The Two Greatest Films of All Time?

The two most critically acclaimed films of all time are both about the same thing – love, and how to destroy it in the modern world…

For decades, critics and academics have all agreed that when it comes to the art of cinema, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), in its storytelling and filmic innovation, its sympathetic and withering critique of a semi-fictional American tycoon, is the pinnacle and benchmark of the entire art form.

Yet as the critics, notably the British and American Film Institutes, released their annual lists of the ‘greatest films of all time’, one film kept rising in their esteem, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

In 2012, Vertigo overtook Citizen Kane on the BFI list for the first time. To add to the connection between both films, Vertigo and Citizen Kane have been included this year in the South African IEB AP English syllabus, and thus I will be teaching them to Grade 11 students this year. I thought it might be worth sharing my analysis of both famed films on this blog…

Intriguingly, both films were not highly acclaimed on their release. Citizen Kane was released under a cloud of controversy, because it seemed to base its story so closely upon the real American tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper baron, like the eponymous Kane, who built a lavish castle for himself, took up a mistress, made a fortune from ‘yellow journalism’, helped spark the Spanish-American War involving Cuban independence, and gradually moved rightward in their political beliefs. Hearst tried to destroy literally the film, and the controversy probably permanently damaged Orson Welles’ career. (Citizen Kane) is also said to be Donald Trump’s favourite film – and his own similarity to Kane is surely no coincidence.

With time, people began to look objectively at the film, its unique way of telling a story (through multiple narrators), its cinematic innovations (such as deep focus), and its essentially American theme – the pursuit of wealth and power as substitutes for love.

Remarkably, the film was Welles’ debut (after he achieved success and notoriety in radio and theatre), and as a young man he had been given complete creative control by the powerful RKO studio. Suffice to say, he would struggle for creative independence for the rest of his life.

Both films are detective stories

Like Vertigo, Citizen Kane is ultimately a detective or mystery story. There is the essential question – what does Kane’s final word in life, ‘Rosebud’, mean? – and there is a detective – Thompson, the reporter – who travels the country in quest of Kane’s hidden life story to solve the mystery.

In Vertigo, retired policeman, John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson, is hired by an old college friend (Gavin Elster) to follow his wife (Madeleine Elster), whom he believes has become obsessed with a dead ancestor and is going mad. Unlike Citizen Kane, the detective – with his fatal flaw of vertigo, the severe fear of heights – is the main character. Yet in both films, we ultimately come to realise that the mystery is what Hitchcock would call a ‘MacGuffin’, a false mystery that is ultimately inconsequential and only necessary to drive the action forward. (Think of the briefcase in Dumb and Dumber, or the Deathstar plans in Star Wars.)

On the surface this is where similarities between the films end.

Citizen Kane was the work of a novice filmmaker, alongside rookie actors, keen to throw all his energy at a project in which he took aim at one of the US’s leading tycoons. Vertigo was the work of an established Hollywood favourite (perhaps seeking to make a film slightly more personal and less audience-friendly) shot in colour with major Hollywood stars (James Stewart and Kim Novak).

Yet it is my contention that these two films stand out for critics because both are ultimately about the same thing, the thing possibly most important to all of us, love. And in both films, this love is presented as something which has gone terribly wrong in the modern world. This corrupt love is hidden in plain sight in both films, hidden beneath the MacGuffins of ‘Rosebud’ and the madness of Madeleine Elster – which by the end of both films, are no longer seen as vitally important to either plot at all.

To understand how both films express this shattered love, it is worth analysing each film in turn.

In this post, I am going to focus on Vertigo.

In the next post I will analyse Citizen Kane with Vertigo in mind.

Please be aware spoilers follow.

Vertigo opens with a famous rooftop chase scene, in which Scottie is overcome by vertigo and a fellow cop dies trying to save him. To show the effect of vertigo on film, Hitchcock created what is now called the ‘vertigo effect’, in which the camera zooms in while moving backwards – creating a distortive effect on the frame of the shot, and giving the viewer a taste of the dizziness and almost temptation to jump felt by sufferers of vertigo.

The story then continues with Scottie having retired and chatting with his former fiancée Midge in her San Francisco high rise apartment where she designs clothes. Midge clearly has feelings for Scottie but Scottie does not even notice. When he has another vertigo spell, Midge suggests that perhaps only another emotional shock can cure Scottie.

Scottie is then hired by an old friend to tail his wife, who has become obsessed apparently with her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, who was spurned by the married man with whom she had an affair and a child, and killed herself after living a solitary life in a house built for her by the married man.

Madeleine Elster, while followed by Scottie, buys a bouquet of flowers, visits Carlotta’s grave at an old Catholic Mission, views her portrait in an art museum, and then visits her old house which is now a hotel – here she vanishes mysteriously from Scottie’s view.

After consulting with Gavin and a historian whom Midge knows, Scottie begins to believe that she is facing a kind of psychologically explainable ‘possession’, which means she obsessively traces her great-grandmother’s life without realising or remembering what she is doing.

After Madeleine plunges into the bay beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, Scottie takes her to his apartment. He does not reveal why he was present for her apparent suicide attempt, but the two get to know each other, and now, much to Midge’s disdain, they wander the city and its parks together. She tells him of a dream in which she walks through a hall of mirrors, into darkness, and dies.

When she continues describing her dream, Scottie realises she is describing another Catholic Mission out of town where Carlotta grew up before she met the married man. At the same time, it is clear that the two are beginning to fall in love, or at the very least are strongly attracted to one another – despite Madeleine not realising Scottie has been following her, and that she is married to Scottie’s friend.

Hoping to break the spell, Scottie takes her to the Mission in her dream. There they declare love for each other, but suddenly Madeleine runs away to the top of the tower; Scottie is unable to follow because of his vertigo, and he sees Madeleine plunging to her death.

Haunted by guilt and regret, and despite being cleared of any wrongdoing, Scottie becomes catatonic and has to recover in a mental hospital, with Midge caring for him without any response.

The story begins to darken further when, after his recovery, Scottie begins to recreate the events that led to him finding and losing Madeleine – a woman he barely knew. One day in the streets he recognises a woman with a startling resemblance to Madeleine, Judy Barton. He begins to court her, and slowly persuades her to change her hair and dress so as to, in a certain sense, become Madeleine.

At this stage, the audience realises that Judy Barton was in fact hired by Gavin Elster to impersonate his wife, feign madness, and lead Scottie up the bell tower, where he could substitute her for the real, unconscious Madeleine, and thus throw his rich wife to her death. Scottie was chosen because of his vertigo – it was clear he would not be able to follow Judy to the top of the tower and thus witness the swap and Judy and Gavin’s subsequent withdrawal from the scene.

Judy is hesitant to accede to Scottie’s pursuit and transformation of her but she gives in, hoping to recreate the love she also felt for him when playing the part of Madeleine.

After he has recreated Madeleine in the shape of Judy (who was in fact always his ‘Madeleine’) he spots a unique piece of jewellery on her, which Madeleine used to wear in imitation of Carlotta’s portrait. He suddenly realises that he has been duped, and leads Judy forcibly back up the tower, seemingly to punish her for killing his once innocent vision of Madeleine.

Judy urges him that she does truly love him, but he says it is too late to bring back Madeleine. They embrace one final time, before Judy is startled by a cloaked figure ascending the tower. She steps back and plunges to her death. The cloaked figure turns out to be a nun investigating their voices. Scottie, in shock at seeing Madeleine die again, approaches the edge of the tower, finally cured of his vertigo.

Film critic Charles Barr wrote of Vertigo: “[T]here are six people involved in every encounter: the two people as they see themselves, the two as they are seen by the other, and the two as they really are, whatever that is.”

I think these words serve as a great approach to the film. The film is haunted by love, but nobody really knows the other. Love has become a kind of vertigo – an obsessive plunge into nothingness. Hitchcock expresses this both in cinematography and in narrative. The film constantly lingers on doubles and mirrors.

The first time Scottie sees ‘Madeleine’ she is already a visual double:

In the shot below, Scottie has begun to follow ‘Madeleine’ who is really Judy. Here, Hitchcock is almost suggesting the falseness of this person Scottie thinks he is beginning to know. His face peering through shadow also provides a clue as to his own lack of self-awareness. Right from the outset, Scottie seems to have a burgeoning obsession with ‘Madeleine’ – even though he hardly knows her. Intriguingly, there is another blonde woman in the story who is in fact ‘real’ and in turn has a kind of obsession with Scottie – Midge – yet Scottie is seemingly oblivious to this.

This doubling recurs as Scottie’s obsessions with ‘Madeleine’ only intensifies after he meets Judy, her apparent double. He takes her shopping in a desperate bid to dress her up as ‘Madeleine’. Judy knowing the truth resists but Scottie is determined to have his way, so much so that the good-natured, down the line cop we knew at the beginning of the story has seemingly melted into a new Scottie defined by his obsession:

Perhaps the most famous scene of all in the film is the so-called ‘resurrection’ scene in which Scottie finally completes his transformation of Judy into ‘Madeleine’ and she emerges in a haze of neon green light from her hotel bathroom, ghost-like:

So what is Hitchcock telling us about love and obsession in this film?

The whole film rests on whether the audience can find Scottie’s sudden obsession with a woman he does not know at all plausible.

After all, the woman he apparently falls in love with never existed at all.

But perhaps this non-existence is the very reason for Scottie’s obsession.

In philosopher Edward Feser’s analysis of the film (I have leaned on Feser’s analysis quite heavily throughout this piece), he calls to mind a psychological concept named ‘limerence’ by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov. According to Tennov, limerence is a kind of intense infatuation with the idea of a person rather than an actual person.

The less we know of the person, the more exciting and mysterious they are. The unattainability of the real person becomes the source of passion – and slowly the passion felt for the person becomes all-consuming because ultimately the passion is an inward obsession – directed at one’s own psyche rather than a real person. This, to me, is the meaning of Hitchcock’s vertigo effect – in which all points of reference for the viewer are distorted and the whole world seems to be plunging into our minds…

Hitchcock, by making his protagonist an out-of-sorts, traumatised, directionless policeman seems to suggest that modern man, or woman, in their boredom, is vulnerable to this kind of pseudo-love idolatry. When Stewart’s restless character meets ‘Madeleine’, from the shadows, in all her mystery and mental distress, and even has opportunity to save her, the results are cataclysmic. So much so, that when she apparently dies, he loses his grip on his own identity. Not even his oldest friend Midge, in all her devotion, remains recognisable to him.

Another aspect of the plot I find most intriguing is its sense of being post-Christian, or haunted by a dead Christian faith. (Which is no coincidence when one considers Hitchcock’s private yet solid Catholic identity.)

The film is set in San Francisco (named for St Francis of Assisi) and much of the action takes place in churches or old missions – including the double death of the two Madeleines. I have already discussed the pseudo-resurrection of Judy as Madeleine. I think Hitchcock is suggesting that the obsession of Scottie, his emotional vertigo, were almost symptoms of a lack of moral direction provided by the old faith. His aimless life and subsequent limerence, his willingness to commit adultery with ‘Madeleine’, Judy’s willingness to be an accomplice to the murder of another woman, all led to the tragic finale.

And then, of course, there is the climax of the film, in which a nun appears at the top of the tower like a kind of ghost:

When Judy stumbles off the tower, it is the nun who walks out of the shadows and says the final words of the film: ‘God have mercy.’ At the same time, Scottie is cured of his vertigo, but at an enormous cost. Indeed, the only thing left to rely on is the forgotten mercy of God.

The theme of love gone wrong in our modern world will be taken up again in my analysis of Citizen Kane.

To be continued…