A retired cop is hired by a San Francisco shipping magnate to follow his beautiful wife, because she has been behaving oddly. Scottie Ferguson begins to trail Madeleine, and finds himself powerfully attracted to the disturbed young woman ...
"Vertigo" was inspired by the French novel, "D'Entre Les Morts" by Boileau and Narcejac. Vera Miles was meant to play Madeleine, but she became pregnant. Plans were already well advanced when Kim Novak stepped in, and the portrait of Carlotta Valdes which intrigues Madeleine is in fact a likeness of Miles herself.
Barbara Bel Geddes (Miss Ellie from TV's "Dallas") appears as Midge, the artistic intellectual who once had Scottie but lost him. Watch for her telling little glance when Scottie mentions their now-defunct engagement. Apparently, Hitchcock gave Bel Geddes minutely explicit directions on when to raise and lower her gaze ("I look up, I look down ..."). Midge will never regain her place in Scottie's affections and she knows it. Twice in the course of the film she is referred to as his mother-figure, a role which she seems fated to adopt, against her own inclinations. The character of Midge is left to wither on the vine. Once Scottie gets out of hospital there is simply no room for her in the narrative, and we never hear of her again.
Midge's pet-name for Scottie is 'Johnny-o', and the strange truth is, Johnny-o is a sicko. He carries a weighty burden of guilt over the policeman who fell to his death (shades of "Spellbound"?) and he now suffers from vertigo, the camera lurching queasily whenever he looks down from any height. This much-imitated Hitchcockian trick consists of zooming the camera in whilst simultaneously tracking back. The custom-built church tower proved unsuitable for the lurch-shot, so the effect was achieved by filming inside a scale model (laid horizontally, incidentally).
Scottie's sickness is insisted upon from beginning to end. Like a voyeuristic stalker, he pursues Madeleine obsessively, watching her from the shadows. When he pulls her out of the Bay, he sits her in her car and clinches her like a lover, repeating her name over and over. He neither calls an ambulance nor informs her husband. Instead, he drives her to his apartment, undresses her, puts her in his bed and plays with her hair. Later, the way he accosts Judy Barton is threatening and inappropriate. Director of Photography Robert Burks lights Stewart's face from below for the disturbing moment when Scottie begs Judy to dye her hair blonde. Scottie spends an inordinate amount of his on-screen time sitting alone in his car, symbolically trapped in the bubble of his unhealthy sexuality.
The colour green is the emblem of Scottie's kinkiness. Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) whets Scottie's sexual appetite by setting up his first glimpse of Madeleine in Ernie's restaurant. Her gown has vivid flashes of green, and Scottie becomes fixated. She drives a green car, and Scottie pursues it through San Francisco's gridiron streetplan like satyr chasing faun. When he sees the car again after his spell in hospital, he runs to it and physically embraces it. When he spies on Madeleine in the florist's shop, the bright green counter occupies a quarter of the Vistavision screen. Bright green lawns outside the art gallery prefigure the central 'village green' of San Juan Bautista. These are important sites which Scottie associates with Madeleine. When he has her at his mercy, naked in his bed, he has on a revolting green sweater. Madeleine gives in and agrees to accompany him on a date, and he gives a sick smile as he drives her through the lush greenery south of San Francisco. The phallic sequoia trees are of the genus 'semper virens', translated by Scottie as 'ever green'. Judy attracts Scottie like a moth to a flame when she looks out of a window, dressed head-to-toe in green. It is when he sees her silhouette against the green-tinged net curtains that he knows who she really is. His excitement reaches an unhealthy pitch when she emerges from the bathroom with blonde hair, the room bathed in ugly green light.
For a story so carefully prepared by Hitchcock and his writers, Coppel and Taylor, "Vertigo" contains some major weak points. Elster's ruse is unbelievably far-fetched. To get the half-drowned Madeleine to his apartment, Scottie must have used her car and abandoned his own. Is that credible? And how come Madeleine is able to dress and leave in the few seconds it takes Scottie to answer the phone? The coroner accepts as fact the suicide attempt near the Golden Gate Bridge, even though this evidence can only have come from Scottie, whom the coroner publicly disparages. Would Judy really be so foolish as to wear the necklace which gives her away? The film's ending is too much to swallow.
Kim Novak is on record as saying that Hitchcock insisted on her wearing the grey suit, the exact same one that Scottie forces Judy to wear as he remoulds her identity. Like Scottie, Hitchcock had a thing about aloof blonde ice-maidens (Hedren, Kelly, Novak) ... Scottie quotes a Chinese proverb about remaining responsible for a life once you've saved it. Did Hitchcock feel the same way about the Madeleine/Judy/Marnie girl to whom he had granted life?
