"This is William Friedkin." "Vertigo is a film about obsession and guilt." "The obsession kicks in from the very first notes of Bernard Herrmann's incredible music score," "which is actually derived from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde." "But Herrmann was such a brilliant composer of music, and he completely captured the tone and spirit of this film, and the film itself is inseparable from Herrmann's great score." "The film stars James Stewart and Kim Novak." "It's called Vertigo, and vertigo, of course, is what results from acrophobia, which is a fear of heights." "And the fear of heights results in a kind of dizziness." "A not unpleasant dizziness, in fact, that's known as "vertigo."" "The original title for Vertigo was From Among the Dead, and it's obvious that" "Hitchcock only used the novel as a starting-off point." "Vertigo is originally derived from a French novel, and the novel was written by two writers called Boileau and Narcejac, who were famous for having written the great suspense-horror film Diabolique." "The director of photography was Robert Burks, who did 11 films with Hitchcock, 11 of his greatest films." "And the editor was George Tomasini, who, starting with Rear Window, edited eight of the great Hitchcock films." "Hitchcock loved to work with the same people." "He believed in loyalty." "The people he worked with, including Edith Head, who did the costumes, and Bernard Herrmann, who he did several scores with." "They knew what Hitchcock wanted." "Hitchcock didn't have to say a lot." "He didn't have to tell them." "He never looked into the camera." "He knew what the lenses were getting." "Herb Coleman, who was the associate producer..." "Actually, the line producer on this film, had worked with Hitchcock many times." "And Hitchcock could sit in his chair and let the crew do the film because they knew exactly how he would want to do it." "This film opens with a rooftop chase over the streets of San Francisco, and the mood, as it is set by the chase," "winds up setting forth the whole premise of the film." "The acrophobia of the main character, the detective played by James Stewart, who is really in a situation that's beyond his control." "He has to leap from building to building, and he does have acrophobia, and ultimately, vertigo." "And in this first scene, he is literally hanging suspended over an abyss, which is a metaphor for everything that happens to the Stewart character throughout the rest of the film." "A police officer who is accompanying him on a chase of this unknown person..." "We never get to know anything about the crime or why the man is being chased." "It's there simply to set up that not only is Stewart a victim of acrophobia and vertigo, but now he is harboring a tremendous sense of guilt for the police officer's loss of life in trying to save his." "The scene switches very quickly to the apartment of Stewart's one-time fiancée, now close friend, whose name is Midge." "Midge is kind of a commercial artist played by Barbara Bel Geddes, and she's still very much in love with the Stewart character, who is called John Ferguson." "His nickname is Scottie." "But she calls him "John,"" "and most of the people who know him well call him "John."" "And in this particular scene, we see that Ferguson has gotten over his acrophobia for the moment by resigning from the police force, over the guilt as well." "And he tells Midge that he doesn't know what he's gonna do anymore, but he's certainly not going back to police work in case he encounters a situation like this one again." "It's never made clear how he got out of that situation, where he was hanging over the side of that very flimsy ledge." "But this film, as with most Hitchcock films, are told from the point of view of emotionally disturbed people." "The story itself, and I'll refer to the story as it goes along, but only peripherally, because in a Hitchcock film, the story is less important than the visual impact." "...and sit behind a desk, chair-borne?" "There is no great concern for plausibility." "You will find much of the plot, as you watch this film, stretches credulity and in itself is pretty implausible." "Hitchcock was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe as a child, and Edgar Allan Poe specialized in completely unbelievable stories that were told to the readers with a kind of spellbinding logic, and that's what Hitchcock has done with Vertigo." "Vertigo is probably the most personal of all Hitchcock films in the sense that it deals, very powerfully," "with Hitchcock's own obsession for a certain kind of woman, and his inability to really make contact with that woman and to communicate with the woman." "No shoulder straps, no back straps." "Hitchcock's desires were mostly imprisoned in the body of a very lonely young boy from a small town in England." "His father was a greengrocer, also a fishmonger." "And Hitchcock very early on found a way to suppress his obsessions through his work as a film director, and he became more than a storyteller." "He became a master technician of his obsessions." "This picture is clearly the one that goes the deepest into his own fears and his own sense of being imprisoned inside of a body that did not permit him complete freedom." "The characters are often that." "In this film, the characters are completely imprisoned by their obsession." "Hitchcock used this long scene between James Stewart and Barbara Bel Geddes to set up the fulcrum of the plot, which is that an old college roommate named Gavin Elster, who will be played by an actor called Tom Helmore," "has called him and asked him to come and see him." "Now, Elster is a man who runs a ship-building company that's owned by his wife's family." "And Hitchcock set it up so that the Stewart character, who has just retired from the police force, who had, at one time, wanted to be a chief of police." "He was a young law student in the backstory that one day wanted to be the chief of police." "And now he's quit the force, and he has no immediate prospects." "At this moment, he's demonstrating how he thinks he can cure himself of his acrophobia." " We'll start with this." " That?" "What do you want me to start with, the Golden Gate Bridge?" "He's going to climb to ever more heights, starting small." "He's gonna start with a little stool, and then a larger stool, and he's going to stand on the stool gradually, step by step, look up, and then down." "And he's demonstrating to Midge, who is really in love with him, but it's unrequited." "He's demonstrating to Midge, now his friend, that he can look up and look down and not be disturbed by what he sees looking down." "Although acrophobia is very difficult to cure, and can only be cured really by a similar event that is traumatic as the original cause of it was." "No problem." "Why, this is a cinch." "Here, I look up, I look down." "I look up, I look down." "At this moment, he looks down and he sees a view similar to the street below when he almost fell off the building, and the police officer lost his life trying to save him." "There's Hitchcock himself, by the way." "He just walked by with a peculiar-looking instrument in a black case." "It might have been a trumpet, or I don't know what the hell it was." "It could have been a dead fish for all anyone knows, but that was Hitchcock's habit of appearing briefly in a shot in one of his own films." "It was kind of his stamp." "No, to be honest, I find it dull." "Hitchcock later had this office, which was a set at the old Paramount lot designed by the great scenic designer Robert Boyle, who also worked with Hitchcock a number of times." "Many years later, Hitchcock wanted to have an exact replica of this set put into his study in his home in Beverly Hills, and he had Boyle come over and make a virtually exact replica of this set." "The things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast." "Like all these." "Yes." "I should have liked to have lived here then." "Color, excitement, power." "Freedom." "Shouldn't you be sitting down?" "No." "No, I'm all right." "But in this scene between Gavin Elster and Scottie Ferguson," "Elster tells Ferguson that he's concerned about his own wife, whose name is Madeleine Elster." "He believes that Madeleine believes that she's possessed by the spirit of a dead woman named Carlotta Valdes, and that the dead woman is driving her to commit suicide." "That the dead woman, who is immortalized in a painting in the famous Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco." "The dead woman has possessed the spirit of Elster's wife, Madeleine, and she goes off on these long drives, and he has no idea where she's going, and he wants Scottie, who now appears to be a man at ease," "to tail his wife and tell him where she goes and what she does." "Now, Scottie is not, at this moment, looking for a job or looking to be a private detective or tail anyone." "He tells Elster that he'll get him a team of crack private investigators, but Elster is insistent and says, "No, I wanna hire you."" "Now, Scottie has never seen Madeleine Elster, and so, toward the end of this sequence," "Elster proposes that Scottie comes to a very famous San Francisco landmark restaurant called Ernie's, which closed in 1999." "And he says that he and his wife Madeleine will be there for dinner on their way to the opening of an opera at the San Francisco Opera." "And Scottie agrees to come to Ernie's so he can get his first look at Madeleine Elster and try to help his old college friend, Gavin Elster." "Once again, you have to understand that while this film seems to be very plot-heavy and extremely well-plotted, this film is in no way about its plot." "It is about obsession and guilt." "Then, with a long sigh, she's back, looks at me brightly..." "Hitchcock, at the time he made this film, said that he was intrigued by the hero's attempts to recreate the image of a dead woman through another woman who's alive." "That was what drew him to this story." "And Elster has now told Scottie that he believes his wife is a suicidal neurotic possessed by the spirit of a dead woman." "...drove out to Golden Gate Park..." "And while Scottie is completely skeptical, something draws him to wanna help out his old college friend." "Sat there a long time, without moving." "I had to leave, get back to the office." "Elster has expressed the feeling that he is not really happy running the shipping business, it belongs to his wife's family." "And Elster has come back to San Francisco to run the business, but he really doesn't have his mind or his heart in it." "I've gotta know, Scottie, where she goes and what she does." "His concern for his wife's problem seems to be really grating at him, and he's looking to Scottie Ferguson to provide some kind of an answer as to his wife's mysterious behavior." "Look, this isn't my line." "Scottie, I need a friend, someone I can trust." "Like many scenes in Hitchcock, this one appears to be too long and have too much exposition." "But gradually you'll see that the movie settles into a kind of dreamlike quality, where the exposition becomes less and less." "This is a replica of Ernie's Restaurant in San Francisco, which used to be considered one of the two or three best steakhouses in the country." "This was built on a set in Hollywood, as was the exterior of Ernie's." "As I said earlier, Ernie's closed in 1999." "And in this moment, we see Gavin Elster in a corner or in a booth toward the back of the restaurant, and Scottie Ferguson's first view of Madeleine Elster is from the back." "Hitchcock was often fascinated by the back of a woman's head, and you'll see in particular why he was fascinated by the back of Kim Novak's head in this scene, and throughout the film." "But his first look at Madeleine Elster, played by Kim Novak with a very prominent green satin collar." "He first sees her almost framed by green and red." "She's extremely beautiful, hauntingly beautiful." "The kind of woman that is really an obsession, and is the kind of a woman that could turn a man like Scottie's head." "And so he's hooked." "He's hooked by the vision of Madeleine Elster, and he decides on the next morning to try and follow her throughout her day." "The next morning, he goes to the outside of her apartment building, which is on Nob Hill, California Street, near Mason, where he sees Madeleine Elster, and she's driving a green Rolls-Royce." "He has no idea where she's going." "She's dressed in a gray dress, which makes her look like someone that has come out of the San Francisco fog." "And Kim Novak fought very hard not to wear gray." "She felt that the gray was not a good color for her bleached blonde hair." "And she didn't want to wear the gray dress, but Hitchcock knew precisely how he wanted her hair, precisely how he wanted her to dress, which is ultimately what happens to Scottie Ferguson, who has to dress her, and do her hair," "and make her over into his vision." "And so they go on a tour into the heart of San Francisco, and she takes a kind of curious and circuitous path." "And gradually, it seems that she knows that she might be being followed, so she turns into a little cul-de-sac, which is very near Union Square in San Francisco." "She goes into this little alley or cul-de-sac, where she parks and gets out of her car and goes through a nondescript alley door." "Stewart's curiosity is now becoming very piqued." "He follows her to this back entrance of we-know-not-what, at this time." "It looks like a kind of storage room, or in a warehouse." "It has a mysterious and dark quality, which is really kind of a false lead." "Because, when he opens the door, he finds nothing truly mysterious, or shocking, or disturbing," "but the interior of a beautiful flower shop, where Madeleine Elster is about to order a particularly beautiful bouquet that will appear to be a funeral bouquet." "You see her reflected in a mirror right next to where Stewart is standing, watching her." "This is the first of many mirrors that will appear in this film, reflecting and re-reflecting, giving us double images of the characters and reflecting other sides of the characters." "The film is, in many ways, filmed with mirrors, and is, in fact, a mirror to the soul of not only the Scottie Ferguson character, but Hitchcock himself." "As Madeleine takes him further on their journey, they leave this little cul-de-sac, go deeper into the heart of San Francisco, where they stop at a little church, which is called the Mission Dolores, and it's still there in the heart of San Francisco." "And there is a kind of a Spanish theme to this film, as reflected in one of Bernard Herrmann's themes for the movie." "The idea of old California deriving from old Spain." "Hitchcock takes the Scottie Ferguson character into this church, or this old mission, where he sees Madeleine go through a side door and he follows her into a cemetery." "Some of the ideas in the film reflect" "Hitchcock's own Catholic upbringing as a child in a small town in England." "The cemetery is shot in a very hazy, dreamlike manner." "But because of the flowers and the plants, it's rather peaceful and beautiful." "And Scottie sees that Madeleine is standing near a gravestone, just staring at this gravestone, in effect communicating with the spirit of the dead." "There's a marvelous mixture in this scene, and in many others." "For example, this shot of Stewart, who was originally photographed in an actual graveyard with Kim Novak, but the closer shots are all done against a process screen, a rear screen, which Hitchcock loved to use." "He would do exteriors and wide shots on location, and then take the closer shots into a studio and shoot them against a film projection of the background, so he could control the light and the camera angles better" "and not have people watching as spectators." "We see Madeleine take the bouquet that she has brought to this cemetery, and she reflects on it." "And you think that she might be leaving it at the grave marker, but she doesn't." "She takes it with her." "And so, Stewart tries to get the name on the stone, which is Carlotta Valdes, who was born in 1831" "and died just a short time later." "And the pursuit continues." "He follows her to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, which is a very beautiful art museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco." "This interior of the Palace of the Legion of Honor is probably a set." "Both a set and a rear-screen projection behind Stewart." "And he sees Madeleine Elster sitting in front of a particular painting for what seems like a very long time, just staring at the painting." "The painting she's looking at is of the woman whose grave marker we just saw," "Carlotta Valdes, and the bouquet of flowers that she bought at the flower shop is the same as the one Carlotta holds in her own hands." "The swirl of Kim Novak's hairdo is similar to the swirl" "in the hairdo of Carlotta Valdes, and also becomes a metaphor throughout the film, from the very opening credits, of the kind of spiral that leads someone down." "The kind of dizziness that occurs through vertigo that leads you, as though downward through a spiral," "over an abyss." "Say, will you tell me something about the lady sitting in there?" "Who's the woman in the painting she's looking at?" "That's Carlotta." "You'll find it in the catalog." "Portrait of Carlotta." " May I have this?" " Yes." "Thank you." "Eventually, Madeleine leaves the Palace of the Legion of Honor and continues Stewart on what seems to be a wild-goose chase," "driving as though aimlessly through downtown San Francisco." "She comes to an old Victorian hotel." "It's called the McKittrick Hotel." "And this building actually existed." "It no longer does." "It was at the corner of Gough and Eddy Streets in San Francisco." "Again, behind Stewart there's another Catholic church." "The old Victorian building has great similarity to the mansion in Psycho that was the home of Norman Bates' mother, behind the Bates Motel." "And Stewart clearly sees Kim Novak in the window, up on the second floor of that hotel." "And so he goes in and he inquires about the woman living upstairs on the second floor." "And it turns out that the woman who is the manager of the hotel" "has no idea that the Kim Novak character has gone upstairs." "She tells Stewart that she hasn't even been here today." "Now the interior of the McKittrick, which is undoubtedly a set," "has, as you will see, a tremendous resemblance to the interior of the Psycho house, the interior of the house where Norman Bates' mother lived." "And I wouldn't be at all surprised if the set for Psycho was a re-dress of this particular set." "Psycho was made less than two years later on the Universal backlot." "She done something wrong?" "Please answer my question." "The Universal backlot is where I first met Alfred Hitchcock, about eight years after Vertigo, about six years after Psycho." "I directed the very last Alfred Hitchcock Hour that was made." "It was called "Off Season," with John Gavin." "And it was about a police officer who kills someone by mistake in a big city, and is so traumatized by the act of having killed an innocent person that he leaves the city and goes to a smaller town with his wife," "where he becomes the local police officer in a small town." "And I directed the film in five days." "Hitchcock, in those days, would only come in and read his introductions off what we'd call an "idiot card."" "It's where you had all your notes next to the camera, and you just read them." "Hitchcock would come in one day a week and read these notes, which were his brilliant introductions to all the segments of the Hitchcock Hour." "And I was a young man in my 20s who had never done anything on a sound stage, but had made a documentary film that impressed Hitchcock and his producer." "And so they asked me to do, as I say, the very last film for Alfred Hitchcock Presents." "And I remember one day when Hitchcock came on the set, and he was introduced to me, and he held out his hand with his fingers sort of drooping, as though I was supposed to kiss his hand," "rather than shake it." "And I was kind of put off by this, but I said," ""Mr. Hitchcock, what an honor it is to meet you."" "And he looked at me very critically and he said," ""Mr. Friedkin, usually our directors wear ties."" "And I said, "Yes, well, I guess I forgot."" "And he was off." "He took off, and he didn't say another word to me at that time." "Then about four years later," "I had just won the Directors Guild Award at the ceremony at the Beverly Hilton Hotel." "It was also a dinner." "And there was Hitchcock at a table with his family, right down below where I was standing to accept the award." "I made my acceptance speech, and then I walked down a short flight of steps, and I had one of those snap-on bowties." "And I snapped it at Mr. Hitchcock and I said..." "I was holding the DGA Award, which is a big, gold-plated plaque, and I snapped my tie at him and I said," ""How do you like the tie now, Hitch?"" "And of course he didn't remember, or know what I was talking about." "But I remembered." "I carried that with me for four years, and still do." "In any case, after his day following Madeleine Elster around," "Scottie Ferguson goes back to the apartment of his ex-fiancée," "Midge, played by Barbara Bel Geddes." "That's a beautiful view out the window of San Francisco, but it's a photographic plate." "They're not really on location." "The apartment is built on a set, and what you're looking at is a backdrop, which Hitchcock was always fond of using," "these artificial backdrops." "Sometimes they're even obvious, often they're too obvious, but Hitchcock constantly was trying to remind the audience, in a way, that they were watching a movie." "That it was an artificial experience, but, like with his hero Edgar Allan Poe, told with a tremendous sense of logic about something that was really illogical." "Midge has a friend who runs this bookshop called the Argosy Book Shop, and she takes Scottie there because the guy who runs the bookshop is kind of an expert on the history of old San Francisco, and especially the Hispanic influence." "And he tells them a story about the real Carlotta Valdes, who was a real person at the turn of the 19th century in San Francisco, from a royal family, a wealthy family." "And she had committed suicide." "And so the painting at the Palace of the Legion of Honor is a painting of a real person." "And somehow or other it appears that Madeleine Elster believes herself to be a reincarnation of Carlotta Valdes." "And in this scene, the old owner of the bookstore tells Scottie and Midge the history of Carlotta." "He had no other children." "His wife had no children." "So he kept the child and threw her away." "You know, a man could do that in those days." "They had the power and the freedom." "And she became the sad Carlotta." "Alone in the great house, walking the streets alone." "At this point, Hitchcock is trying to provide not only a logical base for this story, but a historic base." "And it turns out that, in fact, this legend of Carlotta Valdes is really a part of San Francisco history, and Hitchcock uses it to try and provide a firm foundation" "for what is an almost completely illogical story." "Again, I have to say that Hitchcock is not interested in the story." "He's interested in mood, in atmosphere, in a story that's largely being told by the characters' reactions and the way they're photographed." " For what?" " For bringing you here." "The film is beginning to take on not a logical quality, even though there's an attempt being made here to provide a solid foundation for it." "But the film is beginning to move in a more dreamlike way, where the obsession of Madeleine Elster with Carlotta Valdes is being transferred to the obsession by Scottie Ferguson with Madeleine Elster." "And so these are the early stages of this obsession." "And Midge, his friend and former fiancée, is trying to understand what's going on with Scottie." "What he does with his days, where he goes." "He simply tells her that he goes wandering, and he gives her no information about Madeleine." "Eventually, she'll wind up following him, following Madeleine." "And the curious relationship becomes more and more twisted." "Scottie begins to wonder himself what it is that's overtaken him." "Who is this Carlotta Valdes person whose portrait is immortalized in the museum?" "He begins now to freely associate Madeleine Elster with Carlotta Valdes, and he's bought totally into this hook." "You know, there's something else." "He brings the catalog to Gavin Elster." "He explains to Gavin where his wife has been going day after day, time after time." "And it appears that he has reinforced Gavin Elster's notion, first put to him, Scottie," "that his wife has become possessed by the spirit of a dead woman." "Now, Carlotta Valdes was what?" "Your wife's grandmother?" "Great-grandmother." "Now, the child who was taken from her, whose loss drove Carlotta mad and to her death, was Madeleine's grandmother." "And the McKittrick Hotel is the old Valdes home." "Well, I think that explains it." "Anyone could become obsessed with the past with a background like that." "She never heard of Carlotta Valdes." "She knows nothing of a grave out at the Mission Dolores?" "Or that old house on Eddy Street?" "The..." "What Elster is not aware of is that Scottie himself is beginning to have strong emotional feelings for Madeleine." "And in the mind of Hitchcock, this is really a sort of illicit relationship." "Madeleine Elster is the wife not only of another man, but a man who was his old college friend." "And so Scottie's desire for this woman is a kind of sin." "Boy, I need this." "If Madeleine Elster is so fixated on committing suicide," "to join with the spirit of the woman she believes has possessed her, it now becomes Scottie's mission to try and save her from herself." "She goes back to the Palace of the Legion of Honor on another day," "a beautiful San Francisco day in Golden Gate Park, and stares again at the portrait of Carlotta Valdes." "She's completely drawn into the mystery of Carlotta." "Again, she has the little funereal bouquet." "And this time she leaves and heads further north, up the coast and toward the Golden Gate Bridge." "She comes into the old Presidio, which was a military base." "And you can go through the Presidio to a place called Old Fort Point, where they are now," "which leads you to a ground-level view of the Golden Gate Bridge." "And what happens now is one of the most famous and memorable scenes in world cinema," "where, beneath a glorious view of the Golden Gate Bridge," "Scottie sees that Madeleine Elster has left her car to wander along the breakfront there." "Now this is an actual place." "That's not a rear-screen projection, although the shot of James Stewart is a rear-screen projection." "They would first go out to the locations and shoot the long shots, like this, and then they would come back in and recreate a portion of that view, that magnificent exterior, on a sound stage," "so that Hitchcock could do his close-ups more easily and light them more carefully, without the watchful eyes of a group of tourists." "One of the things that Scottie has learned is that Madeleine has just reached the age of 26," "and that it was at that same age that Carlotta Valdes committed suicide." "He saves her life, and he brings her home to his apartment overlooking Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill." "The exterior of this apartment still exists in San Francisco." "The interior is a set with a very badly painted backdrop." "The lamp is painted on the backdrop." "Sometimes it's painted on, sometimes it's painted off." "But, again, Hitchcock had to know and not really care that the audience could tell they were looking at a painting of a backdrop, not an actual location." "There's nobody on the streets out there." "It's a large photograph." "And, again, it's Hitchcock's attempt to sort of nudge the audience into realizing that this is a film" "and that they're being manipulated." "And he loved to manipulate the audience more than anything." "It was the thing that most concerned Hitchcock." "No, it's all right." "Yeah, I'll call you back." "Yes." "Yes." "Are you all right?" "It becomes clear in this moment that Scottie has had to undress Madeleine." "Her clothes were dripping wet." "He had to take them off, and he put her into his own bedroom." "And we now realize that he has seen her nude body." "But it's done, of course, very subtly by Hitchcock." "Hitchcock as a stylist is interested in pure suspense, pure cinema." "There's never an attempt in a Hitchcock film to present something as complete reality." "With rare exception." "There was a film he made before Vertigo, called The Wrong Man, which was a documentary-style film about a falsely accused man who was a musician, and he resembled somebody who had committed a crime, and he was convicted falsely of this crime and went to prison." "And Hitchcock did a laborious, almost scene-by-scene recreation of the story of that man who had been wrongfully accused." "But other than that, all of his films deal with dreamlike states." "Nightmares, not reality." "He had no sense that the important thing in a film was logic, although there are many logical moments in many of his films." "But as you'll see in Vertigo, you'll see that Vertigo itself is an elaborate hoax." "This whole first part of the film, which is being presented as the story of this woman who is possessed by the spirit of a woman who commits suicide and is trying in her own way to commit suicide," "this whole first part turns out to be a hoax, a game, a trick on the part of the director, Alfred Hitchcock, to mislead an audience." "Hitchcock's interest, as he stated many times, was to involve an audience emotionally, not logically." "He was more interested in pure cinema, what the camera saw and how it captured the emotions and reflections of the characters rather than a story that was grounded in truth and logic." "He would make a number of attempts to offer a logical, and even a truthful, foundation for parts of the story." "But his real gift to cinema is as a master of artifice, a master of technical genius who mastered the art of driving an audience's emotions." "And therefore his interest in the logic of a story was almost nil." "And as we all know, our fantasies and our dreams are not at all in any way reflected in logic." "They come to us with a strange kind of continuity that makes sense to us ultimately after it's over, or doesn't, but we never think of as real when we wake up." "The situations that our minds, that our imaginations create are what Hitchcock does with a movie," "and no film is more of a dream that becomes a nightmare than Vertigo." "That, by the look of many of the actual locations, by the look of the sets," "appears to be something real, but is ultimately just a background for a fantasy." "The Kim Novak character, again, is the ultimate Hitchcock blonde." "The ultimate fantasy, the unattainable." "The woman that he both desired and was repelled by." "And as you'll see, and with only little hints, like the way she looks at Stewart from time to time, only occasional hints that she's really an evil figure." "Nevertheless, Stewart falls in love with her." "Acquaintances call me Scottie." "I shall call you Mr. Ferguson." "Oh, gee whiz, I wouldn't like that." "Oh, no." "And after what happened this afternoon, I should think maybe you'd call me Scottie." "Maybe even John." "I prefer John." "There, that's done." "And what do you do, John?" "Wander about." "Hitchcock was an observer of life." "He was hardly a participant." "He and his wife, and occasionally their daughter, would take a number of vacation trips, but other than that, Hitchcock, as a man of cinema, is the ultimate voyeur, watching people's emotions," "creating their emotions and then watching them." "Offering almost no comment about them." "I mean, Hitchcock does not sit in judgment of any of his characters, ever." "No." "No, it's never happened before." "Oh, I've fallen into lakes out of rowboats when I was a little girl." "I even fell into the river once, trying to leap from one stone to another." "But I've never fallen into San Francisco Bay." "Have you ever before?" "No, it's the first time for me, too." "Here, I'll get you some more coffee." "The film, as I mentioned earlier, is much, much more about obsession, and could've been called Obsession, than Vertigo or Acrophobia." "What happened?" "This is a film about a man's growing obsession for a woman that he hardly knows, that he knows little to nothing about." "She doesn't know what happened." "Simply her appearance, how she looks." "And there's no better heroine than Kim Novak to embody this almost animal sexuality" "that she does." "The premise of the film now, as we look at it, becomes even a bit shakier." "James Stewart was a great film actor, but probably too old for this role." "Well now, Johnny-O." "Was it a ghost?" "Was it fun?" "And we see that Midge," "Scottie's girlfriend, has been following him and has observed that Madeleine Elster came to Scottie's apartment." "The following day, he resumes his pursuit of her." "Again, she comes out of her apartment building, gets into her car, and wanders off somewhere." "And by now, the audience is totally hooked." "Where is she going?" "What's going to happen to her?" "She tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide." "What's next?" "This time, she takes a particularly circuitous route." "Going right, and then left, and right again, seeming to lead him on a wild-goose chase." "He follows nevertheless." "He's completely obsessed with this woman now, quite apart from having agreed to follow her on her husband's behalf." "He's now pretty much following her on his own behalf." "He, as well as the audience, is confused at this time as Hitchcock takes him on a kind of magical mystery tour through the streets of San Francisco." "It seems that she's heading down again toward the Bay, but, in fact, she's turning away from the Bay." "And she's arrived, through this circuitous route, back at Scottie's own apartment," "where he's followed her and sees that she puts an envelope under his door." "All of this is, of course, a hoax on her part to lead him further into a web." "That letter for me?" "The note, which she retrieves, was a "thank you" note for saving her from the Bay." "Here you get a look at Kim Novak in all her glory, in one of Edith Head's most incredible creations, this wide-collared white coat." "White against white." "It sure was." "White blonde, white coat, white wall." "Hitchcock breaks almost every rule of color, of a color film, and yet it works." "It works because it's so highly original." "A lot of these portraits could be hung in a museum." "They're such beautiful realizations, almost like great paintings of the characters." "Would you like to have a cup of coffee?" "We see that Scottie's apartment here is in Telegraph Hill, overlooking the Coit Tower." "And that's how she tells him she remembered where he lived." "She remembered the Coit Tower and its relation to his apartment." "She tells him that she's just gonna go off wandering, with no destination, and he asks if he can come along with her, if they can wander together." "And she tells him that when two people wander together, they usually have a destination and they're not just wandering anymore." "They're going someplace for some reason." "Oh, I don't know." "And we begin to see that the Kim Novak character..." "No, I just thought that I'd wander." "...is having a kind of emotional reaction to the Stewart character, but is it real?" "Or is it part of Hitchcock's elaborate hoax?" "This unusual circumstance, almost implausible circumstance, of Stewart being hired to follow a man's wife" "because the husband is curious about where she is going and thinks that she might be about to do harm to herself." "A very strange sort of situation, but made real and concrete by these extraordinary and glorious locations." "Hitchcock was equally fascinated with the northern coast of California as he was with the major centers of Europe, where he grew up and visited many times." "And in this sequence, they've driven to the Big Basin Redwoods State Park," "where the giant sequoias are." "And supposedly..." "I guess it's a stand-in for Muir Woods where the giant redwoods are, which are much closer to the area where they are in San Francisco." "Muir Woods is no more than a half-hour away from the center of the Vertigo story." "But this is Big Basin State Park, and these are the giant sequoia trees." "And there's a sign on which it's written that the sequoias are always green and ever-living, and the rings of the tree are indicated by the dates when various events took place in the life of the tree." "Various historical events." "And at one point, Madeleine gestures to a spot on the tree rings and says, "Here I was born," ""and here I died..."" "...and there I died." "...with a kind of indication that, like the giant sequoias, she's ever-living." "At this point, you could be watching a dream." "Your own dream, this character's dream." "Everyone who has been captured by Vertigo enters it slowly, as though entering into one's own dream or nightmare." "And that's what's happening to the character of Scottie, too." "His movements become slower, the shots slow down." "The pace." "He loses Madeleine only to find her again." "He's drawn closer and closer to the mystery of this woman, while understanding nothing about what's going on with her." "Madeleine, where are you now?" " Here with you." " Where?" "Tall trees..." "Have you been here before?" " Yes." " When?" "When were you born?" " Long ago." " Where?" "When?" "Tell me." " Madeleine, tell me." " No!" "Madeleine tell me what it is." "Where do you go?" " What takes you away?" " No, I can't tell you." "When you jumped into the bay, you didn't know where you were." " You guessed, but you didn't know." " I didn't jump." " I didn't jump." "I fell." "You told me I fell." " Why did you jump?" "He has fallen in love with a vision, possibly a vision of his own dreamlike conjuring." "Shall I take you home?" "And we begin to think about the myth of Carlotta Valdes," "and if that's really the basis for Kim Novak's breakdown, if she herself is a real person or a figment of Scottie's imagination." "But, again, she is this idealized woman that he can't help but be both attracted to and ultimately repelled by." "Which is basically the story of Hitchcock's own obsession that he was so magnificently able to work out in his best films." "I'm responsible for you now." "You know, the Chinese say that once you've saved a person's life, you're responsible for it forever." "It almost appears as though we're in a travelogue now of Northern California." "They're at a place called Cypress Point." "But the lone cypress tree there, which is based on an actual tree that exists at Cypress Point, this one is a prop." "These shots were made in a studio." "And the background is simply a background projection of a location, and the characters are matched against these filmed backgrounds in a studio." "Now, at this time, when this film was being made," "Italian Neorealism had been recognized as a great cinematic style." "The Italian Neorealists had strongly influenced American filmmakers, as did the French New Wave." "And they were shooting films on location, sometimes using scenes that were not lit at all or badly lit, but were, in fact, on location." "Hitchcock wouldn't even bother to try and do a film completely on location like that." "So, again, an audience that was schooled in the techniques of cinema could see that this is a rear-screen background," "and not a realistic place." "And, again, this is not something that bothered Hitchcock because Hitchcock's philosophy was, wherever he took the audience, the audience would go there and be very pleased to be there." "And so he was using all of the elements, all of the techniques of cinema that he knew and understood perhaps better than any other filmmaker who ever lived." "And so, in watching the dream or the nightmare play out in Vertigo, only the purist cinema disciple is disturbed by the artifice that they're looking at." "And the idea of logic and reality just doesn't really exist anymore." "We're caught up in this dream." "We ourselves are the participant in this story." "It's almost voyeuristic." "Hitchcock has turned the audience into rooms full of voyeurs." "I'm so afraid." "Here's this incredible moment where the waves break, and the music breaks, and the two lovers kiss in one of the most passionate kisses that Hitchcock ever photographed." "And this was Hitchcock's real gift, to make voyeurs of all of us." "Hi, Johnny." "Hi." "Scottie goes back to Midge's apartment, and Midge, who's followed Scottie to the places where Scottie has followed Madeleine, tells him that she's returned to her first love, which is painting." "She's no longer doing advertising pictures." "Where do you go these days?" "She has a surprise for Scottie." "Where?" "She makes him a drink, his famous scotch and soda." "What was this..." "What was this desperate urge to see me?" "All I said in my note was, "Where are you?"" "Doesn't sound very desperate to me." "Yeah, I detected a little undercurrent." "She says, "I thought if I made you a drink," ""you'd take me out to a movie." And he says, "Sure."" "There's a lot of drinking that goes on in this picture." "In restaurants, in apartments." "The solution to almost everything is to have a drink." "You see this constantly." "The same themes appear over and over in this picture." "Wandering." "What have you been doing?" "So Midge gives Scottie a drink, tries to get out of him his admission of what he's been doing with his days." "Seemingly nothing, but he can't talk to her about them." "He can't talk to anyone about them." "She tells him she has a surprise for him." " You wanna see?" " Yeah." "And when he goes to look at her painting, he sees that she's placed herself in the costume and the background of Carlotta Valdes." "And Scottie doesn't find this funny at all." "It's not funny, Midge." "It's now too close to the bone." "Johnny, I just thought..." "This myth of Carlotta and the myth of Madeleine Elster have combined to completely obsess him." "And Midge realized that she's crossed a line with Scottie that'll be very difficult to come back over." "Marjorie Wood, you fool!" "Idiot!" "She realizes that her own obsession with Scottie has caused her to perhaps lose him forever." "Stupid!" "Stupid!" "Stupid!" "We see a very haunting shot of Scottie, probably played by a double here 'cause we never really see Stewart, wandering around Union Square at night," "aimlessly." "He goes back to his apartment, and as dawn breaks, he's fallen asleep." "But his doorbell rings." "But someone appears at the door." "This is truly a disturbing moment." "Madeleine has come to him at dawn." " The dream came back again." " Now, now..." "We see that her own obsession about the possibility of her being driven to some dark fate" "has escalated." "By now, the two of them are in love." "Her motivation is totally unclear." "He has fallen in love with possibly a dead person," "possibly a dream." "And Hitchcock said that what attracted him to an emotionally disturbed man is his attempt to recreate the image of a dead woman through another one who's alive." "In Hitchcock's own description of these characters, what is occurring is a kind of necrophilia, which is really an almost unmentionable sexual aberration." "The desire to go to bed with a dead person." "That's what is happening here." "The Kim Novak character is representative of a dead person, of a woman who very soon will be dead." "You've been there before." "You've seen it." "And then reborn." "Scottie, what is it?" "I've never been there." "Think hard." "Now go on about your dream." "What was it that frightened you so?" "I stood alone on the green searching for something." "And then I started to walk to the church." "But then the darkness closed in and I was alone in the dark." "The place that Madeleine tells Scottie that she's seen in her dream is a place that Scottie knows." "It's familiar to him." "He recognizes it." "He believes it's an actual place and that he can take her there." "And so they make an appointment to meet that afternoon and drive up to this place where Madeleine says is her dream, but is actually a place that Scottie has himself seen before." "It is, again, an actual location." "It's about 100 miles south of San Francisco, on the coast." "It's known as the Mission of San Juan Bautista, or St. John the Baptist." "And it's an old Spanish mission that they get to, founded in 1797," "very near Monterey." "And this is an actual location." "It has the remnants of an old town, a courthouse, a stable, and the mission itself." "Scottie takes Madeleine into the stables to show her that the place that appeared in her dream is a real place that undoubtedly she's seen before." "He's trying to make sense out of her dream." "But understand this, her dream isn't real." "Again, the entire first part of this film, well over an hour into the film itself, has all been a hoax." "Kim Novak is amazingly effective here as a woman who seems to be wandering around in a dream world, uncertain of who or what she is or what's in store for her, while Scottie tries to show her that the gray horse that she saw in her dream" "was just this replica of a horse." "That the location she described is a very famous landmark on the coast of California, and not simply a place in her dreams where she is slated to die." "But Kim Novak acts the part of a woman whose destiny is beyond her control, who is following her own obsession, her own drive towards suicide." "We're together." "No, it's too late." "There's something I must do." "No." "There's nothing you must do." "There's nothing you must do." "No one possesses you." "You're safe with me." "And just as Scottie doesn't wanna let her go," "Madeleine is drawn away from him, out of his arms and toward the mission tower." "Hitchcock here has created a tremendous sense of unease, both in the part of his characters and the audience." "We know that something dreadful is going to happen." "We're not sure quite what." "But very shortly, it will occur to us before it occurs to the James Stewart character." "You believe I love you?" "Yes." "And if you lose me, then you'll know I..." "I loved you and I wanted to go on loving you." "He begs her not to go alone into this tower because he knows that she believes this is the place where she'll die." "She moves dreamlike toward the mission, looks up, and there's the one shot that tells the audience what is likely to happen here." "She's going to the top of that tower, and he's gonna follow her, but now we remember that he can't go to a high place, that he still has his fear of heights." "And in this sequence, Hitchcock dramatizes his acrophobia." "He dramatizes it with a shot that was made with a miniature, looking down from the interior of the tower." "That's a miniature, and the camera is both dollying back while it's zooming in." "It's a dreamlike motion where you are both coming and going at the same time." "The camera moves back, the zoom on the lens goes in, and you are caught in the middle someplace." "And as Madeleine goes to the top," "Scottie can't follow her, and he sees her body dropping from the top down to the stones below." "And she has fulfilled her dream of death." "And he has witnessed her suicide." "Along with everything else, his sense of guilt kicks in, and he realizes that he himself is in some way responsible for her death, and he is further drawn into the position of a man hanging over an abyss." "While the nuns of the mission come forward to retrieve the body and a priest appears," "Scottie slips out." "As viewed from above, as though he's being judged by a higher power, he slips silently away from the scene of the crime that has shattered his life." "There is a long sequence here of a coroner's inquest, where the coroner lays out for the local selectmen" "the situation as he understands it, repeating in clear, logical terms what we've seen as a kind of a dreamlike situation." "And you have heard that Mr. Elster was prepared to take his wife to an institution..." "The coroner is played by a great old character actor and veteran of other Hitchcock movies called Henry Jones." "...seemed the proper choice for the role of..." "He describes to the selectmen how Gavin Elster sent Scottie Ferguson, a retired cop, to follow his wife to see what the nature of his wife's illness was." "In a way, to try and prevent her from an act that she thought was inevitable, that of killing herself." "But that Scottie completely failed in his duties to Elster." "And the question becomes, is he responsible for this woman's death?" "Or could he have prevented it?" "...his character and ability." "Captain Hansen was most enthusiastic." "The fact that once before, under similar circumstances," "Mr. Ferguson allowed a police colleague to fall to his death," "Captain Hansen dismissed..." "Next to him at the inquest is his chief of detectives, who was there as a kind of character witness for him." "And the Henry Jones character, the coroner, lays out a scenario that draws home to Scottie, even in his catatonic state," "that he shares a kind of guilt for Madeleine's death." "And we see, simply by watching Stewart, that Stewart feels this guilt." "Way beyond anything that he actually did." "We now know that Scottie tried to save Madeleine's life, but that it was hopeless." "And now there is the possibility that he will be found by a jury" "to be guilty of her death." "The Gavin Elster character is, of course, completely exonerated." "He tried to do the best for his wife, he tried to get a man who he knew and trusted from their college days together to kind of follow her and protect her from herself." "And it has all backfired." "...the state of mind of Madeleine Elster prior to her death, from the manner..." "We listen, as the jury does, with great interest to how a group of ordinary men formed into a jury will interpret these proceedings." "And the question at this point in the film is whether Scottie will, in fact, be found guilty of the death of Madeleine Elster?" " We've reached a verdict." " Thank you." ""The jury finds that Madeleine Elster committed suicide" ""while of unsound mind."" "Your verdict will be so recorded." "Dismissed." "All right, Scottie, let's go." "Mind if I speak to him for a minute?" "No, go ahead." "Elster takes Scottie aside and tells him that he's leaving San Francisco." "He's leaving the ship-building business." "He never liked it." "He's going to Europe." "He's sorry he got Scottie involved with this." "Scottie is too blown away to understand what he's being told." "He has now, for the second time, been a victim of his own acrophobia" "and having caused the death of somebody else as a result of it." "If there's anything I can do for you before I go." "This is the end of the first part of Vertigo." "The next part is almost another movie." "And the great technique that Hitchcock has managed to bring about is pulling these two parts together into a whole, in which part two," "while confusing us at first, provides a kind of "logical" explanation." "Scottie goes back to see a grave in the old cemetery now, and it's Madeleine's grave." "We realize that he will never sleep a trouble-free night again." "He dreams of the tremendous tragedy brought about by his acrophobia and vertigo." "He gets certain clues that don't really come together for him, in this nightmare, of what has happened." "The elements that, set apart, brought about the tragedy." "The necklace of Carlotta Valdes, the beautiful brooch that will later become so important to this story." "As he wanders through his nightmare, so he wandered through this last adventure, leading to the death of Madeleine." "Through a cemetery, into the empty grave that she thought about." "That he said was nothing but a nightmare." "Now he shares this nightmare, and in his fantasy, his vertigo is an image that becomes indelible in his mind and in the minds of the viewer of this film." "At this point, there is only one place for him, and that's this kind of psychiatric nursing home." "It's Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus." "I had a long talk with that lady..." "Midge comes to see him, tries to cheer him up, brings him some Mozart music." "He can't relate to her or to anything that's going on around her." "She's his ever-loyal friend who stays with him, who loves him, but is helpless at what's become of him." "She's trying to get some answers, too, as to the terrible twist that his life has taken." "The spiral of which he's become a part, that has, at this point in the film, destroyed his life." "It shuts off automatically." "Oh, Johnny." "Johnny, please try." "Midge's appeal is that of a loyal, devoted friend, and more than a friend." "The woman who loves him, but she can't reach him." "There's nothing she can do to prevent his descent." "And we now become aware that the tragedy that was Madeleine Elster's will soon become Scottie Ferguson's." "Mozart's no help." "Midge is no help." "Scottie is contained in a cage of his own making." "You don't even know I'm here, do you?" "But I'm here." "Nurse, could I see the doctor for a moment?" "Doctor, Miss Wood." "Won't you go in, please?" "Yes, Miss Wood?" "Doctor, how long is it going to take you to pull him out of this?" "Midge goes off to see the psychiatrist who runs the hospital, and she learns from him" "that only another emotional shock can cure something like Scottie's acrophobia." "I can give you one thing." "He was in love with her." "Oh, that does complicate the problem, doesn't it?" "I can give you another complication, he still is." "And you want to know something, Doctor?" "I don't think Mozart's going to help at all." "And so part one of Vertigo comes to an end, but remember, part one was simply a hoax." "As you're soon to discover." "I tell you that knowing that you haven't come to the end of it." "Or you've probably seen it, if you're listening to this commentary, so you know what's coming." "But Hitchcock would want you to know that as well, because he's soon going to tell you that everything you've seen is a hoax." "Scottie goes back to the apartment building where he first saw Madeleine, and he sees her car." "It is, in fact, her car." "He sees a blonde woman coming out who's going to drive the car." "But he finds out that this woman is much older than Madeleine was, and that she, in fact, bought the car from Gavin and Madeleine Elster before they moved out of San Francisco." "Why, I bought it from a man who used to live here, in this apartment building," "Mr. Gavin Elster." "I bought it from him when he moved away." "You knew him and his wife." "The poor thing." "I didn't know her." "Tell me, is it true that she really..." "I'm..." "I'm sorry." "This is the beginning of Scottie seeing Madeleine everywhere." "He goes back to the place where he first saw her, Ernie's Restaurant." "Again, this is a set, the exterior and the interior." "Scottie's drawn back to these places as we are drawn back to a recurring nightmare." "What is he doing there?" "He's probably hoping to see the ghost of Madeleine." "And he sees a woman sitting at the same table where he first saw her, but now she's coming toward him, it's not from behind." "But it's not Madeleine either." "Give me a scotch and soda, will you." "Any well-dressed and attractive blonde woman that he sees retracing the steps of his journey toward Madeleine reminds him of her." "He sees her over and over again, both in dreams and in these places." "He sees the bouquet of flowers that Madeleine bought that she let fall into the San Francisco Bay." "And very quickly he sees a woman that looks very much like Madeleine." "She's wearing a green dress now." "And remember, the first concrete image that he saw of Madeleine, she was wearing green." "And so the color green now becomes a motif that draws him to follow this woman who has something of a resemblance, it seems, to Madeleine, but not quite." "He follows her to a place called the Empire Hotel, which still exists in San Francisco." "It's now called the New York Hotel." "It's at 940 Sutter Street." "That's the actual location." "There's Stewart in front of a film backdrop." "And he sees this new woman, who looks like Madeleine, again in the second floor of an apartment building." "Not the McKittrick, but the Empire." "And he follows her to the floor where he believes she's staying." "It's become clear that the Scottie Ferguson character, played by James Stewart, is completely possessed by the spirit of Madeleine Elster." "What happens to an audience when they see the film for the first time, at this point, is the audience knows that this is Kim Novak." "That Kim Novak played Madeleine, and now she's playing this new woman, called Judy." "But what is Judy Barton's relationship to Madeleine Elster?" "They're played by the same actress, but now she speaks with a different voice." "Well, what is it?" "Could I ask you a couple of questions?" "What for?" "Who are you?" "My name is John Ferguson." "Is this some kind of Gallup poll?" "No." "There are just couple of things I'd like to ask." "You live in this hotel?" "No." "I happened to see you when you came in, so I thought..." "Yeah, I thought so." "A pickup." "You've got a nerve, following me right into the hotel and up to my room." "Now, you beat it." "Go on and beat it." "No, please, please." "I just want to talk to you." "Listen, I'm gonna yell in a minute." "Listen, I'm not gonna hurt you." "Honest." "I promise." "The audience, at this point, is completely confused." "We have gone where Hitchcock has led us, we're happy to be here, but we're confused." "What relation is this woman, Judy Barton, to Madeleine Elster?" "The coincidence of Scottie seeing her so quickly after the inquest is remarkable." "But he tells her that she reminds him of someone, and he's drawn to her, and we see how drawn he is to her." "You don't needs words in this scene to understand what's going on with him." "With her, you have no idea." "Well, you don't look very much like Jack the Ripper." "What do you want to know?" " I want to know your name." " Judy Barton." "She acts completely the innocent in front of Scottie." "She doesn't know who he is, or why he's followed her up here, or what he wants from her." "But he tells her that she reminds him of someone." "And in the original novel" "From Among the Dead, by Boileau and Narcejac, this mystery continues until the very end of the book." "My gosh, do I have to prove it?" "She shows him her driver's license, showing him proof that she's Judy Barton" "from Elvira, Kansas." "She works at Magnin's, which was a real department store in Union Square in San Francisco." "She's lived in this apartment for three years, found Kansas boring and came to San Francisco for adventure." "And she has visible proof that she is who she is." "Here's the mirror again, reflecting her double, but not him." "And we have the knowledge that he doesn't, that this is the same actress who played the dead woman." "She's..." "She's dead, isn't she?" "I'm sorry." "And I'm sorry I yelled at you." "He sees photographs of her parents in Kansas." "Her father is standing outside of a hardware store with his name on it, "Barton Hardware."" "That's her mother on the porch of their house." "So, she's clearly not Madeleine Elster." "And as you will soon find out, she is not Madeleine Elster." "Will you have dinner with me?" "Scottie, by way of apology, but more by way of obsession, invites Judy to have dinner with him that evening." "For some strange, inexplicable reason, again, defying logic," "Judy agrees to have dinner with Scottie." "Would you do that with a guy who followed you up to your apartment off the street?" "An hour?" "But now Hitchcock tells you, the audience, but not Scottie, exactly who this woman is." "Through a flashback that she envisions, we see that indeed she did go up into the mission tower, followed by Scottie." "That she indeed went up the stairs." "That he experienced his vertigo." "But he couldn't follow her all the way up, and as she went up through a trap door," "Gavin Elster threw his real wife out the window of the mission to the steps below, while he and Judy hid in the shadows and waited for" "Madeleine's body to be claimed, and then they drove away." "So you now know, the audience knows at this point in the film that Judy Barton and the so-called Madeleine Elster are the same person." "And this is Hitchcock's definition of suspense." "The Hitchcock definition of suspense, as he stated it, is take a situation where two people are having a conversation at, let's say, a dinner table." "And the conversation goes on for five minutes, and then, at the end of the conversation, a bomb goes off," "blowing them both up." "Now, the audience is shocked, but there has been no suspense." "The five minutes of conversation has been boring leading up to the bomb because the audience didn't know that the bomb was there." "Now, however, if you show the audience that a bomb is under the table, every second of this five-minute conversation is fraught with suspense because you are in on the secret." "You know a bomb is going off, the characters don't." "And your heart is beating for fear of what's going to happen to them." "In this case, Hitchcock doesn't wait until the resolution of the film to tell you that Judy Barton is in fact the woman who played Madeleine Elster, who was the mistress of Gavin Elster and participated with him, for money, to help him murder his wife" "and set up Scottie, so that Scottie would've witnessed a suicide." "And it becomes like a perfect crime." "And so, now we know that these two women are the same, but Scottie doesn't." "And so we become more and more afraid of what's likely to happen to him when he discovers it, because the woman he's in love with, that he falls in love with again, the dead girl who comes back into a living person" "is the same person." "And she's evil, she is a murderess." "She was going to write him a note and tell him all of this, but she decides not to." "Hoping against hope that he won't discover who she is because it turns out that she, too, was in love with him." "And now you see how illogical this situation is." "The chance meeting on the street," "Scottie seeing Madeleine everywhere very quickly becomes concrete." "That he actually sees her again, still in San Francisco." "Why wouldn't she have left town?" "Why is she living in an apartment building very near to where he lives?" "How is it that he has so quickly discovered her again?" "Doesn't know who she is, but she knows who he is." "He continues to see images of Madeleine even in other women." "And Judy Barton now knows how deeply he loves her and is obsessed by her." "Here." "Here, I'll do it." "There you are." "Thanks again." "Good night." "Can I see you tomorrow?" "Tomorrow night?" "And again, in an echo of the green fog, and the green dress, the green collar," "that Scottie first saw Madeleine framed within," "Hitchcock repeats the theme of the green background as a neon light shining out the window of Judy's apartment." "Hitchcock is using colors to trigger memory states." "Why?" "The story has now given up any sense of plausibility that this situation could be real." "But what is more real than the situation and the story is the obsession, and that's what Hitchcock is presenting to us in this film." "Most filmmakers, most directors will look at a novel, or a play, or an original screenplay, and be drawn to it because of the story." "The plot has been the staple of Hollywood films almost from the beginning." "But film itself has the ability to convey a dream state." "Film is the closest thing to dreaming." "We sit in the dark and watch these images, and the images conjure certain feelings, like memory, obsession, and guilt." "And that's what Hitchcock is doing in most of his films, but in this film more than any other." "We see them now in another classic San Francisco location." "This is the Palace of Fine Arts, which was designed by the great Bernard Maybeck, a famous Berkeley architect, and it was built for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915." "In addition to having this extraordinary, obsessive dream, we've been on a kind of guided tour of the highlights of San Francisco, which are very real and very concrete, but also very dreamlike in their own way." "The Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Palace of Fine Arts, the Big Basin State Park, where the giant sequoias are." "These are all extraordinary places to set a murder mystery about obsession." "It's the best." "How much is that?" "That'll be 50 cents." "Thank you." "And Scottie's obsession has grown deeper." "He now wants to dress Judy to look exactly like Madeleine." "Now remember, we, the audience, know that Judy is Madeleine." "Well, she's not Madeleine, because Madeleine was Elster's real wife." "Judy was Elster's mistress, who he paid and persuaded to help him kill his wife." "But so deep was Scottie's obsession with Madeleine that he wants to dress Judy in exactly the same way that Madeleine was dressed." "It proves to be a rather difficult task because the dress that came from this department store is now a number of years older, and they have to go on a search for it." "But as the saleswoman says to Scottie," ""You certainly seem to know what you want, sir."" "He wants the exact dress that he saw Madeleine wear." "You're looking for the suit that she wore, for me." "You want me to be dressed like her." "Judy, I just want you to look nice." "I know the kind of suit that'd look well on you." "No, I won't do it!" "Judy resists it." "Judy." "Here, again, they're reflected in these mirrors." "The duality of each character now as they see the exact copy of the dress." "And Judy knows that Scottie won't give up until he's turned her back into Madeleine." "All right, dear." "We'll have it for you to try on in a moment." "How long will the alterations take?" "Well..." "May we have it by tonight?" "Well, if it's absolutely necessary." "Yes, it is." "Judy is in love with Scottie, but this is so clearly a dangerous game that she continues to play." "You certainly do know what you want, sir." "I'll see what we have." "He gets her the exact shoes that he saw Madeleine wearing." "To think of this situation in any logical way, this is about the time when Judy would check out." "I mean, this guy has now, she sees, become so obsessed with the murderess that she was that it can only unravel" "in another tragic way." "And so, why doesn't she leave?" "Why doesn't she just get out of his life?" "Well, they are both now hooked on opposite sides of an obsession." "The movie is not about the plot, it's about obsession." "Judy, I tell you this." "These past few days have been the first happy days I've known in a year." "I know." "I know..." "It's gone from being a murder mystery where the audience now knows who the murderers were before the ending of the film, into a kind of dream state" "where the plot doesn't matter anymore." "Who or why the murders were committed doesn't matter anymore." "This is simply about this man's incredible, unworldly passion for this woman." ""In dressing her," Hitchcock said, "he's trying, really, to undress her."" ""Changing and dressing a woman" ""is like stripping her naked." "It's the same thing," Hitchcock has said." "His love for this woman, his desire for her is akin to necrophilia." "Making love to a dead person." "If I let you change me, will that do it?" "Hitchcock's own obsessions were both brutal and refined." " Will you love me?" " Yes." ""Suspense is like a woman," he said." ""The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement."" "He described his perfect woman of mystery as one who was blonde, subtle, and Nordic." "Here, come on." "We'll sit by the fire." "The question of this film is no longer who committed the murder, who's gonna pay for the murders, the question is, what's going to happen to these people?" "Where is this obsession going to lead him or her?" "I'm afraid it's going to take several hours." "The young lady thought perhaps you'd like to go home." "And then she'll come there as soon as she's finished." "This idealized version of a woman is what the film is now dealing with." "The eyes and the lips that we saw in the beginning, before the titles of the film, are now repeated in a slightly different way as the emotional fixation of changing" "Judy back into Madeleine has become the single-most-important thing in Scottie's life." "He waits for her now to come back from the hairdresser because he's decided to turn her into a blonde," "when we know that she was a blonde." "Perhaps she was a brunette, but she dyed her hair blonde." "Now she's back as a brunette, and he makes her go blonde again." "As Hitchcock made all of his heroines be blonde." "In fact, the phrase "Hitchcock blonde"" "has entered the English language as a very known idea." "Hitchcock's obsession with blondes." "With the Nordic beauties." ""Blonde, subtle, and Nordic-looking," to quote him." "Judy comes back to her apartment." "Madeleine has been almost perfectly recreated." "Same suit, same color hair, but it's not enough for Scottie." "Her hair isn't styled in the same way that Madeleine's was." "He hasn't achieved his perfect image of Madeleine." "He hasn't recreated it." "He needs, for some illogical reason, to recreate Madeleine exactly." "It just didn't seem to suit me." "Please, Judy." "And realizing this," "Judy goes into the washroom to try and complete the vision to his specifications." "Now, the movie code was pretty severe at this time, but we know that what Scottie is waiting for" "is not so much for her to be coming out of that bathroom dressed like Madeleine," "but he's waiting for Madeleine to come out undressed." "He's reached a point where only something very dangerous can happen to both of them." "He's in a heightened state, which is where Hitchcock has put the audience." "Where he has often put the audience." "And now, as though coming out of the San Francisco fog where he saw her at the cemetery, here is Madeleine." "And it's at this point in the film where I always realize, as many times as I've seen it, how incredibly perfect Kim Novak is." "How she embodies this character so completely." "I have never felt that Stewart is the ideal guy to play this part." "As great an actor as he is, and as true of a Hitchcock character as he is." "But Kim Novak has become the embodiment of every man's obsession simply by being there." "This was a rear-screen shot that Hitchcock devised to take them from out of that room, back into the stable." "They're on a turntable, and behind them is a film that is a pan and a splice of one scene to another, so it looks as though they exist in two worlds now." "Which, in many ways, they do." "It would appear as though their story has reached a kind of happy ending." "He's got what he wants." "She's Madeleine." "She has been able to return to him as the one he loved and as herself." "She wears the little black cocktail dress that also belonged to Madeleine, and everything is perfect." "They're even planning to go out to dinner at Ernie's together, which is the place where he first saw her, and that they went back to and revisited." "And all of these themes now begin to come together." "The places, the looks, the ideas repeated over and over again." "And what could go wrong for them?" "He has created his perfect woman, and she's happy to be it." "But here's the MacGuffin, the famous Hitchcock MacGuffin." "I'm just about ready." "All I've got to do is find my lipstick." "The brooch worn by Carlotta Valdes in the painting that was a gift, a copy of which was a gift from Gavin Elster to Judy Barton, who helped him murder his wife." "Judy puts on that brooch, and without a word," "we know that Stewart realizes the hoax that he's been a part of." "Stewart realizes that the woman in his arms is not a dream, is not a recreation." "She's flesh and blood, and an accomplice to murder." "So the added complication for him is that he's got his true love back, but she's a murderess." "And they're not going to Ernie's tonight for that last dinner." "He's taking her back to the mission, where's he's going to put her and himself through the steps that led to the murder of Gavin Elster's wife." "Where're you going?" "One final thing I have to do." "In the way that a mirror image works, reflecting on itself and re-reflecting, so this story works." "Places that we saw earlier in one way, in one light, are now played back in a different way, in a different light." "It's as though we were originally going through a tunnel, and are now, at this point in the film, coming out the other side of the tunnel, where there is about to be, in this darkness," "some light, some revelation." "And Judy Barton realizes that Scottie knows the game." "Why?" "He's taking her back to the place where she lured him to become an unwitting witness to the murder of her lover's wife." "Right there." "We stood there, and I kissed her for the last time." "And she said, "If you lose me," " "you'll know that I loved you..."" " Scottie." ""..." "And wanted to keep on loving you."" "And I said, "I won't lose you." But I did." "And then she turned." "Once again, she doesn't wanna go into that mission, but not as before." "She doesn't wanna go back up there now because she knows that he knows, and what she has to face." "Before, when she didn't wanna go up, it was an act." "She had to lure him up those steps, so he could witness the body of Madeleine Elster falling to the ground." "Now, she doesn't wanna go back because of her own fear of how this tragedy could end." "I couldn't find her, and then I heard footsteps on the stairs." "She was running up the tower." "His imagination has been so triggered by his recreation of Madeleine Elster..." "And I tried to follow her, but I couldn't get to the top." "...that it is now perverted into a sense of violence, and anger, and brutality." "The woman that he so worshipped and adored, and was so obsessed by, is now a woman that he could kill." "That he realizes was a phony." "Go up the stairs, Judy." "And we now fear." "The great trick of Hitchcock is we now fear for the life of this woman." "Hitchcock has taken a woman, caused her to die, be reborn," "and eventually to die again in the same place." "How illogical that is, but how wonderfully cinematic." "And so Scottie and Judy go back up the steps of the mission." "The moment of vertigo is repeated in the same way, the backward dolly, the forward zoom." "He takes her back up into the bell tower, where the murder occurred." "And in many ways, in addition to bringing her back so that she will confess to what happened up there, he's taking himself back so that he may cure himself of the condition that brought him here." "That was the slip." " I remembered the necklace." " Let me go!" "Now we fear also for him." "Is she gonna push him off?" "What's gonna become of him?" "He can't go up to this tower." "He can't look down because of his acrophobia." "Elster and his wife?" " Yes." " Yes, and she was the one who died." "The real wife, not you." "You were the copy." "You were the counterfeit, weren't you?" " Was she dead or alive when..." " Dead!" "Dead!" "He'd broken her neck." "He'd broken her neck." "Wasn't taking any chances, was he?" "So, when you got up there, he pushed her off the tower, but it was you that screamed." "Why did you scream?" "I wanted to stop it, Scottie." "I ran up to stop it." "I..." "If you wanted to stop it, why did you scream, since you tricked me so well up to then?" "You played the wife very well, Judy." "He made you over, didn't he?" "He made you over just like I made you over, only better." "Not only the clothes and the hair, but the looks, and the manner, and the words, and those beautiful phony trances." "And you jumped into the Bay, didn't you?" "I'll bet you're a wonderful swimmer, aren't you?" "Aren't you?" " Aren't you?" " Yes!" "And then what did he do?" "Did he train you?" "Did he rehearse you?" "Did he tell you exactly what to do, what to say?" "You were a very apt pupil, too, weren't you?" "You were a very apt pupil." "Why did you pick on me?" "Why me?" "Your accident!" "Your accident." "My accident..." "I was the setup, wasn't I?" "I was the setup." "I was a made-to-order witness." "I..." "I made it." " I made it." " What are you going to do?" "We're going up and look at the scene of the crime." "Come on, Judy." "But now he's standing on the precipice, looking down to the place where Madeleine Elster was murdered by Gavin Elster and Judy Barton." "And he tells her that he knows everything that happened, and she admits to it." "But still she tells him that she loves him." "While he is about to destroy her, she's never been more in love with him." "Judy, with all of his wife's money, and all that freedom, and that power, and he ditched you." "What a shame." "But he knew he was safe." "He knew you couldn't talk." "Did he give you anything?" "Some money." "And the necklace, Carlotta's necklace." "And there was where you made your mistake, Judy." "You shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing." "You shouldn't have been..." "You shouldn't have been that sentimental." "I loved you so, Madeleine." "Scottie." "I was safe when you found me." "There was nothing that you could prove." "When I saw you again, I couldn't run away." "I loved you so." "I walked into danger and let you change me because I loved you, and I wanted you." "For a moment it appears as though they'll come together again, that their love will triumph over this horrendous nightmare." "And at that moment, when the story can go no farther, when it's been stretched to the limit," "a figure that appears to be Death comes on the scene." "Again, one of the most frightening images in the Hitchcock canon, the silhouette of impending death." "He looks down, and he's able to look down." "He's cured of his acrophobia."