Nerdwriter1, a voluble sort who posts at YouTube, has a nice take, shown above, of an early scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in which “Scottie” (Jimmy Stewart) is put on the case that will prove his undoing by Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore). As Nerdwriter1 points out, in his pains-taking analysis of the scene’s “blocking”, it’s a remarkably peripatetic conversation, even though the two never go anywhere.
The conversation takes place in Gavin’s lavish, old money office, with rich wood paneling, the walls covered with framed photos, prints, paintings, and commemoratives of all kinds, where he runs the family ship-building business, which he married into, he tells us. When Scottie first comes in he sits on a sideboard, looming in the foreground while Gavin seems to shrink in his chair.
Later, Scottie moves to a chair while Gavin strolls into an adjoining conference room, which is several steps higher than the office itself, allowing Hitchcock to give us this striking shot.
Here Gavin looks like a sort of imp, speaking to Scottie’s conscience, urging him to do something that, of course, he would be much wiser not to.
Putting one actor in the foreground and another in the back is a trick Hitchcock had used before, both strikingly and clumsily in this process shot from Stage Fright (1950), in which Marlene Dietrich dwarfs the unfortunate (and, as it turns out, murderous) Richard Todd.
In Psycho, Hitchcock used the same shot again, but this to indicate the vulnerability of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) before the lecherous gaze of small town big shot Tom Cassidy (Frank Albertson).
However, in the next shot Marion returns the favor, giving us just a hint—a hint that will be amplified later—that she feels she has the upper hand with the old goat. She’s the young one, after all.
One thing that “Nerdwriter1” does not comment on—and it’s not only a major feature of this scene, but of many others in Vertigo—is the dramatic view of his shipyard that Gavin enjoys from the massive picture window behind his desk, looking out over what appears to be the construction of several battleships.1 Yet one can hardly say that Gavin “enjoys” the view because he never looks outside, and neither does Scottie. Both men seem to be focused entirely on what’s inside their skulls.
It’s a quality that they share with the rest of the cast of Vertigo. In the scene before this one, we meet “Midge” (Barbara Bel Geddes), Scottie’s neo-Platonic, quasi-incestuous galpal. Midge is a commercial artist, whose studio windows offer a stunning view of the City, one that many San Franciscans would kill for. Yet, visual as she is, Midge never bothers to look outside.
Once Scottie is on the case of tailing Gavin’s wife, with her (fictitious) obsession with the long-dead Carlotta Valdez, he goes with Midge to visit a local historian at his book shop. The shop doesn’t have much of a view, but it does have a spectacularly large window (with virtually no display for passing customers to look at) and even glass doors. Again, no one’s looking outside.
Later, Scottie takes Gavin’s not wife (Kim Novak, as “Judy Elster”, pretending to be Gavin’s wife Madeleine) to his apartment, and he has a great view—one that, perhaps, several San Franciscans have killed for—looking up Telegraph Hill to the famous Coit Tower.
After Gavin’s insidious scheme is complete—after his real wife is murdered and Scottie is tricked into thinking that she committed suicide as a result of her obsession with Carlotta Valdez—poor Scottie has to sit through the coroner’s inquest, five of the bitchiest minutes on celluloid as coroner Henry Jones pisses all over him for failing to save Madeleine, even though, as Jones himself repeatedly points out, that has nothing to do with determining the cause of Madeleine’s death, which is the only issue at hand. The room the inquest is held in isn’t fancy, but it does have lots of windows.
Finally, when Scottie suffers an emotional collapse over Madeleine’s death, he’s taken to a rest home, where he stares out into space, but never out the window.
It’s at this point, of course, that the “real” story of Vertigo kicks in, when we start to learn that the woman Scottie fell in love with isn’t dead, because she isn’t Gavin’s wife Madeleine, she’s Judy Ester, a random outsider pulled into this world of inwardly facing freaks.
When it comes to Vertigo, I am a definite outsider among Hitchcock fanciers, because I don’t like the film at all. Half the film, it seems to me, consists of shots of Jimmy Stewart driving around San Francisco with a pained, constipated look on his face, bad process shots of the City showing through the rear window, while Bernard Herrmann’s sing-song, “haunting” score plays on the background. And the other half is just as bad, if not worse, particularly the cartoonish “nightmare” effects. For my money, Psycho, which I’ve previously discussed in detail, is easily Hitchcock’s best and deepest film. I also developed an extended “photo essay” that covers many of the visual motifs that run through Hitchcock’s work, including both Psycho and Vertigo. And next week (or the week after) I’ll chew on Scottie and Gavin’s conversation some more, focusing on their actual words.
- Gavin tells us that he finds it all “dull”. With his pocket square, French cuffs, and fussy “r-less” speech, he gives the impression of a man refined past the point of taking pleasure in the decidedly imperfect real world. ↩︎
