Movies - Vertigo

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	Movies - Vertigo

Vertigo is a 1958 thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The film is usually taken as a classic of the genre and is considered by many critics to be Hitchcock's masterpiece.

The plot

Vertigo tells the story of a San Francisco detective, Scottie (James Stewart), who leaves the police force (and develops acrophobia) after a fellow policeman falls to his death while the two are chasing a criminal across rooftops. But an old friend, Gavin Elster, hires him to follow Elster's wife Madeleine (Kim Novak). Elster claims that Madeleine often appears to be staring off into space and occasionally drives to points unknown and later has no recollection of anything having been amiss; in the course of various conversations he tells a skeptical Scottie that he believes Madeleine to have a mental illness in which she is possessed by a spirit of someone long dead, her own ancestor. Scottie tails Madeleine for several days. As he watches her, she visits the grave of a woman named Carlotta Valdes, who killed herself years ago; makes frequent visits to the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts (The Legion of Honor), where she spends long periods of time gazing at a large portrait of Carlotta; and rents a room at a hotel which was once Carlotta's home. Madeleine also dresses like Carlotta, with identical hairstyle and jewelry.

Despite her trance-like, sometimes obsessive behavior and her suicidal tendencies — and despite the detective's former romantic involvement with a woman named Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), to whom he had been engaged years before — Scottie is strongly attracted to Madeleine, and resolves to save her from herself. After she jumps into San Francisco Bay in what appears to be a suicide attempt, Scottie pulls her from the water (seemingly unconscious), and brings her to his apartment, where he removes her wet clothing and puts her in his bed to recover from her ordeal. When she awakes, she puts on his dressing gown and joins him in the living room to dry off in front of the fire, where the two begin to fall in love. But when Scottie goes into the other room to answer a phone call from Elster, Madeleine disappears like a ghost (Hitchcock deliberately gives her an impossibly short time to get out of his apartment), only to reappear in his life shortly afterward. Midge, still nursing her own feelings for Scottie -- and especially protective of him since the accident that caused him to leave the police force -- becomes increasingly jealous.

When Madeleine and Scottie take a trip to see the giant redwood trees, she becomes almost a ghostly figure, walking like a wraith through the forest, and engaging in a reverie of what appears to be Carlotta's past. In a torment of confusion, Madeleine tells Scottie she has dreamed of a place that he identifies as Mission San Juan Bautista, and Scottie takes her there in an effort to conquer her disturbing dreams and, hopefully, cure her mental illness. But, once there, Madeleine is again seemingly possessed, and she runs into the mission's bell tower. Scottie's fear of heights renders him unable to follow her up the steep staircase, and Madeleine apparently hurls herself from the top of the tower to her death. Scottie suffers a nervous breakdown and flees the scene. He is placed in a mental hospital, where he descends into catatonic passivity. During his recovery, Scottie -- and Midge, to her sorrow -- realizes that he is still in love with Madeleine.

About a year later, Scottie (still brooding, and himself now wandering the streets like the mad Carlotta Valdes), begins to haunt the places where the earlier relationship happened. On one such visit (to a florist's shop where Madeleine habitually bought her ancestor's favorite flowers), he encounters a woman, Judy Barton, who reminds him strongly of his dead love -- though this girl is more "ordinary," even a bit vulgar in comparison with Madeleine's ethereal beauty. Scottie stalks Judy, and even wheedles his way into her residential-hotel room, where he hears her story: she is a simple girl from Salina, Kansas, making a life for herself in San Francisco after a series of bad relationships. After Scottie leaves, Judy writes him a letter in which she reveals (and we see in flashback) that one such relationship was with Elster, who hired her to impersonate Madeleine for Scottie's benefit, as part of Elster's scheme to murder his wife. But, in love with Scottie and guilty for the pain she has caused him, Judy loses her nerve and destroys the letter almost as soon as she has written it.

Scottie becomes obsessed with Judy, and gradually coaxes her into spending a lot of time with him. But any romantic possibility is thwarted by the memory of Madeleine. Scottie begins insisting that Judy dress like Madeleine, and even having her auburn hair dyed to Madeleine's wintry blonde; despite her protests, Judy eventually gives in. She is as obsessed with Scottie as he is with Madeleine.

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Movies - Vertigo

The plot

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