Vertigo (1958)

Vertigo (1958)

Boom. Look at me living up to my promises (so far). I actually watched the next film (in reverse alphabetical order) on the National Film Registry's selection from 1989. It's Alfred Hitchcock's classic, Vertigo. 

A Little on Hitchcock and This Film
Aside from Hitchcock being a master storyteller, a pioneer of film grammar, and an all around genius, I also like to remember him as the creepy and obsessive womanizer that he was. There was literally something mentally wrong with him, which is very unsettling when seeing how posh and composed he was in interviews and promotional material for his films.

And for me, personally, that's part of what makes his films so great and fascinating. I've been reading Sidney Lumet's autobiographical novel, Making Movies, and in it, he rants about how form follows function. Style is never separate from content. Yet he goes on to also say that in Hitchcock's case, he often handpicked stories to serve his particular style. I'm no pedigreed film scholar (yet), and I'm no Hitchcock expert, but I always get the sense of his personality when watching his films. I think they embody his persona as well as his inner darkness.

His films are made so masterfully with so much subtlety and detail, but also very structured and deliberately, much like like Hitchcock's very proper and calculated mannerisms (just watch any one of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents intros). Then, underneath, there is always some type of horror, menace, sexual deviancy, and dark humor confronting the audience. And while Vertigo, for me, is kind of just an okay film on its own, it's so much fun to think about afterwards. Because Alfred was kind of a sicko. And he knew it.

Most people have seen the film, so we all know it's about Jimmy Stewart, or John Ferguson-- a detective who leaves his retirement (having retired after a traumatic incident that gave him a fear of heights, and the fear gives him vertigo) to follow his friend's wife, who is apparently possessed by her great grandmother. 

The traumatic incident that caused all his fear and ineptitude was watching his partner fall from a high rooftop onto a green screen background to his death. 

And, of course, we know all this because Jimmy Stewart is kind enough to barrel out every piece of information in expository dialogue. 

One thing of interest-- John is shown later to be wearing a corset and using a cane. I guess he fell, too, and the shitty partner cushioned his fall. 

So he follows Madeline Elster, the wife of his friend, Gavin Elster, to see what her deal is. And he follows her really badly. Like, constantly behind her wherever she goes. Whenever I'm driving, someone only has to make two turns after me to make me think I'm being followed. People were more trusting back then. 

Anyway, it turns out she's pretty much got split personality disorder, sometimes assuming the identity of her deceased great grandmother who killed herself at 26. The fear is that Madeline will attempt to do the same thing. 

It's all SPOILERS from here on out, so be cautious. 

John falls in love with Madeline in the process of spying on her, and they form a relationship after John saves her from jumping into the San Francisco bay to her death. They kiss a lot by smashing their faces together. 

One day, they go to the country, near an old church (the setting of Madeline's nightmares about death), as a form of therapy. She runs up the church tower, and while John tries to pursue her, his fear of heights and resulting vertigo stop him. She jumps to her death. John is cleared of any blame, but not before the biggest douchebag judge in film history belittles him and makes him feel completely to blame. He even says that he "allowed" the death of his partner. But, clearly, the partner didn't get his proper footing before going to help Johnny-O. Rookie mistake.  

He is plagued by guilt and nightmares wherein he becomes a spooky batman villain. 

He meanders around most days afterwards, in a vacant and melancholic state. Then he meets a girl named Judy who looks like Madeline. Unbeknownst to him, Judy is Madeline, or rather, Madeline is Judy. It turns out Judy was hired by Gavin to pose as his wife and pretend to be unstable, so that he could kill his real wife and make John a witness to her "suicide". 

John and Judy begin a relationship again, and he starts making her dress exactly like Madeline and get her hair done the same way as well. He realizes that they are one in the same when he sees her putting on some jewelry that belonged to Madeline. 

So he takes her back to the church and confronts her, making her ascend the bell tower once more. At that moment, a meddling nun comes up and scares Judy/Madeline so bad that she actually falls off the tower and dies. John steps to the edge and looks down at her body in horror. 

So it's actually a happy ending, because he got over his fear. Gavin was just trying to help him after all. 

Good Guy Gavin- Kills his wife to help his friend get over his fear of heights.

Significance

There are several reasons that I would guess it's on here. The most obvious would be that it's one of Hitchcock's most popular and recognizable films. Although for me, personally, it isn't his best. I have some problems with it. 

First of all, it's a bit of a snooze for me. The master of suspense doesn't keep me in enough suspense. The following scenes just go on and on and on. 

But I think the greatest source of disappointment for me is the lack of Midge. 

That's Midge. She's introduced early on as John's friend, confidant, and former fiance. To me, she's the most interesting character in the film, and yet she's totally underused. I have to just admit here, I don't know why they wrote her in. 

She has this friendly, yet sort-of-but-not-really romantic relationship with him, and we know that they used to be engaged. She helps him find out some things about Madeline and her great grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, because she knows everyone in town. She even tries to help him cope after his second traumatic incident. 

She's this incredibly engaging, likeable, and mysterious character, but she just gets left to the side. We never really find out the significance of her and John's relationship and it is never resolved, either. The only benefit I can see from her presence in the film is to show that John is a failure at love, and that his obsession with Madeline/Judy results in the alienation of his only loved one (she is last seen leaving the mental facility he temporarily stays in, essentially giving up on him). 

And while that gives her some kind of explanation and function, it just isn't enough for me. I want more. I want a whole movie about her. 

Despite my qualms, with the film, though, I still have respect for it. And I understand why it's on the registry (while I'm sure I'll find others that I think shouldn't be on there). I don't want to talk forever about Hitchcock, because that would take so much time and effort. I'll just point out one or two of the major things it has going for it. 

It's, of course, just a well made and well put together film. Hitchcock has a wonderful sense of mise en scene (and I'm still not sure what that exactly means). 

I know it must mean this. The repeated square patterns on the walls, the constantly moving construction in the background, the overwhelming presence of red, and the constant trading of sitting and standing positions between Gavin and John all come together to create a tense scene where it feels like one is trying to trap the other, and that some kind of greater plan is at work. 

I also think the trickster, Alfred Hitchcock, is a guy with a sense of humor. He's tremendously cruel to his characters, such as placing John, a man with a fear of heights, near tall structures constantly. This type of thing is what one would call "hitchcockian". And the constant exploitation of a character's flaws is something that occurs in a lot of his films, especially in this one. 

No big deal, I only watched my partner die in a cramped alley. 

Like I said, Hitchcock's style tells us about himself. The film, for it's time, is pretty risque in portraying relationships and lust. John is nothing short of a mad, horny dog for madeline, and both of them are able to betray Gavin in some way in order to have each other. John and Hitchcock, while being strict and professional, also make some pretty bold moves and have some pretty dark instincts. 

Like this. John completely undresses Madeline while she sleeps. It's sort of violating. At this point in the film, he is still, more or less, a normal guy. Yet that elephant in the room, that he drove her to his house and undressed her instead of taking her to a hospital, starts peeling away at his facade of normalcy. 

Later, because she lied to him, he forces her up the bell tower again, and he's extremely threatening the whole time, like he wanted her to fall, almost. I get the feeling that it's both John and Hitchcock punishing her. 

It portrays this very bizarre power dynamic between the two. John has power over Judy because she loves him and wants to make him happy. So she dresses up like Madeline for him. Yet in a way, she has power over him, too, because she represents his desires. She can manipulate him by simply existing. 

And I think this very upfront, complicated sexual power dynamic was pretty new at the time. And both the structured and calculated personality given to John mixed with the chaotic, raving mad, sexual, and insidious underbelly that he hides is one of best examples of Hitchcock's form following his content, and perhaps revealing a bit about the filmmaker as well. 

Hitchcock was a weird dude. And this is one of the best showcases of that. 

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Now that school is out, I've been trying to get a few projects together to keep myself busy. One of them will be actually keeping this blog updated, and I've found that giving it a more clear trajectory will make things easier and more fun. In addition to the occasional film review or special feature, I'm attempting to shoehorn in this experiment of sorts.

I've talked about the National Film Registry before. It's a pretty fascinating list. Basically, the only requirement to make the list is that the film must be at least 10 years old, and culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

Here's their homepage.

So in reviewing these films (and there are 650 of them), this blog might last forever, or until I decide to give up.

Let's begin this futile endeavor.

Let me start by saying that all the films on the list are American. So the "significance" is in regards to our country and culture. So I'll try to offer an explanation as to why it's on the list.

But let's just dive in...

The list began in 1989, so I'll start with that group. I'll do each year in reverse alphabetical order just cuz. The first film, then, is The Wizard of Oz.

Original poster, way cooler than the new ones.

The Movie
To spare you all a nostalgic and boring essay on how awesome the film is, I'll just try to sum it up in my own way. 

The Wizard of Oz is about a white trash family who sic their dog on old ladies and abandon their schizophrenic daughter during a tornado after some short lived, casual searching. The daughter then has a fever dream after being hit on the head by a window frame like a wimpy dumbass. 

This hopeless schizoid, Dorothy,  had run away from home after this huge c-word named Ms. Gulch steals her dog for the purposes of murdering it in cold blood after it bit her. 

Everyone says the Wicked Witch is the bad guy in this movie, but really it's Miss Gulch. Fuck her.

I can forgive the Wicked Witch. She's feared and reviled just for being green and ugly and then some random girl kills her sister and both the girl and the incredibly pompous Glinda refuse to give her the sister's only heirloom. Miss Gulch has absolutely no motivation to be a twat. She always pissed me off, even as a little kid. 

Anyway, Dorothy runs into a street mountebank named Professor Marvel, whose Phd is in cooking hotdogs over the fire. 

He essentially robs Dorothy and then tells her that her Aunt Em is dying of a heart attack, so that she will think she has no family to go back to and be forced to travel with him as his young lover.

He failed to take into account that she still has a drunk uncle and three farmhands to return to. She does so, much to Marvel's disappointment (he later visits her at her home, hoping to get some, but has to put on a facade when he sees her family is still alive, something he had not anticipated). 

So after she gets knocked out in the cyclone, she ends up in Oz, which is obviously a dream. I don't care what the books said, it's as clear as day in the film and everything that happens just reeks of dream logic. The dead witch's toes curling up into themselves is totally something you would dream.  

She's greeted by this insufferably self assured and unhelpful socialite who definitely has no magical powers except for turning into a bubble named Glinda. Glinda laughs derisively at Dorothy's confusion and unleashes a horde of dwarves to ogle her. Let's point out my favorites, shall we? 

This guy struts slowly across the frame, desperately clinging to the small amount of fame that he has. 

This one makes this face like she really knows what she's talking about, and she always caught my eye as a child.

When I was a kid, I thought this guy said "You killed us so completely". So as a child, I thought dorothy killed all the munchkins when her house landed, turning them all into ghosts. And they were thankful. 

This particular munchkin is Harry Earles, who plays the main character in Tod Browning's Freaks (1932). 

Glinda gets threatened by the Wicked Witch, and then Glinda tells her she has to see the Wizard and floats off in her bubble, refusing to offer any more help. Which is crap. Glinda doesn't have anything better to do, she's just a horrible person. 

So Dorothy goes to see the Wizard, essentially the god of Oz, so she can go home. She runs into a Scarecrow with muscular atrophy, a tin man who wears mascara, and a lion who inexplicably has a New York accent. They all set off in hopes that the wizard will cure their maladies with homeopathy. 

After several speed bumps and delays, mostly from accidentally running into munchkin actors hanging themselves in the background, they arrive at Emerald City, a bizarre dystopian community where nobody has a job (we get up at twelve and start to work at one, take an hour for lunch and then at two we're done. Jolly good fun!). Those who do have jobs are presumably in indentured servitude, and even at that they are severely understaffed, as they have one guy doing three jobs that require different uniforms. 

So they see the wizard, a floating hologram head, and he says they have to kill the Wicked Witch and bring back her broomstick. They head out to her castle, Dorothy gets kidnapped, and her friends have to save her. 

Some really lame shit happens, and the witch lights Scarecrow on fire because he totally held his arm out for her to do it and then freaked out when she called his bluff. 

Also, Tin Man's face. Gold. 

Luckily, the witch is a huge diptshit who, despite her deathly allergy to water, leaves buckets of water just lying around. So Dorothy gets some on her when she uses the water to put out scarecrow. Witch dies.

Then, and this is where I get totally lost, they bring back the broomstick and the wizard still refuses to help them. Then, Dorothy's dog, Toto, starts meddling around where he shouldn't (which is what got her in trouble in the first god damn place), and reveals the wizard to be just some old turd in a booth. 

Now what I don't get is, if he was just a normal guy with no motives or agenda, why was he being such a dick in the first place? And when he's revealed, everyone is pretty much cool with it after a few seconds. He's like "Yeah, I was just jerking you all around, let me get your shit". And that's the end of it. 

So anyway, he tries taking dorothy home in a hot air balloon but Tin Man totally sabotages it. 

So Glinda drags her useless ass up there and tells Dorothy to tap her heels together three times, making some bullshit excuse that Dorothy had to learn a lesson before she went home. 

She wakes up at home and she tells her family about her dream, but they just laugh it off. I don't blame them. Ever had someone describe their dream to you? It's like, oh my god, who cares? 

Credits. 

Why Is It On the List?
In all seriousness, I love this movie. I love almost all of the songs, and the dancing from the Scarecrow and Tin Man are some of my favorite parts of the movie in particular. What's crazy, though, is that in some bizarre way, it's aged incredibly well. That's what makes it culturally significant.  

Older movies are often less watched by the younger crowd because films were simply different back then. You need to develop a taste for them at this point. Yet parents go out of their way to show this movie to their kids, and almost every kid is enthralled by it as if it were made today. 

And you wouldn't necessarily think that given the subject matter. Just think about it. A girl goes to a fantasy land and hangs around with a talking scarecrow, a lion, a tin man, runs into wizards and witches-- what a clusterfuck! There were several attempts to make the film before and they all sucked because no one knew how to handle the content. 

The decision to shoot in color for the Oz scenes, of course, made a huge difference. This is part of what makes it both historically and aesthetically significant. Color was a relatively new thing, and just look how they use it. They make a distinction between fantasy and reality. Color is used thematically, not just to look pretty.  

But in my opinion, I think they kind of made fun of themselves a little, and that makes everything easier to accept. Look at some of this. 

Bert Lahr really hams up in this role. And I don't think it has everything to do with the demands of the part. I think he's giving us a wink wink. 

That sense that we get that the filmmakers are saying "Yeah, we know this is pretty silly", and adding little nudges to us about that is part of what makes the film successful. It's self awareness has allowed it to endure. 

It's a really big film that took that crazy premise by the horns and wasn't afraid to be tongue-in-cheek. That, and some of those songs are just undeniably wonderful. 

It's no surprise it's on the list. And I honestly think that most of us would be really confused if it weren't.