What the Nominees Were: Auntie Mame, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Defiant Ones, Gigi, Separate Tables
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Vertigo, Anthony Mann’s Man of the West, Welles’s Touch of Evil. Over in Japan, Akira Kurasawa turned out The Hidden Fortress, which would be a huge influence on Star Wars.
What Did Win: Gigi
How It’s Aged: It’s awful. Its supremely creepy story is summed up by the song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” which is, unfortunately, the movie’s high point.
How It’s Aged: It’s awful. Its supremely creepy story is summed up by the song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” which is, unfortunately, the movie’s high point.
What Should’ve Won: Vertigo
How Hard Was the Decision: Not hard at all. Vertigo was ranked for many years as the greatest film of all time by the Sight and Sound Critics poll. It’s universally considered the best film of 1958.
How Hard Was the Decision: Not hard at all. Vertigo was ranked for many years as the greatest film of all time by the Sight and Sound Critics poll. It’s universally considered the best film of 1958.
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, Based on the novel “D’entre les Morts” by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (who also wrote the source material for Diabolique)
Stars: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore
Writers: Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, Based on the novel “D’entre les Morts” by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (who also wrote the source material for Diabolique)
Stars: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore
The Story: A policeman develops vertigo and has to leave the force, but gets hired by an old college friend to do an odd job. The friend fears his wife is possessed by an ancestor in old San Francisco who is driving her to suicide. Our hero falls in love with the wife but can’t save her when she (seemingly) throws herself from a mission tower. Later, he meets a similar looking woman on the street and becomes determined to give her a makeover to recreate his dead love. She eventually admits that she is the same woman after all, and she faked her death as part of the friend’s scheme to get his wife’s money. She ends up dead, too, and Stewart is devastated.
Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for Best Art Direction and Best Sound but lost both.
Why It Didn’t Win: The movie was not particularly well-reviewed at the time and a big flop at the box office. (Hitchcock knew it was a masterpiece but decided he had made a fatal mistake casting Stewart, who was too old for the roll, so he came to dislike the film, too.) It was only decades later that the film was restored, re-released, and belatedly recognized (at least for a while) as the greatest movie of all time.
Why It Didn’t Win: The movie was not particularly well-reviewed at the time and a big flop at the box office. (Hitchcock knew it was a masterpiece but decided he had made a fatal mistake casting Stewart, who was too old for the roll, so he came to dislike the film, too.) It was only decades later that the film was restored, re-released, and belatedly recognized (at least for a while) as the greatest movie of all time.
Why It Should Have Won:
- I had the great honor of being T.A. for Andrew Sarris’s Hitchcock class at Columbia. (Sarris was the scholar/critic most responsible for building Hitchcock’s towering reputation in America.) The week before my section watched Vertigo I asked how many had already seen it. Most had, so I asked them, in this rewatch, to watch the movie from Judy Barton’s perspective (Judy Barton is the real name of Kim Novak’s character) The film doesn’t really give us enough information to do that (it’s unclear if she participated in the scheme for love or money) but it’s certainly a wild time trying to track what this all must be like for her. Like any great film, it rewards rewatches and always has new layers.
- One of my students pointed out to me: “You said that North by Northwest is perfectly constructed, whereas this movie is a big mess, so why is this considered to be the better film?” I said that depth is found in holes. We begin with Scottie dangling from a gutter about to fall, then we cut to weeks later and never find out how he was rescued. That hole disturbs us. Later, there are unexplained phenomena such as how Novak disappears from the hotel room. When the truth about Novak is revealed, there are potential explanations, but thankfully the movie does rewind an hour to provide one. The holes are the whole point. It’s a glorious mess.
- The movie has Hitchcock’s most sophisticated color palette. Certain colors predominate, glowing and pulsing into the movie through means natural and artificial. Generally, red is violence and green is lust, but they get mixed up constantly throughout the picture, which is only appropriate, I suppose.
- The movie essentially ends at 1:29:00 which is longer than Hitchcock’s shorter masterpieces. Stewart is institutionalized, his friend declares he will never get better, the camera pans back and the music swells. They we jump to some time later and Stewart is out on the street, seemingly alright but very much not alright. But… is he still in the hospital? Is the rest of the movie in his mind? Any possibility is open.
- The movie’s most brilliant decision is to reveal the twist to us, but only to us, shortly after we meet Judy. We now shift our identification to her and come to see Stewart as loathsome as he attempts to transform her. It’s not a thriller anymore, it’s a very dark movie about control.
- This movie is, of course, really all about Grace Kelly. Hitchcock had five years to toy with the most beautiful woman in the world, dressing her up how he wanted and telling her exactly what to do (at least when she was on screen). Then she quit to go into a fairy tale and become a literal princess, leaving Hitch bereft. He is trying futilely to turn the much earthier Novak into her, and confessing everything with the very dark story he’s telling. This movie is a cri de coeur.
