably don't like it because you've seen it 100 times." I said, "no...that's Psycho...which I still like." My companion didn't think Stewart looked too old because "Novak looks matronly in that gray dress."

The TCM host on screen was their noir guy, Eddie Muller. He made the "numbers case" for Vertigo -- how it leaped from 61 to 9 on the AFI lists of 100 greatest films ten years apart(more critics and fewer regular people voted the second time around, says I) and how the Sight and Sound critics knocked off Citizen Kane to make it Number One.

When the movie ended, TCM's Muller came on screen again to say "Whether you think Vertigo is the greatest movie ever made -- or NOT -- it is the greatest movie ever to use San Francisco." Well couched, Mr. Muller.

Muller's last words from the screen: "Thank you for watching...and watch your step on the way out."

We did. A man tripped and fell down the theater steps anyway -- as if Muller had cursed him. No injuries. Older man. We helped him up. "Vertigo in the Cineplex"

I'm glad I went but I tell you. I've read a lot of the reviews of Vertigo, NXNW, and Psycho of the time, and in some ways I think the original critics weren't all that far off to review Vertigo less well than the other two. They were professional critics dealing with what was in front of them at the time ("A Hitchcock and Bull story in which the question isn't so much whodunit as who cares." I think that was Newsweek.) . It took decades and acolytes to bring Vertigo to its high esteem.

Something a little fishy with that.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

PS. Psycho the book hadn't been written yet and Psycho the movie hadn't been made, but it is interesting to see how much the McKittrick Hotel scene anticipates Psycho. With "detective" Stewart questioning the hotel manager at a check-in desk near the staircase, it is as if the Bates Motel and the House have merged as one. Stewart's questions are more direct and stern than Arbogast's will be -- this is an ex-cop of recent vintage -- and the manager has nothing to hide(or does she?) -- but we can "feel" Arbogast and Norman formulating here -- all Hitchcock had to do was to make some changes in lighting, close-ups and camera angle.

Interesting , too how the McKittrick staircase is like the Bates staircase ..but bigger and more opulent (with a "landing" halfway up), and how Hitchcock chose different POV angles of the staircase for Stewart than he would with Balsam two films later(Stewart's POV "moves" to take in the floor to the left of the staircase, coming forward in moving camera shot.)

By the time he got to Psycho and the Arbogast staircase scene -- with a lower budget, less time for more camera angles and a house intended to be less opulent than the McKittrick -- Hitch made some changes in approach.

Always refining the same ideas, thus avoiding copying himself (even as Hitch said: "Self-plagiarism is style.")