He was determined upon accuracy of detail and fidelity to mood. His production team mapped out the footsteps of Balestrero on his way home from his work in a nightclub jazz band; they ate in the same diner as he used, and interviewed the judge and the attorneys of the case. They visited the gaol in which he had been detained, and the mental hospital to which his wife had been consigned. The New York police wanted nothing to do with the project, given that it concerned a false arrest, and instead Hitchcock hired retired officers as consultants. He had decided to film the events in the actual locations where they happened, as far as that were possible, and to re-enact the night scenes at night.
For the role of Balestrero he had chosen Henry Fonda, who seemed to be the epitome of grim endurance. He had tried to enlist him earlier, for Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur, but had not succeeded. Now in the part of the wrongly accused Balestrero forced to undergo the ritual penance of the custodial system, he became darkness made visible.
Hitchcock had already found his leading lady. He realised that Grace Kelly, now accompanying Prince Rainier of Monaco, was no longer available, so he determined to catch another possible star. He had seen Vera Miles during an episode on television of The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse, and was immediately taken with her. He glimpsed her possibilities. He negotiated a contract for three pictures over five years, and also gave her the leading role in the first televised episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Hitchcock explained in an interview that “I feel the same way directing Vera that I did with Grace. She has a style, an intelligence and a quality of understatement.” He went further with Cosmopolitan magazine by telling its editor that “Vera Miles is going to replace Grace Kelly.” Hitchcock wanted to dress her as well as direct her. He told his costume designer, Edith Head, that “she’s an extraordinarily good actress, but she doesn’t dress in a way that gives her the distinction her acting warrants.” She wore too much distracting colour. That was perhaps one of the reasons why The Wrong Man was filmed in black and white.
The filming itself was without incident. “He was funny all the time,” Henry Fonda recalled. “Hitch would come in and tell a funny story just before he’d say ‘Roll ’em’ into a serious scene. I loved working with Hitch.” The only hint of trouble came in the director’s relationship with Vera Miles, who came to resent his overbearing and dominating manner. He would spend far more hours with her than any other actor on the set. He advised her how to smile, and how to walk, and how to speak; he counselled her on her diet and on the company she kept. He insisted upon “story conferences” in her dressing room, but, curiously enough, she complained that he had never once complimented her on her acting. His assistant producer, Herbert Coleman, remarked that “Hitch had an obsession with her, sure. But it never went beyond imagining.” Nor was it likely to do so. She was about to marry her second husband, and already had two children. She was too spirited, and too resourceful. When she resisted his influence over her life, he began to lose interest in her. That is perhaps evident in the subdued role that she plays in The Wrong Man, in which she never really comes to life.
Despite Hitchcock’s aspirations toward realism and objectivity, the film did not follow the real course of events when cinematic imperatives demanded otherwise. It was still a slice of cake, however little it was sweetened, rather than a slice of life; it was also obliged to conclude on an optimistic and even reassuring note whereas the “truth” was far more ambiguous. When Truffaut questioned him on this Hitchcock replied that “it seems to me that you want me to work for the art houses” which suggests that all along he had a populist and a commercial, rather than purely artistic, motive.
It was not a great success at the time. The script and the plot engaged some of the director’s predilections and even fantasies, the most prominent of them being those of mistaken identity and false imprisonment, together with the appurtenances of shadows, bars and labyrinthine corridors. But the film did not enlist his imaginative verve. It gives no sign of creative liberation, the wild energy that manifests itself in his more obvious “entertainments.” It is serious, and even solemn. It is neither mercurial nor comic. It has gravity but no lightness. Despite its pretence to realism it seems too schematic and laboured to carry it off. At a later date he told Truffaut that “I don’t feel that strongly about it.” It was to be placed among what he called “the indifferent Hitchcocks.”
. . .
In any case he was flying to more exotic locations. In the early summer of 1956 he and his wife, together with key members of the production team, flew to southern Africa in search of settings for a new project. He had decided to make a picture out of Laurens van der Post’s Flamingo Feather which he described as “a sort of John Buchan real adventure” that he intended to populate with “good, sophisticated stars.” He had already enlisted James Stewart for the enterprise and, against all the odds, hoped to coax Grace Kelly—now Princess Grace of Monaco—out of royal retirement. He said that he had travelled to Africa “for atmosphere, just atmosphere,” but soon discovered that he did not really care for the atmosphere at all. Hot and sultry locations, forests and jungles, bush and track, were not for him. In any case the problem of extras would be as insupportable as it had been in Marrakech, and costs might be enormous. It was too risky a proposition, for Paramount as well as for Hitchcock, and so it was dropped. He had, at least, taken a long holiday.
The nature of his next project was therefore still undecided. He was considering a novel by Hammond Innes, The Wreck of the Mary Deare, that had been recently published; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had purchased the rights, and persuaded Hitchcock to take on the project in a one-film contract. The story concerned a ship found adrift but, when it is boarded for salvage, its first officer is found alive. When the first officer returns to shore, he is brought before a board of inquiry to determine what has happened. It fascinated Hitchcock, and he enlisted Ernest Lehman for a scenario. Lehman was respectful and courteous. Nevertheless neither of them could make much progress with the story, which was turning into a retrospective courtroom drama.
Hitchcock then came upon a novel which seems to have been, literally, made for him. Truffaut set the scene in his interview with him in the summer of 1962.
TRUFFAUT: Vertigo is taken from the Boileau-Narcejac novel D’entre les morts, which was especially written that you might do a screen version of it.
HITCHCOCK: No, it wasn’t. The novel was out before we acquired the rights to the property.
TRUFFAUT: Just the same, that book was especially written for you.
HITCHCOCK: Do you really think so? What if I hadn’t bought it?
TRUFFAUT: In that case it would have been bought by some French director, on account of the success of Diabolique. As a matter of fact, Boileau and Narcejac did four or five novels on that theory. When they found out that you had been interested in acquiring the rights to Diabolique, they went to work and wrote D’entre les morts, which Paramount bought for you.
That was the truth of the matter. Hitchcock had expressed an interest in Diabolique, a 1955 thriller in which an apparently dead man comes to life in a most involved conspiracy, and it seems that the French co-writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac concocted a story that bore a superficial resemblance to it. D’entre les morts is about romantic obsession: a man becomes so haunted by what he believes to be the image of a dead woman that he changes the appearance of another woman to resemble her in every detail. They are in fact the same person, and the revelation will eventually come close to destroying him. Hitchcock was fascinated with obsession, especially that of the male with the female, and it became fruitful territory for exploring some of the more dangerous aspects of sexual fantasy and attraction.
A first version of the script was completed by the playwright Maxwell Anderson. He had already worked on the first versions of The Wrong Man, although his script was considered too fanciful and allusive for an apparently realist film. But his highly charged poetic style might be the best vehicle for Vertigo, as
D’entre les morts was to be called. Yet, however distinguished a playwright, Anderson did not have the peculiar gifts of a scriptwriter; he declined the offer. Hitchcock experimented with one or two other writers before coming upon Samuel Taylor. Taylor recalled that his agent, Kay Brown, “said to have a go at it because she’d like me to know Hitchcock. So I said all right and I studied the screenplay on the train going out, because in those days you almost always travelled by train. By the time I got there I had a pretty good idea what I could do with it.” He told Hitchcock that the film had to shed its romantic mists and become real. Hitchcock replied “That’s what Jimmy Stewart said.” Stewart was to play Scottie, the retired police detective who is lured into a false pursuit.
It was fortunate that they came to an agreement so quickly because, on the day after Taylor signed his contract in the second week of January 1957, Hitchcock fell seriously ill. There is a theory that certain people become ill in order to prepare themselves, as if in a rite of passage, for some great enterprise. His medical records contain the more mundane truth that he was suffering from a hernia and colitis; his hernia was already an old friend, but it might have turned cantankerous. After some minor surgery at Cedars of Lebanon hospital in Los Angeles, he was allowed to return home. It was the first time that he had experienced an American hospital and he told a journalist that “the biggest shock was the indignities to which institutions of healing subject your person. I am not a squeamish man, but some of the things they do to you in hospitals are no less than obscene.” When they tied a name tag to his wrist he thought, of course, of the morgue. He was much possessed by death.
In the enforced absence of Hitchcock, Samuel Taylor continued work on the script, and when the director returned from hospital they resumed their collaborative sessions at Bellagio Road. Clearly Hitchcock had less energy, and perhaps fewer powers of concentration, but Taylor recalled that “he was in good form and we were having a very happy time writing…We’d talk about the picture and there would be a long silence and we’d just sit and contemplate each other and Hitchcock would say, ‘Well, the motor is still running.’ ” After lunch he would take a recuperative nap, and Taylor would return to the studio and his typewriter. Then Hitchcock’s health grew worse.
Hitchcock in his office at Paramount Studios, 1957.
On the morning of 9 March he started moaning and clutching his chest. He and Alma seemed at first to believe that he had suffered a heart attack but tests revealed a disease of the gall bladder together with two gallstones. Two days later he had a successful operation for the very painful condition. “I suffered two internal haemorrhages,” he told a reporter. “I was told that this often happened to people and not to worry. So I wasn’t alarmed. But they told my wife she had better see a priest.” Although Hitchcock said he was not alarmed, his daughter recalled that he was “terrified.” This is more likely. He took two months to recover after this second operation, and by the beginning of April Taylor had completed the first script for Vertigo. Hitchcock was in no state to concentrate upon the matter for another month. The shooting script was eventually ready by September.
While recuperating from the operation he received the news that Vera Miles had decided to leave the production for the very good reason that she was now pregnant. Hitchcock was not happy about this, and told a reporter from Cosmopolitan that “she cost me several hundred thousand dollars. I don’t know what I’m going to do with her. Movie careers have a rhythm you know. She broke the rhythm and it means making a whole new start.” It was clear enough that he had designed a career, or a path, for her. His resentment emerged in another interview. “I was offering her a big part,” he said, “the chance to become a beautiful sophisticated blonde, a real actress. We’d have spent a heap of dollars on it, and she has the bad taste to get pregnant.” Their relationship was resumed only when she was granted a subsidiary role in Psycho.
It is possible, however, that he was secretly relieved. He had no doubt about her abilities as an actress, but he was not sure that she had that mysterious and indefinable quality that would lend her a commanding presence on the screen. Could she ever be a star? She, too, might have been relieved when the burden of expectation was lifted from her.
So the search began for a replacement. After a series of deals and negotiations Kim Novak emerged as the new heroine. Novak was already a tested Hollywood asset and came to the studio complete with demands. She would not wear grey. She would not wear dark brown shoes. Hitchcock invited her to Bellagio Road where, according to his assistant producer Herbert Coleman, he began to discuss with her topics such as art and wine that she had never considered before. Coleman added that “he succeeded in making her feel like a helpless child, ignorant and untutored, and that’s just what he wanted—to break down her resistance.”
Hitchcock recalled the episode in more detail. “She had very definite opinions about herself; her hair always had to be lavender; she would never wear suits under any circumstances…I said ‘Look, Miss Novak, you do your hair whatever colour you like, and you wear whatever you like, so long as it conforms to the story requirements.’ And the story required her to be a brunette and to wear a grey suit. I used to say, ‘Listen. You do whatever you like. There’s always the cutting-room floor.’ That stumps them. That’s the end of that.” In another interview he remarked that “I even managed to get her to act.” Novak said that “I think he’s one of the few directors who allowed me the most freedom as an actress.”
Some early filming had already been completed in February 1957, with location work in San Francisco. In Vertigo San Francisco is the city of dreams. Scottie, the retired detective, has been hired to follow Madeleine by her husband. She seems to have become deeply obsessed with a figure from the nineteenth century, Carlotta Valdes, who had been “thrown away” on to the streets of San Francisco by her rich lover. Scottie in turn becomes passionately fixated on the woman he is shadowing. When Madeleine apparently falls to her death from a church tower Scottie begins his own gradual journey into obsession, seeking this now idealised woman in every face. Quite by chance he finds Judy Barton, also played by Novak, and persuades her to shed her identity and take on the role of Madeleine. The decision is literally fatal for her.
When Scottie dresses Judy in the same clothes as Madeleine, and arranges her hair style in precisely the same fashion, it was remarked at the time that there was some resemblance, to put it no higher, with Hitchcock’s own behaviour towards his favourite actresses. It was easy to see why he had chosen this novel. The fictional hero’s obsessive pursuit of an ideal or idealised woman came very close to the trajectory of Hitchcock’s cinematic career.
Kim Novak with Peggy Robertson on the set of Vertigo, 1957. Robertson was Hitchcock’s personal assistant for the rest of his life.
Samuel Taylor remarked that “Hitchcock knew exactly what he wanted to do in this film…and anyone who saw him during the making of this film could see, as I did, that he felt very deeply indeed.” The atmosphere on the set was as strained and as intense as in the film itself. James Stewart commented that “I could tell it was a very personal film even while he was making it.” Kim Novak said to a reporter from Le Monde that “it’s as if he had wanted to put himself in the skin of the James Stewart character.”
He began intense filming at the end of September 1957, and it was completed by 10 December. About two and a half minutes of film was shot each day, slowly accumulating into a magnificent threnody that lasts a little over two hours. He had prepared the way with his usual care. One of the rooms in a local hotel, the Empire, had to be reconstructed in minute detail. Even the ashtrays had to be authentic. The local florist, Podesta, was also reproduced in the studio. The flowers were their flowers. This concern with detail is somehow congruent with a great deal of visual experimentation, when the camera does a 360-degree turn or when a forward zoom with reverse tracking is used to mimic the sensation of vertigo. The spinning camera emphasises the extensive use of spiral images in the fi
lm. They are one of Hitchcock’s favourite motifs, in any case, but here they serve the themes of fate and eternal recurrence.
He told Novak before shooting began, “You have got a lot of expression on your face. Don’t want any of it.” He instructed one of the other players, Barbara Bel Geddes, “Don’t act.” He did not need to tell James Stewart to do anything. Stewart was often expressionless, with only a flicker across his face to register discomfort or even nervous collapse. By indirection Hitchcock coaxed the actors to perform only to his instructions. Characteristically he never commented upon their performances.
As the leading man tries desperately to find, and then to alter, his idealised woman, the cameras come closer; the atmosphere becomes more menacing and haunted. The history of San Francisco drifts slowly past them like woodsmoke. The crucial scenes of death are set in the city’s oldest building, the Mission Dolores, established with its chapel in 1776. The impression is given that the lonely and wandering Madeleine believes herself to be the reincarnation of Carlotta, and dresses in the same antique fashion. A necklace is a clue to the final mystery of love and death, time past and time future. Yet if Vertigo is a ghost history of San Francisco, it is also a meditation on fate itself. What is the appearance and what is the reality? What is hidden beneath the surface? A brooding sense of gloom, and a sense of impending calamity, suffuse the film. It is a film of coincidence and double identity, of fatality and suspense. In one of the novels of Wilkie Collins, a writer whom Hitchcock greatly admired, a character reveals that “I felt the ominous Future coming close; chilling me, with an unutterable awe; forcing on me the conviction of an unseen Design in the long series of complications which had now fastened around us.” The unseen designer is on this occasion Hitchcock himself, and he was blessed by a particular art and singular imagination.
Alfred Hitchcock Page 19
