Vertigo

Although now rightly recognised as one of cinema's true masterpieces (along with Citizen Kane it's guaranteed to make all but the most contrary of filmgoers' top ten), Vertigo was not always held in such high regard. On its release in 1958, critical reception was cool. There was praise for the film from some quarters, but it was muted. The reviewer of Time magazine famously dismissed it as "another Hitchcock and bull story", showing that a critic is always ready to make a lame pun at the expense of insight. The New Yorker called it  "far-fetched  nonsense" whilst the Los Angeles Times complained that the plot was "hard to grasp at best". Many reviewers of the time faulted the movie for its pacing, calling it too slow and "not a little confusing". It's true that its story was unconventional. Retired police detective Scottie Fergueson (James Stewart) is given the job of following the glacially beautiful Madeliene, who is suspected by her husband of harbouring suicidal tendencies. When Scottie's intervention leads to Madeleine's death, he is consumed with grief and can only find solace by trying to recreate her image in another woman  he meets seemingly by chance.


Vertigo performed respectfully at the box office, coming in at twenty first place when Hollywood totalled its ticket sales for the year, but it wasn't the hit that Hitchcock had hoped for. Paramount re-released it in 1963 to cash in on the anticipation surrounding The Birds, and then in the late Sixties, under the terms of his Paramount contract, the director gained control of the rights. By 1974 Vertigo had been withdrawn completely from circulation and for a decade it was like a unicorn, much talked about but never seen. It could be glimpsed in stills that illustrated the growing library of books that were being written about the Master of Suspense, who was now approaching the end of his career and his life. Serious critics such as Robin Wood and Raymond Durgnat championed the film, even though they had to rely on an unreliable memory to do so.

By the time Vertigo was re-released in 1984 (along with other 'lost' Hitchcocks, Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry, Rope and The Man Who Knew Too Much) it trailed behind it a fabled reputation. I was living in Japan at the time and I took a bullet train to Hiroshima to watch it on a double bill with The Man Who Knew Too Much. I still have the snapshot I took of the cinema where it was playing. Sitting in the darkened theatre listening to the swirling strings and dark brass chords of the opening "Prelude" made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and the moment at the end when the nun steps out of the shadow like a ghost to the accompanient of an spooky organ literally made me jump.

I was familiar with the score long before I saw the movie. The five minute "Scene D'Amour" was a standard on Herrmann compilations. In the film the music accompanies the scene where Judy completes her transformation into Madeleine in the Empire Hotel. She emerges from the bathroom in her grey tailored suit with her hair pinned up and is bathed in the eerie green light of the hotel's neon sign. As Scottie takes her in his arms, the camera circles the couple and Herrmann's music swells into a grand romantic statement. I listened to Herrmann long before I listened to Wagner and so for a long time wasn't aware of the borrowing (or, indeed, the significance) of the theme from the opera Tristan and Isolde.

Hitchcock provided his composer with notes on music suggestions and the sound mix, but on the whole gave him a free hand. The notes the director made for his sound editor for the scene reveal the confidence he had in Herrmann's ability to carry the moment:

"When Judy is in the bathroom changing - we just hear faint traffic noises, and when she emerges and we go into the love scene we should let all traffic noise fade, because Mr Hermann [sic] may have something to say here. For the rest of the sequence we will hear faint traffic noises, except when we go away to the portrait (when Mr Herrman [sic] will be the one to take over.)"

Herrmann went his own way with the music. His use of habanera rhythms to portray the sad and mysterious Carlotta was inspired not by the Spanish mission setting but by his belief that the film should have been filmed in a different locale and with a different lead actor. "They should never have made it in San Francisco, and not with Jimmy Stewart," he said. "It should have been an actor like Charles Boyer. It should have been left in New Orleans, or in a hot, sultry climate. When I wrote the picture, I thought of that."

For the celebrated zoom in/track back shot that Hitchcock employed to convey Scottie's acrophobia, Herrmann wrote a disorientating chord overlaid with frenzied harp glissandi. It may not be as famous a musical moment as the stabbing strings of Pyscho, but it has a similarly jolting effect.


The version of the score I'm listening to right now is the Joel McNeely re-recording on the Varese Sarabande label (VSD-5600).  The original soundtrack conducted by Muir Mathieson is also available on a Varese Sarabande CD (B000024Q93) and has the added bonus of the cool Saul Bass poster design on its cover.