What is this movie about ?

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. " Alfred Hitchcock

This movie is about a policeman, John Ferguson (Scottie) who suffers from acrophobia (This is, "extreme or irrational fear to heights").
At the beginning of the movie, Scottie runs with another policeman over some towers of San Francisco. They are pursuing a thief.
One of those policemen jumps from one tower to another and continues the pursuit. The second policeman, Scottie, slips down a steep roof and ends up hanging from a gutter.
When the other policeman realizes that Scottie is in trouble, he goes back and tries to give Scottie his hand in order to prevent him from falling. Scottie, tries hard to reach the policeman's hand but he fails and finally is the policeman who tries to save him from death the one who falls from the top of the tower and dies. After this dramatic event, Scottie quits his job as policeman.

Some time after this event, Scottie is called by Gavin Elster.
Elster's wife has had an unusual behaviour and he asks Scottie to follow her. He tells Scottie that his wife (Madeleine) is probably possessed by a dead person.
Scottie, who does not believe in those things, asks Elster to take his wife to the doctor, but Elster refuses and says that he prefers Scottie to follow her. Since Elster is an old friend, Scottie finally accepts.
Scottie sees Madeleine at Elster's Restaurant for the first time and immediately he falls in love with her.

During the following days, Scottie begins following Madeleine and he becomes really worried about the way she behaves. She visits a museum and gazes at the portrait of a lady called Carlotta Valdes for a long time. After that, she goes to the grave of this woman to let her flowers.

Scottie asks himself who the woman in the portrait is, and what does she has to do with Madeleine.
Elster reveals that Carlotta Valdes is Madeleine's great grand mother.After knowing this, Scottie becomes obssessed with Madeleine and keeps her under careful surveillance. Furthermore, he saves her from committing suicide.
After this event they become closer and she tells Scottie that there is someone inside her that tells her that she must die. At that moment she also mentions the tower of a church.

Trying to do his best, Scottie takes Madeleine to a place that resembles the place that she describes. This place is an old Spanish mission. When they arrive in the mission, Madeleine escapes and goes upstairs in the tower of its church. Scottie, while going upstairs in order to save her, feels the vertigo again, in the same way as he felt it when hanging from the gutter. The vertigo makes Scottie fail at saving Madeleine.

Devastated and feeling a great guilt, Scottie is hospitalized.But one day, after leaving the hospital, he sees a woman that resembles Madeleine. He knows that Madeleine is dead because he saw her, but could she be Madeleine ? That is what Scottie is about to find out.

History of "Vertigo"

"The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them" Alfred Hitchcock

Choosing a place

Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco

In 1951, Alfred Hitchcock visited San Francisco for the opening of "Strangers on a Train". According to his daughter, Patricia Hitchcock, "He loved San Francisco. He felt it was a very glamorous city. He felt it was rather like an American Paris". It is said that Hitchcock liked to present the audience "a peaceful place and then introduce an unexpected twist of malice".

Alfred Hitchock had observed the Golden Gate Bridge and was tremendously inspired. The only element missing was a story to support the movie, until he found "D'entre les morts" (From Among the Dead). After having the story for his film and all the settings in his mind he asked his associated producer, Herbert Coleman to look for Spanish missions for the "key scenes".

Mission Old San Juan Bautista

In 1955, Herbert Coleman visited the Mission Old San Juan Bautista. This place, located 97 miles south San Francisco, was built in 1797 and since then, it has served mass. It has also resisted earthquakes. The first one took place on October 1800 and the other one in 1906. In reality, the bell tower that appears in the most important scenes of the film does not exist. It had been destroyed in a fire a long time ago, so Hitchcock added it by means of photography tricks.

The Cast

Regarding the cast, James Stewart seemed to be the perfect person to play a detective with fear of heights.

Vera Miles

Originally, the role of Madeleine was going to be played by Vera Miles. But problems appeared : Hitchcock had to had an operation and by the time he recovered, Vera Miles announced that she was pregnant and that she could not do the film. Finally Kim Novak was chosen as the object of the detective's obsession.

The costumes were in charge of Edith Head, who also had an important role in Vertigo. She was one of the most important costume designer in Hollywood. Let us remind you that clothes take an important role in Vertigo. The grey suit or the dress that Madeleine wears at Ernie's or the white coat, are also part of Scottie's obsessions.
Hitchcock was very clear about what kind of clothes he wanted for his films and its colours.

The Story

After Hitchcock and his wife had carefully studied the story for the film, they hired the first screen writer, Maxwell Anderson who turned in a screenplay called "Darklin I Listen" that was not satisfactory at all. Then, Alec Coppel worked on this script and changed its name to "From Among the Dead". It contained scenes such as the rooftop opening, the dream sequence and scenes at the Spanish mission. But Hitchcock and James Stewart were still unhappy about the script,so a new writer was hired. He was Samuel Taylor and he worked for one year on the screenplay and did a great improvement. He added Midge and developed James Stewart's character,and he decided to reveal Madeleine's identity to the audience two-thirds of the way into the film rather than at the end.

By 1957, the location shooting began mainly in San Francisco and the title of this movie was "From Among The Dead". Hitchcock did not like to shoot on real locations. Instead, he would get the outside places and then build a set on the stage in order to be able to control the lights and the actors. Henry Bumstead designed all the individual sets for Vertigo, including the inside part of the Bell Tower. The set for the bell tower was seventy feet high, so it gave Hitchcock's stars a real feeling of vertigo.



The vertigo effect was achieved by a combination of zooming forward and tracking backward simultaneously. It was necessary to build a large-scale model of a staircase. It was filmed by cameraman John Fulton.
The spiral, a symbol of the movie, was designed to express the feeling that Vertigo produces.

Robert Burks carried out Hitchcock's cholor scheme of reds and greens and used fog filters to create a dreamlike atmosphere. Green is important because it has a symbolic role in the movie.
This Masterpiece was going to be lost, but fortunately it was restored by James Katz and Robert Harris in 1996. This work lasted for two years.

This post was made thanks to the information found on :

http://www.viamagazine.com/weekenders/sanjuan97.asp http://missiontour.org/bautista/history.htm http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=64090 http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=64090 http://dailybruin.com/news/2002/nov/26/bumstead-gives-talk-on-art-dir/

Special thanks to the following Documentary:
Obsessed With Vertigo.Dir. Harrison Engle. DVD. American Classic Movies 1997
In which this post has been mainly based.

A Source of Vertigo : The novel " D'entre les morts "

"I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline - production: 1: small children, 2: policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next movie will not be as good as the last one. " Alfred Hitchcock

Here we have a link between Film and Literature.
This novel, written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, was the inspiration for the film "Vertigo" by Alfred Hitchcock.

Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (Boileau-Narcejac)

Their lives

On the one hand, Pierre Boileau was born on April 28th 1906 in Paris. Although he had begun a commercial career, he also began writing tales and pieces of news that were published on magazines and newspapers. At that time, he did not use to write detective stories.
In 1932, he published his first short story in "Lecture pour tous" and two years later he published his first novel "La Pierre qui tremble". At that time he is an specialist in enigma.
After that, the War began and Pierre Boileau was made prisoner until 1942 when he was released due to problems of health.
When he arrived in Paris, he began publishing novels on "France Soir".
On the other hand, Thomas Narcejac was born on July 3rd 1908.
After studying at the university, he worked as a teacher of Philosophy and Letters. Simultaneously, he used to publish novels.
During those years Narcejac became deeply interested in detective novels and began his first detective novel "L'Assassin de minuit". After that, while working for Le Portulan, he wrote his second novel and essay "Esthétique du roman policier" where he analyses Boileau's work.

Their meeting and their work together

Thanks to "Esthétique du roman policier" the two writers met. At the beginning, they used to exchange ideas through letters but in 1950 they began working together. When writing novels both of the writers had a role: Frequently, Boileau provided the plot to the novel while Narcajac provided the psychology of the characters.
At the very beginning they wrote "L'ombre et la proie", which was, according to the writers, "only a model". Their second work "Celle qui n'etait plus" (1952) was not accepted by many Editorials, but in 1954 it was adapted by Henri-Georges Clouzot with the title of "Les Diaboliques" (The Devils) and surprisingly it became a resounding cinema success.
After this success, they publish many novels, which frequently were the inspiration for movies. For example : D'entre les morts became Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo or Sergio's Gobbi's Maldonne in 1968 and also the inspiration for TV programmes.
In this way, this couple worked together for almost forty years providing suspense to readers, film goers, etc.
The end of their career together finished with the death of Boileau in 1989. After Boileau's death,their last work was published "Le soleil dans la main" (1990) and Narcejac continued working on his own, but always signing Boileau-Narcejac until he died in 1998.

D'entre les morts

After the success of "The Devils", Alfred Hitchcock made sure that Paramount would buy the rights of the novel "D'entre les morts".

"D'entre les morts" is a crime novel, written in 1954. Although this novel was Hitchcock's inspiration for the film, he changed some elements of the novel, such as places and parts of the plot.
Originally, the story begins in France. Flavières, a former detective, gets in touch with an old friend who asks him to follow his wife Madeleine who has been behaving in a strange way for a certain amount of time. After keeping Madeleine under surveillance, Flavières falls in love with her, but she throws herself from a tower and he does not succeed at saving her from this fall. This traumatic experience makes Flavières leave Paris,for four years, just in the moment when the Germans were launching an offensive against France.When he goes back to France, France is free again and he remembers Madeleine obsessively. One day he sees a woman and he is convinced that this woman is Madeleine. He saw Madeleine dead, but , without paying attention to that fact, he starts a search of that woman.


Information taken from :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'entre_les_morts http://www.livres-a-gogo.be/bio/biboilea.htm http://www.ratsdebiblio.net/boileaunarcejacsueurs.html http://www.polars.org/article77.html http://perso.orange.fr/calounet/biographies/boileaunarcejac_biographie.htm http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Diaboliques