FAQ for
Vertigo (1958) More at IMDb Pro »

The following FAQ entries may contain spoilers. Only the biggest ones (if any) will be covered with spoiler tags. Spoiler tags are used sparingly in order to make the page more readable.

For detailed information about the amounts and types of (a) sex and nudity, (b) violence and gore, (c) profanity, (d) alcohol, drugs, and smoking, and (e) frightening and intense scenes in this movie, consult the IMDb Parents Guide for this movie. The Parents Guide for Vertigo can be found at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052357/parentalguide.

Yes. Vertigo is based on Sueurs Froides: D'Entre les Morts [trans: Cold Sweat: From Among the Dead, a 1954 crime novel French crime writers Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud (aka Thomas Narcejac), writing as Boileau-Narcejac.

Vertigo is the medical term for dizziness, or a feeling of spinning or being off-balance, typically caused by problems with the balance mechanisms in the inner ear. However, it can also accompany more serious conditions, such as a stroke or a brain tumor. In Scottie's case, his vertigo was caused by acrophobia (fear of heights).

Scottie (James Stewart) first noticed it when he was chasing a criminal who was trying to escape by running across rooftops. Scottie slipped off the roof, catching the rain gutter to keep him from falling several stories to the ground. Another cop tried to grab his hand and pull him back on the roof, but the cop wound up falling to his death. Ever since then, Scottie has been unable to look down from high places without feeling dizzy. For this reason, he even quit the police force because he couldn't depend upon himself to assist in any situation that involved heights.

We never find out. The scene ends with him still hanging from the gutter. We can assume that another cop came to rescue him.

San Francisco. However, in his 1974 book, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, Raymond Durgnat mistakenly placed the film in Los Angeles.

Carlotta Valdez is the name on the tombstone that Scottie observed Madeleine (Kim Novak) visiting in the church graveyard. She's also the lady in the portrait that Madeleine visits at the art museum, and she's the renter of the room that Scottie saw Madeleine enter at the McKittrick Hotel. According to Pop Leibel (Konstantin Shayne), the book dealer, the story goes that Carlotta was mistress to a rich man who built the McKittrick Hotel for her but who eventually dumped her. On top of that, he took her child, while Carlotta was left to wander the streets, sad and mad, asking people "Where is my child?", and eventually committing suicide. Madeleine's husband, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), explains to Scottie that Carlotta was Madeleine's great grandmother and that the child was her grandmother, which is why he's concerned that Carlotta's ghost is beginning to possess Madeleine.

There isn't one. Scottie sees Madeleine enter the hotel and open the curtains of her room. Then Scottie enters the hotel himself and asks the manager (Ellen Corby) to tell him who is renting the room. The name she gives him is Carlotta Valdez. Scottie asks her not to say anything to her tenant about his visit, but she tells him that Miss Valdez hadn't been there that day. Scottie insists that he just saw her walk in. The manager maintains she had been putting olive oil on her rubber plant leaves and wouldn't have missed her. Besides, her key is still on the rack. Scottie presses her to check the room. She does, and the room is empty. Even Madeleine's car outside has vanished. Alfred Hitchcock called this an "icebox" scene, meaning it's the kind of scene that hits you after you've gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox. "Hey," says the hypothetical viewer. "How did Kim Novak vanish from the hotel? Did we ever find that out?"

There are a number of possible explanations. One is that the manager had her back turned (polishing her leaves) when Madeleine entered the hotel and quietly snuck upstairs. Another is that the manager and Madeleine are in cahoots. Others have thought Madeleine may have rented another room under another name, so the manager wasn't lying when she said she didn't see Carmen Valdez enter the hotel. Still another possibility is that someone else rented the room as Carmen Valdez, such as Gavin Elster's real wife or even Elster himself. The only thing that's certain is that Madeleine entered the room being rented by Carmen Valdez, so she either had a key or the door was purposely left unlocked for her.

The character doesn't have a name.

The most likely explanation is that Madeleine went out a back entrance and drove off while Scottie was talking with the manager.

Novak felt the straight skirt was too confining. They ended up using two skirts. One had a very small back kick pleat, which does not go up much further than the back of her knees. This skirt is quite limiting and was used for all the static shots. For the action shots, Novak wore a second skirt that was slightly fuller cut and has a large knife pleat that goes halfway up the back of the skirt. This skirt is used in scenes, like at the mission, where Novak needs to run.

When Scottie tries to calm Judy down after she fled from his attempt to take her shopping, he says, "These past few days have been the first happy days I've known in a year." Conclusion: it was about a year.

Some viewers point out that Scottie has no reason to see Judy (Kim Novak) as anyone other than a woman who reminds him of Madeleine. Consider that, when he spends time alone in Judy's room while she's getting the makeover, he doesn't appear to be snooping...just waiting. It's only until he sees her wearing the necklace that he connects the dots. However, other viewers believe that Scottie knew all along who Judy was.

Viewers who have questioned that offer three explanations. One is that Judy actually forgot. Another is that a year had passed, and Judy didn't think that Scottie would have paid that much attention to a painting in order to remember the necklace. A third explanation is that Judy actually wanted Scottie to recognize it so that the truth could be told.

The necklace was handed down to Madeleine, and Elster gave it to Judy as payoff.

The most common interpretation of the ending is that, when Judy saw the dark figure of the nun, she thought it was a ghost, recoiled in shock, took a step backwards, and fell. However, in an interview with Kim Novak [see: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/kim_novak_c.html], Novak's take on it is that Judy threw herself off the tower. She was so desperate to be loved that she had let one man turn her into Madelaine and involve her in a murder because she thought he loved her, then another because she hoped he would love her. When Scottie found out the truth, he told her "It's too late." So when she cried out, "No," it was because she realized that she had just lost her last chance and had nothing left to live for. The nun's arrival merely distracted Scottie long enough for Judy to break away from him and do herself in.

For Gavin Elster's scheme to work, the "witness" had to chase Madeleine up the stairs but be unable to make it to the top or he would see exactly what was going on. Elster had seen the newspaper article about Scottie's phobia and, since they knew each other from college, Scottie was the perfect choice.

Yes. Old Mission San Juan Bautista is located about 100 miles south of San Francisco in San Juan Bautista, just west of the city of Hollister, California. Founded in 1797, it is said to be the largest mission in California. However, the bell tower featured in Vertigo was added by trick photography.

It's actually a deleted scene added in the Collector's Edition of Vertigo. Scottie and Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) are in Midge's apartment, she pours him a drink, and they have cheers...and the movie is over. Do Scottie and Midge ever get together? That's up to the viewer to decide.

Yes. Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance about 11 minutes into the movie. He plays a man wearing a gray suit, walking down the sidewalk past Gavin Elster's shipbuilding company. A photo of the cameo can be seen at http://movieimage6.tripod.com/vertigo/vertigo18.jpg.

Vertigo is a great film, but not a perfect one. First-time viewers tend to focus on the plot, its implausibilities and a twist that seems to end the movie half-way through. Second- or third-time viewers can concentrate on the characters; the themes of love, obsession, unrequited love (the Barbara Bel Geddes character), duplicity and manipulation; and the extraordinary depth and beauty that the performances, images and music give to them. Vertigo has a hypnotic power on the viewer who has already solved the mystery of the plot and can now delve into the mysteries of human nature.

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It's difficult to put into words exactly what Vertigo means to me as both a film lover and as a filmmaker. As is the case with all great films, truly great films, no matter how much has been said and written about them, the dialogue about it will always continue. Because any film as great as Vertigo demands more than just a sense of admiration - it demands a personal response.

A good place to start is its complete singularity. Vertigo stands alone as a Hitchcock film, as a Hollywood film. In fact, it just stands alone - period. For such a personal work with such a uniquely disturbing vision of the world to come out of the studio system when it did was not just unusual - it was nearly unthinkable. Vertigo was and continues to be a real example to me and to many of my contemporaries, in the sense that it demonstrates to us that it's possible to function within a system and do work that's deeply personal at the same time.

Vertigo is also important to me - essential would be more like it - because it has a hero driven purely by obsession. I've always been attracted in my own work to heroes motivated by obsession, and on that level Vertigo strikes a deep chord in me every time I see it. Morality, decency, kindness, intelligence, wisdom - all the qualitites that we think heroes are supposed to possess - desert [James Stewart]'s character little by little, until he is left alone on that church tower with the bells tolling behind him and nothing to show but his humanity.

Whole books could be written about so many individual aspects of Vertigo - its extraordinary visual precision, which cuts to the soul of its characters like a razor; its many mysteries and moments of subtle poetry; its unsettling and exquisite use of color; its extraordinary performances by Stewart and Kim Novak - whose work is so brave and emotionally immediate - as well as the very underrated work of Barbara Bel Geddes. And that's not to mention its astonishing title sequence by Saul Bass or its tragically beautiful score by Bernard Herrmann, both absolutely essential to the spirit, the functioning and the power of Vertigo.

Of course, we can now hear Herrmann's score with clarity and breadth that it's never had before, thanks to [Robert A. Harris] and [James C. Katz], the men who worked on the beautiful, painstaking restoration of Vertigo. I'm happy that the Film Foundation was able to play a part in making this important work possible, and I'd like to thank Universal and Tom Pollock for allowing it to go forward and, of course, I'd like to thank the American Film Institute for their invaluable contributions.

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It's a Wonderful Life (1946). George Bailey (James Stewart) is frantically trying to prevent his customers from pulling all of their money out of the Building and Loan. When the spinster Miss Davis (Ellen Corby) asks for only $17.50, he impulsively kisses her on the cheek.

In Bell Book and Candle, Gillian Holroyd [Kim Novak] is a witch attempting to cast a spell that will make Shep Henderson [James Stewart] fall in love with her.

PRO:

A good old-fashioned brew of sock, suspense and surprise... A most handsomely furnished film. -- Peter Burnup, News of the World

It entertains and is admirably photographed. -- Times

Hitchcock in vintage form. -- Frank Jackson, Reynolds News

Hitchcock pulls a major mystery and a bit of a miracle out of his capacious bag. -- Harold Conway, Daily Sketch

The mechanisms and motivations of the male power drive are subjected to the most ruthless and uncompromising critique. -- Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, 1986

In Vertigo, Hitchcock reveals himself to his audience, embodying, in Stewart's character, his own obsessions and desire to make women over. -- Baseline

Of all Hitchcock's films the one nearest to perfection. Indeed, its profundity is inseparable from the perfection of form: it is a perfect organism, each character, each sequence, each image, illuminating each other. Form and technique here become the perfect expression of concerns both deep and universal. -- Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited, 1989

[Hitchcock] was a great visual stylist in two ways: He used obvious images and surrounded them with a subtle context. Consider the obvious ways he suggests James Stewart's vertigo. An opening shot shows him teetering on a ladder, looking down at a street below. Flashbacks show why he left the police force. A bell tower at a mission terrifies him, and Hitchcock creates a famous shot to show his point of view: Using a model of the inside of the tower, and zooming in while at the same time physically pulling the camera back, Hitchcock shows the walls approaching and receding at the same time; the space has the logic of a nightmare. But then notice less obvious ways that the movie sneaks in the concept of falling, as when Scottie drives down San Francisco's hills, but never up. And note how truly he "falls" in love. There is another element, rarely commented on, that makes Vertigo a great film. From the moment we are let in on the secret, the movie is equally about Judy: her pain, her loss, the trap she's in... Novak, criticized at the time for playing the character too stiffly, has made the correct acting choices: Ask yourself how you would move and speak if you were in unbearable pain, and then look again at Judy. -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

A complex tale with supernatural overtones... What is apparently seen may not be what actually happened at all. The feeling of vertigo is communicated in the music, in the overemphatic titles... and in a sequence which visualizes the delirium suffered by the detective. Hitchcock uses a highly elaborate and oddly leisurely style in telling this unlikely tale. -- Gerald D. MacDonald, Library Journal

Vertigo would be pretty preposterous if it weren't for Hitchcock. -- Isabel Quigly, Spectator

Brilliant but despicably cynical view of human obsession. -- Geoff Andrew, Time Out Film Guide, 1998

CON:

The plot is a brilliant box of devilish tricks. And yet the film disappoints. It seems too long, too elaborately designed; the narration of this kind of criminal intrigue sags under such luscious treatment; it needs the touch of the harsh and squalid. As the mysterious quarry Kim Novak makes one of her more lifelike appearances. -- Dilys Powell, Sunday Times

Alfred Hitchcock, who produced and directed the thing, has never before indulged in such far-fetched nonsense. -- John McCarten, New Yorker

Technical facility is being exploited to gild pure dross... [The film] pursues its theme of false identity with such plodding persistence that by the time the climactic cat is let out of the bag, the audience has long since had kittens. -- Arthur Knight, Saturday Review

The old master has turned out another Hitchcock-and-bull story, in which the mystery is not so much who done it as who cares. -- Time

At the risk of sounding slow-witted, I must complain that Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was a little too difficult for me. I had to concentrate so narrowly on the labyrinth of the plot that I never broke out in the cold sweat which is the emotional reward of a good thriller. -- Robert Hatch, Nation

The trouble, I think, is that the ideas which Hitchcock pioneered have since been made commonplace by imitation: great close-ups of an eye, or half an eye, or the corner of a quivering mouth, or a hand holding a pistol, or hair-raising chases up high places. All this amusing Hitch-poppycock is no longer exclusive to him. -- Daily Mail

Tricksy... Vertigo has its moments, all right, but between them stretches a lot of wasted time. -- Philip Oakes, Evening Standard

A film in which character and theme are unimportant, and which therefore relies heavily on plot interest. Unfortunately in this case, the plot is an involved one. -- Monthly Film Bulletin

Murky and pretentious. -- John Simon, 1970s

Not exactly, says Dan Auiler. He wrote:

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Legend has it that Hitchcock was furious when Vera Miles became pregnant and dropped out of Vertigo. Perhaps a more realistic assessment, though, is that [Alfred] Hitchcock and [James] Stewart had been having their own doubts about Miles as a star.

Hitchcock had discovered Vera Miles during casting for his television series, and he was impressed enough to place her under personal contract; yet according to [Samuel A. Taylor], though secure about her acting ability, Hitchcock felt she didn't yet possess that luminous quality that made a star. By placing her under exclusive contract, he hoped to create that quality in her.

From the onset, though, Miles was reluctant to be shaped by anyone--even a director she respected as much as Hitchcock. Her first feature with Hitchcock was not exactly a showcase for the new blonde. The Wrong Man's microscopic focus on the justice process left little screen time for Manny's wife. Dressed down and psychologically shattered by Manny's unjustified arrest, Miles's character is never fully developed. Hitchcock seemed impatient with the wife's story line, and his indifference shows on screen. The film's sanitarium scenes are similar to the scenes in Vertigo, with the same overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of psychological crisis; yet there was little occasion for Vera Miles to do much else on-screen to make an impact.

This film, and the role in Vertigo that was intended to follow, dominate the Vera Miles story. There is much more, though, to the full picture. Her career had begun with small roles in 1951 in Two Tickets to Broadway and in 1952 in For Men Only; Miles effectively used her television performances as audition pieces for Hitchcock--and for John Ford, who cast her in The Searchers a year before she filmed The Wrong Man. Vertigo was intended as Miles's big break--but even before her first screen tests in November of 1956, there were signs of doubt from Hitchcock. A few weeks before Miles reported to Stage 5 at Parmount for hair, costume, and makeup tests, Hitchcock screened The Eddy Duchin Story, a biopic featuring an actress [Kim Novak] who was being molded by one of Hitchcock's crosstown rivals [Harry Cohn].

--Auiler, 'Vertigo': The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, NY, 1998, pp. 20, 21.

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"[A] big international thriller, adapted from the novel Flamingo Feather by Laurens Van der Post, to be shot on location in South Africa."

Source: Dan Auiler, 'Vertigo': The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, NY, 1998, p. 2