7 Deadly Obsession: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

****
Country: US
Director: Alfred Hitchcock


What's that old Oscar Wilde thing? "Each man kills the thing he loves . . ." That I think is a very natural phenomenon, really.

—Alfred Hitchcock, in a 1963 interview

In his fifty-five year long career in films, Alfred Hitchcock directed sixty-seven movies. At least a dozen of these are bona fide masterpieces, and about an equal number are excellent movies that fall just short of the masterpiece mark. By any measure that's an impressive record, one unequaled by any other filmmaker I can think of. Even more impressive is that Hitchcock's pictures are not rarefied works of art of interest mainly to aesthetes and film scholars, but full-blooded movies that appeal equally to ordinary filmgoers looking for accomplished entertainments and to cinephiles looking for an intellectually and artistically stimulating film-viewing experience. Of all Hitchcock's pictures, none managed to combine these two modes—entertainment and art—so skillfully, so intriguingly, and so pleasingly as his 1958 film Vertigo.

Most people are familiar with the plot of Vertigo. A retired San Francisco police detective, John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart), psychologically traumatized after a rooftop chase to apprehend a criminal ends badly, is targeted as a dupe by his old college friend Gavin Elster, who exploits Scottie's crippling fear of heights to bring off an intricate scheme to murder his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak). The film's plot is a clever one and since this is a mystery thriller with hints of the supernatural (can Madeleine really be the reincarnation of her ancestor, as she believes?), neither the audience nor Scottie realizes what is really happening until quite far into the film. This allows the viewer's understanding of the situation to be manipulated, just as Scottie's is, to create a mood of suspense and, after the truth is revealed to the viewer about three-quarters of the way through the film, for that suspense to be prolonged as the film proceeds in a completely unexpected direction right up to its shock ending.

Such a narrative strategy requires that the viewer's reactions be precisely guided at every turn, and nobody was more expert at this than Hitchcock. Well known for his need for absolute control over all aspects of his films from conception to release, Hitchcock was by temperament the epitome of the film auteur, the director who puts his stamp on every element of his work. The way he accomplished this was by meticulous attention to detail. Because each shot was storyboarded in advance, the final film essentially needed no editing and thus was immune to tampering with by producers and studio executives. Like most filmmakers who began by directing silents, Hitchcock viewed cinema storytelling as essentially a visual process, with dialogue, music, and sound used to augment the film's imagery. Because the way he chose to show the action—placement and movement of the camera, the use of visual effects that form his famous set pieces, the exact way images succeed one another to form a spatial and narrative continuum—was the product of his own imagination, his films always seem expressions of a personal and very distinctive vision. Many directors have made movies in the Hitchcock style, but I can't think of a single one of those films that on close viewing could actually be mistaken for the work of the master himself.

Because of the convoluted and deceptive nature of its plot, Vertigo is even more dependent on Hitchcock's almost obsessive attention to detail as a means of controlling audience response than any other film he made. But in Vertigo he uses his working methods as much more than merely a practical means of telling a story in his own way. He amplifies his control-freak approach to directing until it becomes an all-encompassing aesthetic used to suggest a great deal more than is apparent in what at first seems little more than a deftly contrived suspense melodrama. It is this effect of using every device in his vast repertoire of cinematic tricks to evince the complex psychological and thematic undertones of the film that makes Vertigo Hitchcock's greatest achievement. It's a haunting film that can be watched again and again and still continue to entertain and thrill and deliver new revelations.

Perhaps the most powerful and resonant thing about the film is the way Hitchcock uses repetition to emphasize the idea of doubling. Elements in the first part of the film recur later in the film, and elements in the later part of the film mirror those in the first part, giving the film a strange pattern of symmetrical associations. Scottie seeks out places where he saw Madeleine in the beginning of the film and revisits them later in the film: the missions, the florist's shop, the museum, Ernie's restaurant. He watches Judy at her hotel window the same way he watched Madeleine at her hotel window earlier. His transformation of Judy into Madeleine exactly duplicates Elster's transformation of Judy to pass her off as his wife.

Near the end of the picture Hitchcock expresses the complete fusion of Madeleine and Judy, of past and present, of Scottie's memories and his dreams, in the most striking of several memorable set pieces in the film—a long, passionate kiss between Scottie and Judy after he sees her for the first time as the fully re-created Madeleine. The camera swirls, Scottie and Judy swirl, and the room appears to revolve around them. The background fades from Judy's room to the stable where Scottie and Madeleine kissed for the last time and finally back to Judy's room again, while Bernard Herrmann's glorious music—clearly inspired by Wagner's Tristan und Isolde—surges and pulses in unison with the intense emotions of the passage. It's the most rapturously erotic scene in a Hitchcock movie since the kiss in Notorious.

Hitchcock was famous for his lack of interest in the acting of his performers, and for saying that actors should be treated like cattle, that is, prodded into doing what he needed for the shot he was working on. This was perhaps a holdover from his silent days, when facial expressions, body language, and movement were more important than character development and line delivery because the director essentially created the performance visually, through the staging and editing of the film. This is one reason experienced theater actors often found working with Hitchcock such a frustrating experience. Yet for all this, in Vertigo he gets two remarkable performances from his stars.

It is well documented that Kim Novak was not Hitchcock's first choice to play Madeleine/Judy; Vera Miles was. But by the time he was ready to begin shooting, Miles was pregnant and so somebody else had to be cast. I have no idea how he hit on the idea of casting Kim Novak, but I did notice that just as Elster and Scottie transform Judy into the image of Madeleine, Hitchcock almost seems to transform Kim Novak into an uncanny image of Grace Kelly, right down to her hair and makeup, and her accent and diction. I can't help wondering if one of the reasons Vertigo seems to be Hitchcock's most personal film is his own understanding of the compulsion behind Scottie's Pygmalion-like behavior.

In any event, Novak, who under the right conditions could be a much better actress than she is generally given credit for, does a tremendous job as the mysterious, spaced-out Madeleine. But her more demanding incarnation as Judy is even more impressive. If Madeleine is an enigma, Judy is a fully defined character. Hitchcock and his writer, Samuel Taylor, make a daring narrative decision that happens soon after Scottie meets Judy. The conventional thing to do would have been to conceal the truth about the murder plot from the audience until the end then reveal it to the viewer and Scottie at the same time, in the kind of twist ending typical of films of this kind. Instead Hitchcock and Taylor devise a situation in which Judy writes a letter to Scottie explaining everything to him then impetuously tears it up before he sees it.

The audience is now aware of the true nature of events even if Scottie isn't, and the entire tone of the movie has changed. Now that we know the truth, the point of view shifts much more in Judy's direction. The crux of suspense is no longer what really happened, but how long will it take Scottie to figure it out and what will be his reaction when he does. What all this means for Novak's performance is that she can no longer play her character as an enigma, but must externalize the conflict Judy feels about what she has done to Scottie and the ambivalence she feels about his controlling attitude. Novak's role immediately becomes much more demanding, and she handles the requirements of those demands admirably. If only she looked less like a caricature of a rather common shopgirl!

But the real center of the movie is James Stewart's Scottie, a character who inspires Stewart to give one of the most remarkable performances of his career. We tend to think of the screen persona of James Stewart as that of an optimistic, boyish everyman. But in truth Stewart's characters often had a dark side to them, a willfulness that threatened to cause the passion of their emotions to spill over into obsession. We tend to forget this because until Vertigo, even though that dark side might threaten to take over whatever character Stewart was playing—George Bailey or even Jefferson Smith for Frank Capra or one of the revenge-driven men in the Westerns he made with Anthony Mann, for instance—at the end of the film his character always managed to pull back from the brink before he went over the edge. Hitchcock himself perceived the latent darkness in Stewart's screen image and used it as a sort of dangerous recklessness in the characters Stewart played in Rope and Rear Window. But in Vertigo, for the first and only time I can think of, Stewart's character is completely overcome by the darkness in him and propels the film to a catastrophic conclusion.

During the course of the picture, Stewart must convincingly go through a series of changes that illustrate the stages of the disintegration of Scottie's personality. At the beginning of the movie, he seems like the familiar James Stewart. He has experienced a traumatizing event, his life has been drastically changed by it, and he must live with his disabling acrophobia. But his resilience and sense of proportion intact, he seems able to cope with the changes in his circumstances and determined to overcome his handicap. As he reluctantly follows Madeleine, he finds his detective's curiosity about this mysterious woman aroused. Curiosity soon turns to fascination and then to passionate love. At this point he is already beginning to lose his objectivity as he desperately tries to rationalize Madeleine's delusional behavior.

After Madeleine's death, he is a broken man, a state he conveys in his scenes in the mental hospital through his dazed expression and total lack of affect. If he seems to have regained a precarious sense of balance after several months of treatment, he begins to lose it as soon as he first spots Judy. As he grows closer to her, he progressively loses control of himself until he has become an emotional juggernaut moving inexorably toward the annihilation of both himself and the object of his love. This idea that external and internal forces could collude in such a way to transform a person's ego into an unstoppable engine of destruction is a chilling one indeed.

By the film's conclusion, Hitchcock has carefully guided us to a place where he is at last able to make the point he has been aiming for all along: the fine distinction between passion and obsession, between real life and dreams, between creation and destruction. The death of Judy at the end makes real the fake suicide that was staged for Scottie's benefit earlier. What began as make-believe has taken on a terrible life of its own and become reality, a reality born of the destructive potential when love overpowers reason.

You might also like:
• A Dedicated Man: An Appreciation of James Stewart
• The Wrong Man (1956)
• I Confess (1953)
• Young and Innocent (1937): A Neglected Early Hitchcock Masterwork

This post is part of A Month of VERTIGO at The Lady Eve's REEL LIFE. Click here to learn more about the event and read more posts on Vertigo.

16 CMBA Hitchcock Blogathon: The Wrong Man (1956)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Alfred Hitchcock


The opening shot of The Wrong Man, in which Alfred Hitchcock makes his customary appearance, immediately lets us know this is not going to be a typical Hitchcock film. Not only does Hitchcock come right out and say so, addressing the audience directly just as he did in his television series, but the shot itself, with an unidentifiable Hitchcock walking onto a dark sound stage lighted in extreme chiaroscuro, emphasizes how different this is going to be from the escapist fare we expect from this director. Even though Hitchcock was closely identified with movies of suspense, he clearly liked a change of pace now and then, for he regularly dabbled in other genres than the suspense film—Gothic romance (Rebecca), courtroom drama (The Paradine Case), whimsical black comedy (The Trouble with Harry), screwball comedy (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), toward the end of his career edging ever closer to the outright horror genre (Psycho and The Birds). Although elements of film noir can be detected in Strangers on a Train (1950) and I Confess (1953), the opening shot of The Wrong Man announces in the strongest visual terms that this movie is going to be Hitchcock's deepest—and bleakest—foray into the territory of film noir.

10 I Confess (1953)

***
Country: US
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

The nine years between Strangers on a Train in 1951 and Psycho in 1960 mark the most fecund period of Alfred Hitchcock's career: five outright masterpieces (Strangers, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho), three near-masterpieces (To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Wrong Man), and three lesser but still quite good movies (I Confess, Dial M for Murder, and The Trouble with Harry). I Confess has never been considered one of Hitchcock's great works (although San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle once named it Hitchcock's most underrated). The quality and artistry of Hitchcock's films did create extraordinarily high expectations, though, so even if I Confess doesn't sustain the level of brilliance of his best pictures, it is still by any standards a good film. And in its best moments, it manages to reach the heights his greatest films more consistently achieve.

It's clear why I Confess appealed to Hitchcock, for it centers on a variation of the theme of the falsely accused man that he returned to time and again, from The 39 Steps (1935) to Frenzy (1972). This time around, the man falsely accused of murder is a Roman Catholic priest, Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift), who lives in Quebec City in Canada. Another interesting variation on the typical Hitchcock movie of this type is that the identity of the real killer is known from the beginning. He is Otto Keller, the handyman at the parish house where Father Logan lives, and the victim is a shady lawyer named Villette, for whom Keller worked as a gardener. When he arrives back at the cathedral after the murder and sees Father Logan, he insists that Father Logan hear his confession. Since Keller is quite an unscrupulous schemer, it's not clear whether he is really seeking absolution for his crime or using the sanctity of the confessional as a way to silence the only witness to his late-night return after the killing. When it turns out the murdered lawyer was also blackmailing Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), the wife of a prominent politician, because of a secret relationship between her and Father Logan, the priest becomes implicated in the murder. Father Logan then finds himself in the difficult position of being obligated to follow his vows and remain silent about Keller's confession even though it means he might very well be hanged for the murder himself.

0 A Cinematic Feast: Great Movie Dining Scenes, Part 2

This week I am continuing the post I began two weeks ago, about my favorite dining scenes in movies.

•Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson (1970). The scene in the diner where Jack Nicholson tries in vain to order a plain chicken salad sandwich is remembered by everyone who has seen this movie. The confrontation with the implacable waitress is used by the writer (Carol Eastman) and the director to reveal details about Robert Eroica Dupea's (Jack Nicholson) character: he's a fearless, obnoxious, rude, boorish, and frustrated loudmouth who isn't going to endure anyone's insolence. The scene also serves a larger purpose—to lambaste the conformist, one-size-fits-all, no-substitutions mentality of mainstream American society. The scene is an unforgettable blend of food and politics, a bitter jeremiad with Nicholson as the haranguing prophet.

•The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola (1972). Near the mid-point of this movie comes a crucial scene set in a small restaurant in Brooklyn. Deeply offended by the attempted assassination of his father and by his own mistreatment by a corrupt police official, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is to meet with the policeman and the head of the rival family responsible for the attempt on his father's life. The meeting will take place at the restaurant, where a pistol will be hidden in the bathroom. The plan is that Michael will retrieve the gun and shoot the two other men. We see Michael searching for the gun, but we do not see for sure if he finds it. He has been told to come out of the bathroom firing, but when he does come out, he walks quietly back to the table and sits down. Pacino's troubled facial expressions in the scene that follows are riveting. Is his obvious discomfort because there was no gun in the bathroom? Having been warned that the men will attempt to kill him at the meeting, is he now preparing himself to face certain death? Or did he indeed find the gun but is now having second thoughts about killing the men, an act that would be out of character for Michael as he has been presented in the earlier parts of the film?

Having kept us on tenterhooks for several tense minutes, Coppola finally reveals the answer when Michael suddenly pulls the gun from his pocket, shoots the two men, and calmly walks out of the restaurant. The scene is pivotal in the development of the character of Michael in that from this point on, he changes from a static character who has distanced himself from the family's criminal activities ("That's my family, Kay. It's not me," he tells his girl friend in the very first sequence of the movie) to a character in transition. At the end of the movie, Michael is a very different person from the one he was at the beginning, and it is this scene in the restaurant that sets in motion the sequence of events that will cause the transformation in Michael's nature and eventually lead to his becoming the new godfather.

•You Can Count on Me, Kenneth Lonergan, (2000). Samantha Prescott (Laura Linney) and her brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) have been out of touch for several months, and Sammy doesn't understand why. When Terry finally contacts her and arranges to visit, she suggests they meet in a restaurant. At first the reuinion appears to be going well and the two siblings are getting pleasantly reacquainted. But Sammy is puzzled that her gentle but persistent probing about where Terry has been for the last few months is met with evasiveness.

Finally Terry reluctantly reveals that he has spent the last months in jail. At this the strait-laced Sammy quietly explodes, and in an instant the entire mood of the occasion changes. Sammy is barely able to conceal her suppressed anger from the other diners—this is a rather nice restaurant, and she and her brother are well-behaved middle-class adults—while Terry responds with abashed guilt and shame. The scene is a marvel both of controlling and expressing emotion and of character revelation, all achieved through brilliant dialogue, direction, and acting.

•Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (1983). Is there anyone who hasn't already guessed which scene I've chosen from this movie? It is, naturally, the one in which the grossly overweight Mr. Creosote (Terry Jones) eats himself to death in a very formal and rather snobbish restaurant. After consuming a huge amount of food and literally inflating with each successive course, he is reluctantly tempted by the waiter (John Cleese) to consume one last tidbit. This proves too much for Mr. Creosote, who explodes (literally), showering the restaurant and other diners with half-digested French cuisine, a sort of culinary version of John Hurt giving birth in Alien. Python sketches are always gloriously silly, but that silliness is generally used to make a point. The point here seems to be not just the gluttony of one person, but the fanatical addiction to consumerism—and the vulnerability to incessant inducements to comsume more, more, more—of Western culture. The scene is an illustration of suicide by overconsumption. Whether you find it funny or offensive, once you've seen it, you are not likely to forget it anytime soon.

•North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock (1959). This is not only my favorite Hitchcock film but my favorite movie of all time, so how could I not include it? The hero, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) first gets to know the heroine, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), during a meal in the dining car of a train to Chicago when he is seated at her table just as she finishes eating. The scene is filled with sexual badinage that clearly conveys the immediate sexual attraction between the two:

GRANT: The moment I meet an attractive woman I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
SAINT: What makes you think you have to conceal it?

SAINT: I never discuss love on an empty stomach.
GRANT: You've already eaten.
SAINT: But you haven't.

In truth, Hitchcock's movies are full of noteworthy meals (is this really so remarkable, given Hitchcock's considerable girth?), and I could have chosen a scene from any of a number of his movies. Memorable dining scenes occur in Sabotage, where Sylvia Sydney takes out her anger at her husband, who's responsible for the death of her young brother, with a carving knife ; in Shadow of a Doubt, where the wholesome family and adoring niece unwittingly share the family table with the Merry Widow Murderer; in To Catch a Thief, where Grace Kelly and Cary Grant share a picnic on the Riviera after a hair-raising ride in Kelly's sports car ("Breast or thigh?" asks Kelly mischievously, offering Grant some cold chicken); in Vertigo, when James Stewart takes the newly transformed Kim Novak to dinner at Ernie's restaurant; in Frenzy, when Vivien Merchant proudly whips away the large dome covering a platter to reveal a supper of minuscule proportions, Hitchcock's skewering of the then-fashionable cuisine minceur. And who can ever forget Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh eating those sandwiches in a shabby motel room overlooked by stuffed birds (and containing a concealed peephole into the bathroom of the adjoining cabin)?

•Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen (1986). Thanksgiving is the most American of all feast holidays, and it is the occasion Woody Allen chooses to open this film and, exactly one year later, to conclude it. The first meal serves to introduce us to the main characters, Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her family, and to Hannah's husband Elliot (Michael Caine) and his sexual obsession with her sister Lee (Barbara Hershey). At the second Thanksgiving meal we see how all the various plot elements have turned out. Most importantly, we see that Elliot's obsession with Lee has come to an end and that Hannah's other sister, the flaky Holly (Dianne Wiest), has taken up with the equally eccentric Mickey Sachs (Woody Allen). The two meals that bookend the movie are wonderfully detailed social occasions that also serve as the essential organizing elements of the narrative.

•Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman (1982). It seems appropriate to follow a movie that contains a notable celebration of Thanksgiving with one that contains a notable celebration of Christmas, and to follow a movie directed by Woody Allen with one directed by his idol, Ingmar Bergman. The sequence in question, which opens the movie, lasts nearly a full hour and must be one of the most richly detailed and lengthy meals in all cinema. The sequence begins with the preparations for a family Chistmas Eve dinner at the house of Helena Ekdahl, the matriarch of the family, where the housemaids are elaborately decorating the tree and placing presents for the children under it.

The scene then shifts to the theater that her son Oscar manages, as did his father before him. The end of a beautifully staged Nativity play is shown, followed by a festive backstage dinner for the theater staff given by Oscar. At one point he haltingly makes a speech to the staff about the importance of their work: "Perhaps we give the people who come here the chance to forget for a while...the world outside. Our theater is a little room of orderliness, routine, care, and love."

Back at Grandmother Ekdahl's house the guests begin to arrive. The dinner that follows is filled with unforgettable images: the candle-filled dining room, the copious feast set out on the tables, afterwards the guests and servants singing and dancing in procession through the house (an interesting counterpart to the danse macabre that concludes The Seventh Seal) while the children are being entertained by Uncle Carl's "fireworks show," which consists of him lowering his trousers and blowing out three candles in a candelabrum with a single fart. When the meal has ended, the children are sent to bed in the nursery, where they have a pillow fight with their young nursemaid. Later, after the lights are out, Alexander, unable to sleep, sets up and plays with his Christmas present, a magic lantern. After everyone else has gone to bed or gone home, Grandmother Ekdahl and her friend Isak stay up drinking cognac and reminiscing, during which she is stricken by a fit of melancholia and broods on the passing of time. "This happy, splendid life is over," she tells Isak, "and this horrible, dirty life engulfs us."

Bergman seems to have rolled all of life into this one meal: youth and old age, joy and sadness, reality and imagination, poverty (the chronically debt-ridden Uncle Carl) and prosperity (Oscar's financial success with the theater), sex (horny Uncle Gustav Adolf bedding the voluptuous nursemaid Maj) and death (Oscar, Alexander's father, is already showing signs of the fatigue and illness that will soon kill him.)

•The Dead, John Huston (1987). Based on the short story by James Joyce, probably the greatest work of short fiction in the English language, this movie takes place almost entirely during one meal, a dinner given by three sisters ("the three Graces of Dublin") to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. This is last day of the well-known twelve days of Christmas and in the Christian religion is observed to mark the adoration of the Magi and the presentation of their gifts to the Christ child. The dinner tells the viewer everything about an extended middle-class Dublin family, especially Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) and his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston).

But the real revelation—Gabriel's own epiphany—takes place after the meal, during the carriage ride home, just as Gabriel, emboldened by the intensely emotional mood of the dinner they have attended, is about to declare to his wife his love for her. Before he can speak, Gretta, also deeply moved by the dinner experience, confesses her first youthful love and its tragic outcome and quietly falls asleep in the carriage. Gabriel realizes that her feelings for him can never be as strong as those for her dead first love, nor as strong as his own for her. The movie ends with the "Snow is falling" voice-over read verbatim from the story, one of the most hauntingly melancholic passages in all literature, and equally moving here as the finale of the movie and of the long career of its director, John Huston.

3 Discovering Carole Lombard

During October 2008 Turner Classic Movies paid tribute to Carole Lombard as its Star of the Month, giving me the chance to learn more about this actress. One of the major stars of the early Hollywood studio period, Lombard is an actress who has a devoted following. There is even a film/fan site (Carol & Co.) that publishes almost daily articles about her. But before the TCM tribute I had seen her in only a couple of films, both of them well-known screwball comedies from the 1930s, one of my pet genres. Having now seen several more of her films from the late thirties and early forties (she died in a plane crash in 1942 at the age of 33), I can understand why she has inspired such devotion among her fans. She will not supplant my absolute personal favorites of the early studio era—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, and Irene Dunne—but she will now be one of my also-greats, joining the likes of Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, Greta Garbo, and Margaret Sullavan—not bad company to be in.

Carole Lombard appeared in her first movie in 1921 at the age of thirteen. She had appeared in around 60 films before she got the lead in the movie that made her a star: Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century (1934). This was the year screwball comedy was born in Hollywood with It Happened One Night, setting off a craze for the genre that lasted nearly ten years. (According to the website notstarring.com, Lombard turned down the lead in It Happened One Night.) Twentieth Century was the other notable example of screwball comedy from that year and exhibits the take on the genre that Hawks would continue with his masterpieces Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). It's all there in Hawks's very first attempt at the new genre—the frenetic pacing, rapid-fire dialogue, contrived but hilarious situations, put-upon supporting characters, and egotistical lead characters.

Twentieth Century was just about the last remaining classic screwball comedy I had never seen, and what a treat it was to see it at last. The movie has now joined my list of the top examples of the genre. John Barrymore, lampooning his own image, stars as Oscar Jaffe, a flamboyant, manipulative, often hysterical Broadway director given to melodramatic pronouncements like "The iron door slams!" and "Anathema! Child of Satan!" at moments of heightened emotionalism. Lombard plays his new discovery, a shopgirl named Mildred Plotka whom Jaffe wants to rename Lily Garland and transform into a star. Only Jaffe has any faith in the newcomer's ability, and at this point the screenplay requires that Lombard be weepy, immature, and so insecure that she is ready to give up the idea of acting and return to the sales counter. But with patience, encouragement, and gentle cajoling, Jaffe does succeed into molding her into a star.

Three years later Lily is the most esteemed actress on the New York stage, and Jaffe, like a true Svengali, is now romantically involved with her. But he has become so possessive, controlling, and jealous that Lily can no longer stand him. Now Lombard must play her character in a completely different mode—successful, confident, mature, independent, and rebellious. She walks out on Jaffe ("That's not love," she says of their relationship. "It's sheer tyranny. I'm no Trilby.") and heads for Hollywood.

The plot now shifts ahead even further. Lily is a hugely successful movie star, and Oscar is close to financial ruin, not having had one successful production since Lily left him. By chance he finds himself on the same train as Lily, the Twentieth Century Limited, traveling from Chicago to New York. Convinced that his career will be saved if he can just get her to star in his next production, he determines to get her to agree to do so before the train reaches its destination. The dirty tricks campaign he embarks on (not dissimilar to Cary Grant's efforts to stop his ex-wife from remarrying in His Girl Friday) and the complications that follow occupy the bulk of the movie.

The rub, though, is that Lily, having achieved Hollywood stardom, has become as much of a temperamental egomaniac as her former mentor, and Lombard is now required to portray Lily as a swollen-headed, self-centered shrew. Reportedly, Lombard was so intimidated by working with Barrymore, who at the time was still at the height of his profession, that Hawks had to take her aside and threaten to replace her if she didn't loosen up and stop holding back in her scenes with him. Whatever Hawks did, it must have worked, for Lombard easily holds her own with Barrymore for the rest of the movie and gives as good as she gets. It was no surprise that Barrymore was up to the demands of his role. The surprise is how well Lombard, pretty much untried in this type of exaggerated, broad comedy, does with her role, which unlike Barrymore's requires her to act convincingly in three different modes—first insecure, then independent, and finally insufferable.

If Twentieth Century clearly showed how good Lombard was at broad comedy, it only hinted at her remarkable range as an actress. It took a whole series of movies to do this. In My Man Godfrey (1936), another classic screwball comedy, Lombard plays Irene Bullock, one of those proverbial madcap heiresses. But her performance is much less theatrical than in Twentieth Century, and her sweet-natured, guileless naiveté is utterly charming. Her speech is fast and breathless, rather like Katharine Hepburn's in Bringing Up Baby. Like Hepburn in that movie, Lombard's character is impulsive and mercurial, and she shows the same child-like resolve to get her man. This performance earned Lombard her only Oscar nomination.

The next year Lombard made another classic screwball comedy, Nothing Sacred. She plays Hazel Flagg, a young woman who has been mistakenly diagnosed with radium poisoning and is turned into an overnight media celebrity by a cynical reporter played by Fredric March. This is a movie loved by many, but—prepare yourselves for sacrilege—it is one that I have never totally warmed to, even after repeated viewings. For some reason the movie just doesn't click for me the way my favorite screwball comedies do. Despite mixed feelings about the film, I still find the lead performances outstanding, particularly Lombard's, in which she shows a flair for unpretentious physical comedy that pokes fun at her glamor and her astounding beauty. Many consider this her signature performance, and for anyone interested in her career it is essential viewing.

Lombard's work in two lesser-known movies is further evidence of her versatility. In 1935 she made a little comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen called Hands Across the Table, in which she plays a manicurist in a swanky New York hotel whose one goal is to marry a rich man. She sets her sights on rich paraplegic Ralph Bellamy but finds herself falling in love with Fred MacMurray, whom she believes to be penniless. (Of course, he isn't.) It sounds like a classic screwball comedy situation, but the movie lacks the antic quality typical of the genre. Lombard comes across as quite level-headed and practical and maybe just a bit disappointed with life. In the end she chooses MacMurray not just because of love, but also because she is simply too nice to exploit Bellamy in such a mercenary way. Lombard creates a quietly touching and intelligent character who is quite distinct from her boisterous Lily in Twentieth Century, her energetic Hazel in Nothing Sacred, or her whimsical Irene in My Man Godfrey.

Lombard turns in another impressive performance that showcases her ability to integrate the light with the serious in In Name Only (1939). In this film she plays a widow and mother who rents a house for the summer from Cary Grant. Grant is unhappily married to Kay Francis, who he has discovered married him solely for his money. Grant and Lombard are immediately attracted to one another and quickly fall in love. The problem is Grant's possessive wife, who refuses to give him a divorce. The movie is a showcase for the range of both Lombard and Grant, who seem to have tremendous chemistry. They are allowed to behave at times in a relaxed, loving, and light-hearted manner with each other—the considerable charm of both actors at full throttle—and at other times in a serious and troubled manner when various obstacles, including the machinations of Grant's duplicitous wife, keep them apart. The plot is pure soap, but both Lombard and Grant rise above the familiar plot to create characterizations that are completely winning. If there were ever any doubts about Lombard's ability to handle serious roles, her performance in In Name Only surely put them to rest.

In two of her last movies Lombard returned to the comedy genre she was so associated with. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) is a screwball-type comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his only effort at a purely comic picture. The movie, while enjoyable, lacks both Hitchcock's distinctive touches and the sparkle typical of the genre. Lombard is the best thing in the movie, and the presence of her by-now distinctive personality is alone sufficient reason to watch it.

The most remarkable thing about the movie is how closely Lombard conforms to Hitchcock's idealized image of blonde beauty as personified by his other leading women like Madeleine Carroll, Grace Kelly, and Eva Marie Saint. Lombard was a very beautiful woman, but she never looked lovelier than in this picture. She is photographed by the great Harry Stradling in ways that deliberately emphasize her stunning facial beauty. Time and again, as she was photographed in close-up, with her full lips, prominent cheekbones, and straight, rather long nose, I was reminded of Greta Garbo. Like Garbo, Lombard's face seems mask-like, sculpturesque, and ethereal—an archetypal image of timeless female beauty. Garbo's favorite cinematographer, William Daniels, once remarked that Garbo "had no bad angles." The same could be said of Carole Lombard in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and to adore that exquisite face is reason enough to see this movie.

Carole Lombard's last picture, To Be or Not to Be (1942), improbably manages to combine topical anti-Nazism with pointed comedy. Released the year after her death, it was directed by Ernst Lubitsch. In Lombard's entire screen career, she was probably never paired with a director whose light comedic touch was so attuned to her own comedic skills, and in this film she gives what to me is her most enchanting performance. As the beautiful leading lady of a Polish theater troupe that finds itself engaged in a battle of wits with Nazis to help the Polish Resistance and to effect its own escape to Britain, she is married to its egotistical leading man, played by Jack Benny.

Lombard's restrained performance forms quite a contrast to Benny's intentionally hammy one; she is at times required almost to play the "straight man" to her costar. Benny's outrageous antics propel the complicated ruse the troupe concocts to dupe the Nazis, while the beautiful Lombard handles the romantic distractions involved in the ruse. She never falters in the face of Benny's purposeful overacting but delivers an understated portrait of a woman who possesses great shrewdness, poise, and dignity beneath her glamorous exterior. The Lubitsch touch and the Lombard touch turn out to be a perfect match, and the film stands as an appropriate valedictory tribute to her beauty, grace, charm, and ability to seamlessly blend seriousness with humor.

By all accounts the real Carole Lombard was an unpretentious, generous, lively person with an outsized sense of humor. In one way or another those qualities all come through in her movie characters. Add to those qualities her great acting talent and her gorgeous looks, and you have a working definition of what is referred to as Star Quality.

0 A Dedicated Man: An Appreciation of James Stewart

"James Stewart, the most complete actor-personality in the American cinema"

—Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

For many years I took James Stewart (1908-1997) for granted. I never thought of him as n exceptional actor, as one of the great self-manufactured screen personalities like Cary Grant or one of the great emoters like Marlon Brando. He always struck me as a regular guy who appeared to be playing himself in every role. In the last few years, though, I have revised my opinion of him as an actor. This new appreciation came about partly from seeing him in pictures I hadn't seen before and partly from rewatching some of his performances I had seen years earlier but dismissed as unexceptional. I suddenly saw sides of him that I had never noticed before and subtleties that had previously escaped me. My present view of Stewart is that he is one of the great American actors, second only to Cary Grant in my own pantheon of the great actors of the studio era.

When Andrew Sarris referred to Stewart as an "actor-personality," he got it exactly right. Stewart was that rare breed of screen actor who in every role seems to be both the character he is playing and himself. Every character seemed a new incarnation of a familiar personality. On reflection, I think it is this combination of familiarity and continuity of personality that blinded me for so long to the true artistry of his acting. When he projected a heightened emotional state, it didn't seem like acting at all, but like the wholly natural outgrowth of a familiar and normally staid personality pushed to its limits.

That personality, the one we automatically think of when we think of James Stewart, is one of comfortable ordinariness. If ever there was a screen personification of the American Everyman, it was James Stewart. He suggested none of the uniqueness or quirkiness of Cary Grant or the barely contained passion of Marlon Brando. His personality was always exactly life-sized, never larger than life. His screen presence was closer to that of Spencer Tracy, Joel McCrea, or his lifelong friend Henry Fonda—all, like Stewart, masters of understatement and invisible technique. Just watch one of Stewart's performances with the sound off and observe how subtly yet clearly his body language and especially his facial expressions register his emotions.

But the screen personality known as James Stewart did have one individual trait that persisted from movie to movie. Call it steadfastness, tenacity, constancy, perseverance, loyalty, or even stubbornness—these are all aspects of the quality that Stewart consistently projected and around which he fashioned each performance. Although modified to suit the needs of the role, this quality was the constant that set him apart from the truly ordinary man, that gave him the quiet individuality it took me so long to recognize and appreciate.

In his early romantic roles, Stewart's devotion is to someone he loves. In You Can't Take It with You (1938), the breakthrough role that made him a star just three years after his first credited part, his allegiance is to Jean Arthur. Despite her unconventional family and the disapproval of his stern and narrow-minded father, a banker and industrialist, he remains true to Arthur, even sacrificing his career and inheritance (in the middle of the Great Depression). In The Mortal Storm (1940), one of four films he made with his friend Margaret Sullavan, he risks his life to help Sullavan escape from Nazi Germany. Later in his career, in the whimsical Harvey (1950) he never loses faith in the existence of his imaginary friend, a 6-foot tall rabbit. And in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), as another ordinary man, a dentist from Indiana, he must use his wits and rise to heroism to rescue his kidnapped son from terrorists.

In many movies Stewart's commitment is to a principle or ideal. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) it is to the ideals of democracy and honesty in government. In Destry Rides Again (1939), in which he plays the inexperienced sheriff of a lawless Wild West town, it is to the notion that law enforcement can be practiced without the use of firearms. In Call Northside 777 (1948), as a reporter, it is to his belief that an imprisoned killer is innocent. In Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in which he plays a criminal lawyer, it is to the legal principles of presumption of innocence and that every accused person is entitled to the most effective representation. In John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) it is again to the rule of law, non-violence, and the ideals of American democracy. In The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) it is to his unshakable faith that if he can keep the crew of the crashed plane united in their purpose, they will somehow overcome all obstacles and get that plane in the air again.

From 1941 to 1945 Stewart left pictures and served in the U.S. Army. An aviation enthusiast, he had earned his pilot's license in 1935 and even had a commercial pilot's license. During World War II he flew many combat missions over Europe. When Stewart returned to making movies after the war, he seemed different. The boyish charm that had been a big part of his screen presence was still there but seemed somehow muted, with an undercurrent of sadness that hadn't been there before. And he looked different. The skinny boy now looked looked older and a bit worn. He had been absent from the screen for only five years, but when he returned he looked closer to fifteen years older.

Stewart's first movie after the war was Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Surprisingly, Stewart was not Capra's first choice to play George Bailey in the film; Cary Grant was. Today it's hard to imagine anyone but Stewart in the role. This is a part that required him to play a tormented and disappointed man, a man shattered by self-doubt who has given up all hope. Considering the upbeat and optimistic streak that runs through Stewart's prewar performances, it is perhaps understandable that Capra did not immediately think of him for the part. Possibly Capra eventually realized that the role would not be too much of a stretch for the actor who in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington played a man so committed to his principles that in the end he drives himself to physical exhaustion and comes close to a nervous breakdown.

Contrary to what one might have expected from Stewart's prewar performances, his depiction of George Bailey's despair is almost overpowering in its intensity. And when Bailey is saved at the end, his sense of joy and relief is almost tangible. It's enough to persuade even the most obdurate cynic to accept the movie's simple premise that every human life, no matter how ordinary, has meaning and value. And it's hard to believe that any actor but James Stewart could have communicated such a premise with so much conviction.

It's a Wonderful Life liberated the dark side of the American Everyman by showing that the adherence to a belief that typified Stewart's characters, in this case his unswerving belief in his own worthlessness, could when taken to extremes result in destructive obsession. But it was not by any means the last that moviegoers would see of this side of James Stewart. His dark side was most fully mined in Stewart's collaborations with two great directors in the 1950's.

Between 1950 and 1955 Stewart made several Westerns directed by Anthony Mann. Considering the series of stark low-budget films noirs that Mann made in the late 1940's, it is not surprising that his Westerns of the 1950's would have darker overtones and greater emphasis on character psychology than the typical studio Western of the time. In The Far Country (1954) Stewart plays a character motivated solely by self-interest. He lets nothing stand in the way of his goal of making a fortune in the Gold Rush-era Yukon and returning to the U.S. with his loyal pal to buy a ranch. He refuses to intervene as a sadistic and power-crazed local boss terrorizes and exploits the inhabitants of the mining village where he has staked his claim. It is only after his friend is killed and their gold stolen that he takes action and defeats the villains. In The Man from Laramie (1955) Stewart plays a man consumed with finding those responsible for his brother's death. He endures extreme physical suffering and eschews all intimate human contact in his relentless pursuit of revenge.

Perhaps the greatest of the Stewart-Mann collaborations is The Naked Spur (1953). Here he plays a man obsessed with capturing a dangerous outlaw, not out of any sense of justice, but strictly to claim the reward money that will allow him to buy back the farm he lost through betrayal by a woman while fighting in the Civil War. He is a man driven by a compulsive pursuit that he believes will correct the injustices of the past and restore what he has lost, and his obsession causes the death not only of the outlaw but also of every other person in his party except for the outlaw's girl friend. It is only the promise of her love that in the end breaks the hold his anger and disappointment have over him and allows him to escape his past and move on to a new future.

The other director who used the darker implications of Stewart's dedication to purpose to its full advantage was Alfred Hitchcock. Rope (1948) first hinted at the dark themes that Stewart's covertly obsessive persona was capable of catalyzing. In this movie Stewart plays a rather smug teacher who purports to believe in the Nietzschean proposition that laws and morality are mere human inventions and that some people are above them, even the ultimate prohibition against murder. For him this is strictly an intellectual proposition. He never imagines that two of his former pupils, taking his teachings literally, will put them into practice by murdering an unpopular former schoolmate. His smugness becomes horror as he gradually sees the destruction his adherence to a wrong-headed concept has inspired.

Hitchcock took the dark component of Stewart's screen persona even further in Rear Window (1954). In this movie Stewart's character, a news photographer temporarily confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, idly begins spying on his neighbors. What begins as an amusing pastime quickly takes over his life and becomes an obsession. Without professional constraints, Stewart's desultory curiosity grows into full-blown and dangerous voyeurism that places himself and his fiancée at considerable risk from a ruthless murderer.

But it was in Vertigo (1958) that Hitchcock gave Stewart's embodiment of all-consuming obsession its ultimate expression. What begins as a scheme to exploit former detective Scottie Ferguson's (Stewart) fear of heights in order to disguise a murder as suicide grows out of control when Scottie falls in love with the woman he has been hired to follow, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). The long sequence in which he tails her around San Francisco in his DeSoto—without dialogue, filled with swooping camera moves, Bernard Herrmann's alternately pensive and majestic music, shots of the most picturesque locations in San Francisco, and close-ups of Stewart's reactions as he spies on her, and ending with Stewart pulling her from the Bay at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge—is one of the great sequences in modern movies. But it would be far less effective without Stewart's wordless reactions conveying the transformation of professional detachment to romantic curiosity and finally helpless love. This is the intersection of brilliant, showy filmmaking with subtle, expertly calibrated acting.

Believing that Madeleine has died as a result of his paralyzing phobia, Scottie is overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and loss. When by chance he encounters her doppelganger, he loses all control as he obsessively molds her into the image of his lost love. This is the closest Stewart ever came to playing a villain (save for 1936's After the Thin Man), and Hitchcock is merciless in his treatment of Stewart's obsessiveness. In Vertigo there is no final reprieve by the acceptance of love, no saving change of heart, no last-minute pulling back from the abyss for Stewart. His obsessiveness results both in his losing his beloved again and in his own psychological destruction. To see the very quality that made Stewart the All-American Everyman become so distorted that he is transformed into an agent of destruction is a devastating thing to watch.

After Vertigo Stewart seemed to regain some of the easygoing charm that had been so much a part of his early work, while still retaining the gravitas that his screen persona had acquired in the postwar roles. That same year he starred again with Kim Novak in Bell, Book, and Candle, a delightful light comedy that is in a different world altogether from Vertigo. The very next year he gave what is my favorite performance of his career in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in a role that achieved the perfect equilibrium between the two sides of his screen personality. His Paul Biegler is completely focused on the task at hand—defending a soldier on trial for murder—yet he never allows the case to skew his perspective on life. At the end of the movie he is able to let go of the case and simply go fishing.

When I think of James Stewart, that is the way I like to picture him: balancing serious dedication to a purpose with an innate sense of enjoyment of life, and keeping each in its proper proportion.


I don't think Stewart ever gave a bad performance, and his presence makes any movie worth watching. But here are my ten favorite performances by James Stewart:

1. Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
2. Vertigo (1958)
3. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
4. Rear Window (1954)
5. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
6. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
7. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
8. Destry Rides Again (1939)
9. The Naked Spur (1953)
10. Harvey (1950)

2 Young and Innocent (1937): A Neglected Early Hitchcock Masterwork

Two of Alfred Hitchcock's films made in Britain in the 1930's are universally recognized as masterpieces, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). For the latter movie Hitchcock received the Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Circle. During this period Hitchcock directed two other pictures that are also highly regarded, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Sabotage (1936), as well as several other lesser movies. But in 1937 he directed a film that to my mind is very nearly the equal of his two masterpieces of the period and which has never received the acclaim it deserves: Young and Innocent (originally released in the U.S. as The Girl Was Young).

In the movie, writer Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) is falsely accused of murder. Tisdall saw the real killer but does not know who he is; he knows only that the man has a pronounced squint in one eye. During a court hearing in the small English town where he has been jailed, Tisdall manages to escape and hide in a car. The car happens to belong to Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam, the kidnapped daughter in The Man Who Knew Too Much), the daughter of the local constable. Erica then proceeds to help the fugitive escape and hide out, at first unwillingly, and later willingly as her romantic attraction to him grows. The rest of the movie consists of the basic plot that Hitchcock had already used at least once before, in The Thirty-Nine Steps, and would continue to use several more times until it reached its apogee in North by Northwest. The innocent man must learn the truth and find the real culprit before the authorities, who are all the while pursuing him, capture him. If this happens, he will almost certainly be falsely convicted and jailed, for to everyone but the viewer all the evidence appears to indicate his guilt.

This basic plot was in truth merely an elaboration of the classic cinematic device that had been used to create suspense since the earliest silents and was based on the cross-cutting between parallel plots perfected by D. W. Griffith. There the cross-cutting was typically between the heroine in peril and the rescuer(s) racing to reach her. Will the villain succeed in achieving his evil intentions before the hero arrives? The device was used in everything from The Perils of Pauline style of melodrama—where the heroine is tied to the railroad tracks while the hero races a speeding train to save her—to more ambitious works like The Birth of a Nation. In this brilliant but egregiously racist landmark film, Lillian Gish risks suffering the "fate worse than death" (to the sexually repressed Victorian mentality of Griffith, rape) before the Klan, attired in their full regalia and mounted on racing horses, reach her.

As well as its basic plot, Young and Innocent contains many other elements that are staples of the Hitchcock movie. The director has a brief cameo as a reporter outside the court building. His macabre sense of humor is in full evidence during the dinner scene with Erica's family, where while dining, her teenaged brothers discuss in graphic detail a grisly murder. The film also contains two of those elaborate set pieces that are always the high points of any of Hitchcock's movies.

The one that serves as the movie's finale is well known and rightly so. It is set in a night club where Tisdall and Erica have finally tracked the murderer. The police are closing in on the pair, who still have no idea exactly who the killer is. As the police arrive, a dance band in blackface begins to play, and the camera slowly moves in a lengthy crane shot towards the band and keeps on moving to an extremely tight close-up of the eyes of the drummer at the very rear of the band. Suddenly one of the drummer's eyes, surrounded by its outrageous blackface make-up, begins to twitch involuntarily, Erica sees it, and the hero is saved.

The other memorable set piece served as the template for a device that Hitchcock used again and again. In Young and Innocent the sequence takes place in an abandoned mine. Tisdall and Erica, accompanied by one of those ubiquitous tramps of 1930's British fiction, are in her car racing away from pursuers and drive into the derelict mine to elude them. Suddenly the ground begins to give way beneath the car, which rapidly begins sinking into a collapsing mineshaft. Tisdall and the tramp manage to escape, but Erica is trapped in the car. By this time the car is below floor level and all that can be seen of Erica is her outstretched arm reaching for help. In another tight close-up, Tisdall's hand is seen reaching for Erica's and finally taking it and pulling her to safety an instant before the mineshaft collapses completely and the car plunges to the bottom of it. Hitchcock was to repeat this device—based on fear of heights and of falling—or a variation of it again and again in later films. He used it in Sabotage, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and (again reaching its apogee) in the conclusion of North by Northwest.

If you like Hitchcock and you've never seen Young and Innocent, by all means make a point of catching it. I don't think you'll be disappointed.