Kim Novak in VERTIGO: A Hypnotic Presence

by guest contributor Brandie Ashe

Scratch the surface of the prototypical “Hitchcock blonde”—a cool, reserved exterior masking a fiery and determinedly passionate woman—and the subtle differences in their characterizations become more evident.  In her three films for the director, Grace Kelly’s characters are paragons of dignity, displaying a patrician façade that eventually gives way to a sizzling sexuality. Tippi Hedren’s two characters for Hitchcock have an overt veneer of sophistication that nonetheless belies an innate playfulness at the heart of each woman.  And in her three films for Hitch, Ingrid Bergman is the foreign exotic who smolders with a hint of endearing uncertainty.

But when it comes to the star of Hitchcock’s 1958 ode to obsession, Vertigo, the director carefully crafts yet another embodiment of flawed femininity: the duplicitous double—caught in a web of her own making—whose love for an equally flawed man will ultimately be her undoing. And to embody this complex creature, he turns (for the first and only time in his career) to a twenty-five year old relative newcomer, Kim Novak.

By the time she starred in Vertigo, Novak had appeared in only a handful of films over the previous five years. Her breakthrough came in 1955’s Picnic, in which she played a small-town Kansas beauty who falls for William Holden. That same year, Novak played Frank Sinatra’s love interest in the controversial Otto Preminger film about heroin addiction, The Man with the Golden Arm. She played early Broadway and screen star Jeanne Eagels in the same-titled biopic in 1957, and reteamed with Sinatra in the film version of the successful musical Pal Joey.

In just a matter of three years, her small body of work, along with her stunning all-American blonde looks, garnered Novak a great deal of attention. But some film critics at the time were dismissive of Novak’s acting ability. A.H. Weiler’s New York Times review of Pal Joey called her performance merely “decorative,” and the same paper’s review of her performance in Jeanne Eagels wondered what “possessed Columbia to cast this comparative fledgling … as one of Broadway’s immortals” (though the reviewer did, in all fairness, go on to ultimately blame the film’s many problems on the lackluster script and direction).

Still, despite critics’ opinions of her talent, it is undeniable that in some of her roles, there is an almost hypnotic quality to Novak’s presence on the screen. Watch, for example, her sensual dance with William Holden in Picnic. As the strains of “Moonglow” play in the background, Novak begins to dance, her movements slow and deliberate, her eyes focused solely on her partner as they circle one another. She draws him—and us—in with a mere smoldering glance, a twitch of her hips, a slight swaying movement. The sexual tension is palpable, and it’s hard to take your eyes off Novak in the moment.

Of all of the directors with whom the actress worked during her career, only Hitchcock was fully able to exploit this stirring hypnotic quality and use it to full advantage on the screen. In the process, the prolific director ultimately drew out of Novak what is arguably the greatest performance of her career.

Vera Miles

Novak was not the original choice to play Madeleine/Judy. Hitchcock had initially cast Vera Miles, with whom he had a heavy-handed personal contract. Hitchcock had adopted a Svengali-like attitude with Miles, trying to craft her into “his” type of actress by dictating her appearance and building her into a kind of Grace Kelly clone (as Hitch had recently lost his favorite star to Monaco’s Prince Rainier). But Miles was forced to drop out of the project due to pregnancy, and as a result, Hitchcock lost interest in the actress (though he would still go on to cast her as Janet Leigh’s sister in 1960’s Psycho). Years later, he would tell Francois Truffaut, “She became pregnant just before the part that was going to turn her into a star.”

It’s interesting to consider how closely Scottie’s attempts to “make over” Judy into “lost” love Madeleine mirror Hitchcock’s own attempts to craft Miles into the “perfect” cinematic star. More than any other film in his oeuvre, Vertigo represents Hitchcock’s cinematic quest to “build” the perfect woman, one made over in precisely the image he desires. To put it bluntly, Novak’s Madeleine/Judy most clearly embodies the old idiom (fully embraced by Hitchcock) that men want a lady in the drawing room and a whore in the bedroom. To that end, the character is a subtly sexy blonde whose deceptively icy, composed, and chic appearance hides a shrewd mind and a leashed, but potentially voracious sexuality.

And yet, despite her flaws and her deceptive behavior, Madeleine/Judy is one of the more sympathetic Hitchcock blondes in that her struggle to reconcile her love for Scottie with her guilt over deceiving him about her role in the real Madeleine’s death forces the audience to feel some sense of compassion for her. We witness her dilemma; we understand intrinsically that her acquiescence to Scottie’s mad desire to recreate the “real” Madeleine comes from a place of desperate love. She agrees to let him clothe her in Madeleine’s sophisticated style, to have her makeup done and her nails shaped as Madeleine’s, and even gives in when Scottie insists she color her now-brown hair blonde. Her plaintive response to his pleas to dye her hair is heartbreaking in its eagerness to earn his love: “If I let you change it, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me?”

There are those who claim that Novak is too stiff in her performance in Vertigo, that there is something unnaturally wooden about her interpretation of Madeleine/Judy. But I tend to agree with film critic Roger Ebert, whose reflection on Vertigo praises Novak’s presentation of the character: “Ask yourself how you would move and speak if you were in unbearable pain, and then look again at Judy.” Every element of Novak’s performance, particularly in the wake of the real Madeleine’s death, is carefully constructed to convey the character’s inner turmoil. She has broken the rules—she has fallen in love with her mark. And her punishment is that he cannot love her as herself, as Judy: he needs “Madeleine.” She knows nothing she does short of donning the mantle of “Madeleine” once more will earn her what she needs from him. It’s the last thing she wants to do … and yet, because she loves Scottie, she cannot—will not—deny him his desire.

The entire film comes down to that single five-minute sequence in which Judy “becomes” Madeleine again. Scottie waits impatiently for Judy to return from her makeover, and is displeased that her newly blonde hair has not been pulled back from her face in Madeleine’s signature updo. He sends her into the bathroom to complete the transformation and waits anxiously for her to emerge. When she does, she is bathed in a hypnotic, strange green light (ostensibly reflected from the neon sign hanging outside the hotel room window), a dreamlike effect that makes it appear as though Madeleine is moving back from the murky past into the solid present. This sense is highlighted through Hitchcock’s brilliant composition of the scene, as Scottie kisses Madeleine and is swept back into a memory of their time together in San Juan Batista while the camera rotates around the embracing couple in a smooth 360 turn.

The uncertain, yearning expressions on her face, the stilted movements of her body as she walks in that gray suit once more—everything Novak does is masterfully composed in order to show us just how miserable Judy’s situation really is in that moment. “Judy” is now the one who is dead and Madeleine—the double, the false identity—is her new reality, and must remain so if she wishes to keep Scottie’s love and attention. And the utter hopelessness that comes from that realization is written all over Novak’s face in this scene, effectively foreshadowing Madeleine’s second (and permanent) demise.

It is fitting that Vertigo has, in retrospect, turned out to be the defining role of Kim Novak’s career, because the film features what is undoubtedly the best performance she ever gave on-screen. Her role as Madeleine/Judy remains one of the most intriguing Hitchcock blondes, a mesmerizingly intense woman brought to blazing, impressive life by a truly talented young performer in the capable hands of a truly talented director in his prime. I can’t help but imagine what more Hitchcock and Novak could have done, had they been paired in another film together at some point. What other depths could he have uncovered in her, and what other cinematic brilliance could they have created, had they just been given the opportunity?

~

Brandie Ashe is a freelance writer and editor from Alabama. An inveterate classic movie fan since discovering the films of Shirley Temple and the Marx Brothers as a child, she indulges her obsession at her blog, True Classics. In 2011 True Classics was honored with two CiMBA Awards from the Classic Movie Blog Assn., one for Best Classic Movie Blog Event and another for Best Profile of a Filmmaker. In addition, her blog was nominated for a 2011 Lammy  Award  from the Large Assn. of Movie Blogs in the Best Classic Movie Blog category. 

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Tuesday, January 10, 2012