| movies: a dissenting opinion on hitchcock |
| I teach ESL—English as a Second Language. The students are immigrants-- Mexican, Korean, Armenian, Iranian, Ukranian, etc—you name it. Friday is movie day. I show a film and make popcorn. The class is 80% woman and when it comes to movies women are interested in one thing: romance. I also enjoy a good romantic film and if you combine it with a thriller so much the better. Put these two elements together and who do you come up with? You come up with Alfred Hitchcock. So I decided to show Vertigo—one of my favorites—or so I recall. But now its 40 years later that I am watching the film and as I sit there watching it a thought begins to recur: can this movie get any dumber? Here are the problems: The Kim Novak character is a sweet thing, portrayed in an empathetic way but why? Shes a low life who agrees--for a sum of money, how much is undisclosed-—to impersonate this guys wife so he can proceed with this wacky plot to kill the wife and make it look like suicide. This is called: accessory to murder. The famous scene in the bell tower at the mission. Kim Novak climbs the stairs and at the top what do we see but the husband holding the dead wife—the real wife—and now he flings the wife from the ledge to plunge to her death below. Meanwhile the jimmy Stewart character, pursuing Kim Novak, is stalled halfway up due to his vertigo problem and can climb no further. He sees the body of the woman hurtling by, that he assumes is Kim Novak, and descends the tower—a shattered man. My question is this: when did the husband kill the wife, how did he kill the wife, how did he get the wifes body up all those stairs and how long has he been there waiting for Kim Novak to arrive—trailing Jimmy Stewart—with the vertigo problem, very clever. Has he been there a minute, an hour, all day or what. That’s the plot of Vertigo—all over the place, totally wacky, not even remotely connected to any prescribed notion of reality as we know it. My head was spinning—like Jimmy Stewart The Jimmy Stewart character is a problem. The movie is half thriller and half romance. But where is the romance? Jimmy is a stiff. He has the charisma of a narcoleptic—a 55 year old retired cop narcoleptic. Kim Novak is 25—a bombshell—with a capital B. The chemistry between these two is zero. Not only that-- he insists on clinging to the image of her not for herself but as this other woman. You may recall the dress buying scene in the salon of the fancy dept store. Its hilarious. But Kim puts up with it. Why? Because shes a sap. There is more but I have said enough. You get the idea. I know it was the fifties and I may be laboring these discrepancies but Im a writer—the logical type. Next month I check in with To Catch a Thief—dialogue by an English grad student with a bad case of Jane Austen. |
