Vertigo (1958) some thoughts (in 2022)

 

So, here’s some thoughts on Vertigo – the movie which was annointed the finest movie of all time in that most recent sigh and sound poll. I’ll drop this here: it’s weird.

So, just quickly here’s the entire story – spoilers ahead – a detective who retired from the force after he is discovered to have vertigo is tasked with following the young wife of an old college mate. She acts in a strange manner and it seems as though she’s being possessed by the ghost of her grandmother – a woman who commit suicide many years before. Like all good private detectives, he falls in love with his friend’s wife whom he is supposed to be tailing. At a Spanish mission, she jumps off the steeple, and because of his vertigo, he’s not able to climb up to save her. Her death means that the husband gets all of her estate (ship-building, in case you ask) and the detective goes into a weird catatonic state after an inquiry deems him not responsible for the death.

He comes out of it when he meets a woman who looks a little like the wife, and after a very strange, manipulative relationship, it turns out that this woman was playing the wife – the husband had paid this young woman to act crazy, to trick the detecitve into thinking her mad, before the real wife was flung off the steeple. In a deranged fit, while the young woman is (for some reason) ready to run away with him – they RETURN to the steeple, seemingly in order for the detective to rid himself of his vertigo and confirm the truth about the death. The young woman, frightened by a nun, jump/falls off the steeple while the detective looks on.

That’s the story, it seems a little strange, but it’s much more than that.

Anyway, here are some thoughts:

There are special effects used throughout which add a certain charm. There’s a fair bit of green screen effects, especially when characters are driving, and the special effect of someone falling to their death is used a few times. It’s not convincing, but it’s pretty cool. Later on, Jimmy Stewart (he’s the detective) to show his state of high anxiety, goes into a technicolour dreamscape which reminded me of that bit in Dumbo with the bubbles and pink elephants. Charming, sure.

Anyway, as a private eye, Jimmy isn’t great. He barely keeps his distance while tailing his mark. In the worryingly empty San Francisco he would definitely be discovered if there wasn’t a plan in place to keep him following her. When the woman he’s watching jumps in the water, he a) feels her tits while he is saving her, and b) takes her home and strips her instead of calling the police or ambulance. To top it all off, he falls in love with this woman, a woman he believes is an old friend’s wife, before she dies under his watch. It’s a pretty crappy private dick job from old Jimmy.

 

Fun fact: in 1958, a boob-grab like this could lead to pregnancy.

When, later on, he finds the actress who was playing the wife, they embark on a very strange relationship. It reads as maniupulative and potentially abusive today, and probably did in 1958, too. He stalks her so that he finds where she lives, and his mad eyes and uncompromosing demeanour never let’s us see why she has fallen in love with him.

For the record, it’s the same actress, but because of the clothes, I couldn’t tell it was the same woman. It’s Kim Novak, who is still alive as of the time of writing, which is nice, and something I can’t help but keep an eye out for now. Anyway, this young woman was posing as the wife, and after the death of the real wife, she’s able to go back to her regular life, which seems to involve walking around showing off her slim waist. It doesn’t seem that she’s been paid very much for this difficult and dangerous action which would have taken months of planning, as she’s still living in the same hotel she ever was.

Jimmy Stewart falls in love with this new woman. He forces this much younger woman to dress and look exactly like the dead wife through clothes fittings and hair dyeing. It’s weird. He is in a clothes shop with a non-consenting woman, forcing her to wear clothes, and the shopkeeper just says ‘there’s a man who knows what he wants’ – it’s kind of funny, but it definitely plays weirdly today.

It’s not helped by the fact that Jimmy Stewart is in his very late 40s while he chases after a woman who is, we’re told, 26 – his other love interest, a woman called Midge is described as being Jimmy’s age, but she looks like his daughter. I watched this movie yesterday, but I’m still not sure how her story ended – was the last thing she said in the movie telling the psychiatrist that Jimmy is still in love with the wife? That’s not a very satisfying storyline.

The movie is from 1958, and there are a few funny incidences, too. We’re meant to believe that the husband broke the wife’s neck, carried her up several flights, then threw her off a bell tower without anyone seeing, despite at the very end, a speedy old nun is able to overhear mere voices. Also, is there only one restaurant in all of SF for them to eat at?

There are a few other things too, they notably turn down cigarettes from a town gossip, and Jimmy says ‘it’s a little early in the day’ for him to have a drink when meeting with his old friend. However soon afterwards, the wife, in a state of shock, is given brandy, arranges to meet with with him later, and he says, yes but in a couple of hours: “Make it noon.” How early are they drinking then? He also describes brandy as tasting like venison… which… it doesn’t.

Perhaps the most Hitchcock-ian element of the entire movie, and the most telling reflection of the time it was made, is the strange attitude the whole thing takes to mental illness. We’re told at the beginning that Jimmy’s vertigo is only curable by another trauma overtaking it (which explains why they go up the bell tower again at the end – note that it’s not a convincing reason). After the death of the wife, he goes into a catatonic state which is seemingly curable by Mozart. This strange attitude to psychotherapy is similar to other Hitchcock movies, such as Spellbound, and that strange bit at the very end of Psycho which makes nonsense of the rest of the movie. I’m sure that Hitchcock had some concerns with the branch of medicine at the time, but I’m too lazy to look it up further. At very least, it’s an interesting snapshot intop the thinking of the time, for sure.

At the end of this is a very weird choice for the best movie ever made. Arguments could be made that it’s not in the top, oh, 15, of its own director’s best movies. The plot is really weird. At the end of all of this, this is a very strange movie, it’s interesting, sure, the music is good and... you know, it’s well shot, but you’re left thinking ‘why is this considered the greatest movie of all time?’ in a way you don’t with many others. Put it this way..not many ‘great’ movies end with ‘the main woman dies when a nun spooks her and she falls the same was as the woman she was posing as did.’

1929: St Louis Blues (103rd!!!!!)

What else happened this year? Global Financial Crash. Boom!

What is the plot - in one sentence? It’s a short movie, Bessie Smith gets cheated on by her man, she sings a sad song, and then he returns and they dance.

I don't have time, just spoil it for me? You don't have 10 minutes? What are you doing reading this? It was a psyche! move, he was just there to steal some money from her stockings before pissing off for good.

What is the meaning of the title? It’s the song that she sings, with the help of an entire restaurant as the chorus,

Here's Bessie having a beer, a sing and a cry. We call this the Irish sandwich.

Anything that's not aged well? Does a woman get slapped around? Bessie does, as her kept man cheats on her, and then throws her to the ground when she’s confronting him. Also, the woman he’s cheating on Bessie with, a pretty woman, he refers to her as a ‘yellow lady’ for some reason. Also, he cheats on her in a single bed.

Any thoughts? I know Bessie Smith only from that song ‘I need a little sugar, in my bowl’ which is full of eye-opening euphemisms – it’s not subtle. I was therefore surprised to hear her sing here, as her voice is magnificent.

Would you recommend this? It’s 15 minutes long, features a good song, some crazy dancing (the guy who she breaks up with does some running on the spot for it bit and it’s weird. Yeah, you can watch it right here. . Oh, there’s a guy spinning a drinks tray during a dance, and he does a good job of it, it’s pretty funny to watch.

Final thoughts? This could easily have been a longer movie, cram in a few more songs and dances, and I wouldn’t complain. On a lighter note, this is the last one of these I’ll do, and for some reason 1929 was very difficult to accomplish – and I note that I’ve tried to watch the Movie Pandora’s box a few times, and despite the very pretty star, it’s positively glacial – the version I have leaves the interstitial subtitles for 20 seconds. I might watch it, at 1.5x speed, just as the director intended.

That's it! A movie from every year from 1920 to 2022. All for you to peruse, you can find them all right here if you want.* Have I learned anything from this endeavour? Not really, but I've seen some good movies as a result of it, and that's always something.

 

 

 

*If you don't want that, I don't want your readership, get fucked.

The Northman: aka why do none of the reviews mention Nicole Kidman's face???

 Howdy folks, I hope you're all well and enjoying the season.

I watched the Northman yesterday, and I feel that something needs to be said. There's some nice scenery, roaming accents, and much bloody violence. The story is a verion of Amleth, which we might know better as Hamlet - a prince must get vengeance on his uncle, who killed his father and takes his mother as queen / wife. So far, so good, and from the director of the VVitch? There's no reason this shouldn't be a good movie.

I've got a lot of time for humourless, dour viking movies, but this one didn't do it for me. There's a scene where Amleth, now a man, has joined a Viking party and raids a town for slaves. In the battle, there's a guy that he fights, I watched it pretty closely, and here's how it goes: the other guy swings his sword, Amleth blocks it with his shield and then shoulder barges the guy to the ground. While he's there he kicks him in the stomach to prevent him getting up. The other guy's face is now messed up for some reason. We're to assume he's dead, though if a shoulder barge and kick messes your face up and kills you, there's a reason your town won't get much money as slaves. This is from a long single-shot scene, and they should have taken another attempt at it. It's jarring, and the person I watched it with noticed it too, despite having me to distract them.

One of the slaves is Anya Taylor-Joy, who is a Russian for some reason. From the sounds of it her accent coach must have left to fight in Ukraine. The kid who played Amleth as a kid also sounds like an American trying to do a Scottish accent, and Nicole Kidman's accent is terrible. It's really off-putting.

Speaking of which, I read a couple of reviews saying that her performance is a tour-de-force, particularly a scene where Amleth confronts her as an adult. She tells him that she and the uncle had planned the death of Amleth's father - i.e. that Amleth's entire life had been for nothing. Fine, fine, but this scene takes place in a room with a fire underlighting it, and Nicole Kidman's face is so full of botox that she looks inhuman. There are no creases on her face so the flickering fire has no effect on it. It's even worse that it's in a movie set in the early 10th century. Every time she was on screen it was offputting, and removed a lot of the potential emotional heft of the movie.

I mean, come on.

I don't know who she's kidding, she was a very pretty young woman, there's no reason she'd be ugly as a 50 year old. Certainly it would be an improvement over the 'Janice from the Muppets' look that she's got now. I don't know how it's not mentioned in every review.

It's also telling that this scene, potentially the emotional climax of the movie, takes place when there's still 50 minutes left. The final battle, which takes place in a volcano, is far less cool than you'd imagine.

Anyway, not great. This movie has made Richard Egger's movies go from must-see (after the VVitch, and to a lesser extent the Lighthouse) to someone I might watch if the reviews are good. I'm sure that will really hurt him, but jeez.