High Anxiety, Whenever You're Near
In lieu of writing anything fresh tonight I'll reproduce some brief musings on Hitchcock's Vertigo and Psycho that I put in an email to a friend of mine a couple days ago, with some tweaks for content, hyperlinking, and correct apostrophe usage. It mostly assumes some familiarity with both those movies (as well as, um, Sister Act) but it's probably as mildly interesting as anything else I have to say.
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In the department of sitting-on-my-ass-and-watching, I just watched Psycho and Vertigo again on DVD, both of which are worth revisiting every couple of years. Vertigo's newer to me but it fairly easily displaced Psycho as my favorite Hitchcock film, due largely to its exquisitely lush Bernard Herrmann score and the nuances of Jimmy Stewart's character that both cut through the fake-psychological trappings of the plot (such trappings in Psycho, unfortunately, are given the unrebutted last word) and make you wish for some parody version of It's a Wonderful Life in which he brings the same freakazoid unlikeability to bear on his role ("Go up the stairs, Clarence. Go up the stairs!") Vertigo's rightly a favorite subject of introductory lessons on the cinematic gaze, as Stewart spends the first several minutes of the second act shadowing Kim Novak and watching her, and the camera hovers at a distance watching her and watching him watch her -- it's a credit of some kind to Hitchcock that it's not his most voyeuristic movie, coming in a decisive second behind Rear Window. I prefer Vertigo for the rapturous, gauzy treatment its camera lays on Novak, though, always heightened by the soundtrack... The way it sets up Madeleine as an impossible object of desire (who or what could live up to that sort of deluxe cinematic treatment?), besides raining manna upon sophomore-year film theorists, perfectly establishes that the object of Stewart's affection doesn't exist, and couldn't. It's only a bit of a shame that Novak can't entirely convince as the earthy, regular gal that the last half hour of the movie needs her to be. (Transforming her from a platinum blonde to what the original theatrical trailer cattily calls a "tawdry redhead" has lost a lot of its power as Hollywood shorthand.) Even more of a shame is that they don't make movie starlets like Kim Novak anymore, e.g. about 75% torso. Ancillary credit goes to the movie for a mostly neat, pre-psychedelic dream sequence and the most disturbing filmic nun this side of Whoopi Goldberg.
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In the department of sitting-on-my-ass-and-watching, I just watched Psycho and Vertigo again on DVD, both of which are worth revisiting every couple of years. Vertigo's newer to me but it fairly easily displaced Psycho as my favorite Hitchcock film, due largely to its exquisitely lush Bernard Herrmann score and the nuances of Jimmy Stewart's character that both cut through the fake-psychological trappings of the plot (such trappings in Psycho, unfortunately, are given the unrebutted last word) and make you wish for some parody version of It's a Wonderful Life in which he brings the same freakazoid unlikeability to bear on his role ("Go up the stairs, Clarence. Go up the stairs!") Vertigo's rightly a favorite subject of introductory lessons on the cinematic gaze, as Stewart spends the first several minutes of the second act shadowing Kim Novak and watching her, and the camera hovers at a distance watching her and watching him watch her -- it's a credit of some kind to Hitchcock that it's not his most voyeuristic movie, coming in a decisive second behind Rear Window. I prefer Vertigo for the rapturous, gauzy treatment its camera lays on Novak, though, always heightened by the soundtrack... The way it sets up Madeleine as an impossible object of desire (who or what could live up to that sort of deluxe cinematic treatment?), besides raining manna upon sophomore-year film theorists, perfectly establishes that the object of Stewart's affection doesn't exist, and couldn't. It's only a bit of a shame that Novak can't entirely convince as the earthy, regular gal that the last half hour of the movie needs her to be. (Transforming her from a platinum blonde to what the original theatrical trailer cattily calls a "tawdry redhead" has lost a lot of its power as Hollywood shorthand.) Even more of a shame is that they don't make movie starlets like Kim Novak anymore, e.g. about 75% torso. Ancillary credit goes to the movie for a mostly neat, pre-psychedelic dream sequence and the most disturbing filmic nun this side of Whoopi Goldberg.
1 Comments:
It's funny to hear you describe Vertigo that way; I watched it a few years ago and only really remember that the plot seemed really unlikely.
But not as off the wall bizarro-unlikely as in North By Northwest. Now that is something I will not bank on happening in real life.
And I remember the nun. You do not forget the nun.
During the course of conversation when I saw my friend Dan, he noted that Korngold's opera "Die Tote Stadt" has a very similar plot to Vertigo. Maybe you should check out the NY City Opera's production of it this fall.
If you don't like it you can at least wander off into the city and go all Rear Window with your opera glasses.
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