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Three Masterpieces
As he awaited the release of The Wrong Man, Hitchcock weighed possibilities for his next picture at Paramount. The company owned rights to two novels that looked promising. One, Laurens van der Post's Flamingo Feather, was a spy thriller set in Africa. Hitchcock abandoned that project, however, after he visited South Africa, the planned location for the shooting, and met with government officials who showed little interest in cooperating with an American film company. This was just as well, since the other novel, D'entre les morts ("From Among the Dead") by the French writers Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau, intrigued him much more.
An earlier book by the same authors had inspired a hit French thriller, Les diaboliques ("The Fiends"), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and released in America in 1955. Hitchcock hoped that his film of D'entre les morts might repeat that success. In Hitchcock's hands, the rather contrived mystery novel would be transformed into Vertigo. While its initial performance at the box office would prove disappointing, the film would endure as what many consider to be the director's supreme masterpiece.
Getting it to the screen, however, was itself a story with a few twists and turns. Casting the male lead was easy - James Stewart was perfect for the part - but the female lead presented some problems. Hitchcock originally wanted Vera Miles for the role, hoping she would indeed become the next Grace Kelly. That dream dissipated when the actress, who had recently married, became pregnant. Kim Novak, a performer with bigger name recognition than Miles, replaced her.
The screenplay stirred up even more anxiety than the casting. Fresh from writing The Wrong Man, Maxwell Anderson began work on the first draft in June 1956. When it became clear that Anderson's plotting and dialogue were just not working, Hitchcock again let his old chum Angus MacPhail give it a try. MacPhail, however, was still battling alcoholism and soon withdrew from the project. Another writer, Alec Coppel, improved on Anderson's efforts, but Hitchcock remained dissatisfied. Finally, Samuel Taylor, author of the play Sabrina Fair, took over, and he was able to breathe life into the characters and the story. In September 1957, 15 months after the process had begun, the screen-play - credited to both Coppel and Taylor - was ready.
It might have been finished sooner if Hitchcock's health had not caused additional delays. The director underwent minor surgery for a hernia and colitis (an inflammation of the colon) in January 1957, around the time Taylor was hired. Two months later, he suffered a much more serious problem involving his gallbladder. Timely surgery saved his life. As Hitchcock always worked closely with screenwriters, his hospitalization and recovery inevitably slowed down the preparations.
Once the script was completed, however, filming went smoothly - first in San Francisco, where the exterior scenes were shot, and then at the Paramount studios in Hollywood, where the interior work was done. In April 1958, however, as Hitchcock was putting the finishing touches on the film, another health crisis in his household added to the pressure. This time it was Alma who was affected; she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and required surgery. The possibility of losing his life's companion terrified Hitchcock, but luckily, Alma recovered.
Vertigo was finally released in late May. What audiences saw was perhaps the strangest, yet most hauntingly beautiful film Hitchcock had ever made. At the time, its far-fetched plot drew a mixed response from critics - Time magazine sneeringly called the movie a "Hitchcock and bull story" - but today most agree that it is one of the director's most deeply felt pictures.
In Vertigo, a San Francisco police detective, John "Scottie" Ferguson (Stewart), resigns from the force when his fear of heights, or acrophobia, leads to the death of a fellow policeman during a rooftop chase. Afterward, an old friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), calls on him for a strange favor: He asks the ex-detective to follow his wife, Madeleine (Novak), who may be in danger. Scottie learns that Madeleine is apparently "possessed" by the spirit of her great-grandmother, who had tragically killed herself. Trailing Madeleine, Scottie sees some strange behavior. As if in a trance, she visits the grave of her forebear and sits before the woman's portrait at a museum. One day she tries to drown herself. Scottie, who has fallen in love with Madeleine, rescues her and vows to keep her safe. But his acrophobia again thwarts him: he cannot follow Madeleine to the top of a church tower, where she leaps to her death. Overcome with grief and guilt, Scottie
spends a year in a mental institution.
After his release, he continues to obsess about Madeleine. One day he spots a young woman, Judy Barton (also played by Novak), who bears a striking resemblance to his lost love. He begins a strange courtship, attempting to remake Judy into the image of Madeleine. What he does not know, however, is that Judy really is "Madeleine." She had been part of an elaborate plot by Elster, her former lover, to murder his real wife and make it appear to be a suicide. At the film's finale, Scottie discovers the truth, drags Judy to the top of the tower where the murder took place, and forces her to confess. He overcomes his acrophobia, but Judy accidentally falls. Stunned and devastated, the hero stands at the edge of the tower, gazing down at the body of the woman who is now truly lost to him forever.
Hitchcock said that what appealed to him about the Narcejac-Boileau novel was "the hero's attempts to re-create the image of a dead woman through another who's alive." Indeed, the film becomes most troubling in its last third when Scottie buys Judy a Madeleine-style wardrobe and bullies her into dyeing her hair blonde to match Madeleine's. He cannot love Judy for who she is; he can only love his memory of Madeleine. His romantic obsession has him teetering at the edge of madness.
His situation is made even more disturbing by the fact that we know what Scottie does not know - that Judy is the same woman, that the "Madeleine" with whom he fell in love was a fake. In a bold move, Hitchcock and Taylor decided to reveal this plot twist to the audience right after Scottie first meets Judy. Thus, as we watch the final scenes, we are held in suspense, wondering how Scottie will react when he discovers the truth. More important, we realize that Scottie is focusing his obsession on someone who was never real in the first place. Our feelings are complicated further by our knowledge that Judy actually loves Scottie and submits to the makeover only to win his affection. However, by this time we also know that Scottie's delusions and Judy's guilt - her role in the murder plot - have already doomed that love.
Many elements came together to help turn Vertigo into the unforgettable film that it is: compelling performances by the two leads, a lush, romantic score by Bernard Herrmann, and beautiful use of locations in and around San Francisco. It was Hitchcock's masterful control of such elements, all orchestrated to create a dreamlike atmosphere and stir powerful emotions, that made the film a triumph of both style and substance.
Although Vertigo would not be properly appreciated for years, the director's next production would prove an instant crowd-pleaser. The making of North by Northwest took Hitchcock for the first and only time to the studios of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. As he had done with The Wrong Man, he exercised the non-exclusive clause in his contract with Paramount in order to make the picture. Interestingly, though, North by Northwest was not the film he had originally agreed to direct for MGM.
That picture was supposed to have been an adaptation of Hammond Innes's novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare, to which MGM owned film rights. As Hitchcock and screen-writer Ernest Lehman soon realized, however, the book had an intriguing opening - a ghost ship is found adrift in the middle of the English Channel - but an otherwise tedious plot. Neither man could figure out a way to make it work on film, so they decided to do something altogether different. As Lehman put it, they set out to make "the Hitchcock movie to end all Hitchcock movies."
North by Northwest was a return to the territory of The 39 Steps. Like the British classic, it focuses on an ordinary man who is caught in a spy plot, falsely accused of murder, and forced to run for his life. Along the way he finds romance and endures hair-raising adventures. Although Hitchcock reportedly approached James Stewart about the part, he really knew from the beginning that it was better suited to Cary Grant, his other favorite leading man. Grant, now in his mid-50s, was as suave and handsome as ever - so much so that no one thought anything of it when Hitchcock cast Jessie Royce Landis, an actress born in the same year as Grant, as the character's mother.
After the seriousness of The Wrong Man and Vertigo, North by Northwest was a lighthearted change of pace, a return to the sort of Hitchcock film many moviegoers expected. Filled with witty dialogue and amusing situations, the story took the viewer on a wild and delightful ride from one picturesque locale to another - from New York to Chicago to the Black Hills of South Dakota. It contained what is probably the director's most famous action sequence, one in which Grant's character, an advertising executive completely out of his element, is terrorized in an open field by a small plane. Later, in a finale almost as exciting, the hero and heroine flee their pursuers by climbing down the giant stone faces of Mount Rushmore.
As in Rear Window, the light touch that makes North by Northwest so entertaining disguises deeper concerns. The illusion-versus-reality and false-identity themes that figure so strongly in Vertigo are here as well. Grant's character, Roger Thornhill, first becomes entangled in the spy plot when the spies mistake him for an American agent named George Kaplan. We soon learn that Kaplan does not even exist: He is a phantom decoy set up by U.S. intelligence to divert attention away from the real agent, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). The whole Kaplan charade underlines the superficiality of Thornhill's own personality. A glib ad man who tries at one point to wriggle out of his situation by declaring that he has "a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives, and several bartenders dependent on me," Thornhill is a man who shuns commitment and revels in his own cynicism. Over the course of his adventures as "George Kaplan," however, he becomes a better man,
falling in love with Eve (who is also not what she seems) and learning to trust her.
Costing $4.3 million, North by Northwest was Hitchcock's most expensive film since The Paradine Case, which had been a gigantic failure. This time, however, the lavish production paid off: the film earned $6 million following its July 1959 release. Having fulfilled his single-movie deal with MGM, Hitchcock still owed Paramount one last picture.
He originally intended to make No Bail for the Judge, based on an English novel about a woman lawyer who must defend her father on charges of murder. A major star, Audrey Hepburn, agreed to play the lead. Although Hitchcock usually favored blonde actresses, Hepburn was one brunette with an elegance that matched Grace Kelly's. But her collaboration with Hitchcock was not to be. Just as Vera Miles had done with Vertigo, Hepburn withdrew from the project when she became pregnant. Furious at this turn of events - as if Hepburn's pregnancy were somehow a personal betrayal - Hitchcock lost interest in the film and quickly put another project into motion.
Always a keen observer of box-office trends, the filmmaker had recently noticed how successful a number of low-budget horror movies had become, especially with young audiences. American-International Pictures, for example, had made small fortunes from such fare as I Was a Teen-age Frankenstein and I Was a Teen-age Werewolf, both released in 1957. Meanwhile, an independent producer-director named William Castle was enjoying similar success with a string of shockers, including Macabre (1958) and The Tingler (1959). Such movies were usually silly and poorly crafted. Hitchcock wondered how a cheaply made horror film might turn out with a master director in charge. That, he believed, would be an interesting challenge.
The source material he chose was Robert Bloch's recent novel Psycho. Bloch was a prolific spinner of horror yarns who had also written scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His book had been inspired by the grisly exploits of a midwestern serial killer named Ed Gein, and while its details were much less gruesome than those of the actual Gein case, it still contained some bloody shocks for the reader. Barely 25 pages into the novel, one character - an attractive young woman - steps into a motel shower and is murdered moments later by a knife-wielding maniac.
"I think the thing that appealed to me and made me decide to do the picture," Hitchcock said, "was the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue." This was unusual for Hitchcock, who usually favored suspense over surprise. But of course he would be sure to pack Psycho with plenty of suspense as well.
Before he could start production, however, he hit a snag. Paramount executives thought the story was too lurid and balked at financing it. Hitchcock responded with a counter-proposal. He would make the film with his own money, using the crew from his television show and filming it at the Universal studios, where the weekly TV episodes were shot. And like the TV show, it would be made in black and white on inexpensive sets. Paramount would only have to market and distribute it. Hitchcock even agreed to go without salary in exchange for 60 percent ownership of the film. Feeling they had little to lose, the Paramount bosses gave Psycho their approval.
