Alfred Hitchcock was born to middle-class parents in London, England,
fittingly on Friday the thirteenth of August 1899.
When he was twenty-one, he took a job at Paramount Studios in London
as a writer and illustrator of silent-movie title cards, which led
to work as an art director and finally to a position as a director.
He acquired the honorary title “Master of Suspense” while working
on a radio adaptation of his film The Lodger for
RKO in 1940. Hitchcock married his assistant,
film editor Alma Reville, with whom he collaborated on all his work.
The couple, along with their daughter Patricia, moved to the United
States in 1939, where they lived for the
rest of their lives.
Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first American-made
film, won the 1940 Academy Award for Best
Picture. In 1947, seeking artistic independence,
Hitchcock broke with noted Hollywood producer David O. Selznick,
with whom he had worked for almost eight years, and formed his own
company, Transatlantic Pictures. The company went bankrupt after
producing two films that used the expensive and difficult “ten-minute
take” technique, in which the entire script was shot in a series
of ten-minute, uninterrupted takes. The point was to create films
that appeared to have no editing, but the process was hard on actors
and producers alike. Hitchcock then worked a brief stint at Warner
Brothers, followed by a run at Paramount, which produced Vertigo.
His last film for Paramount was Psycho, in 1960.
He then moved to Universal, where he remained for the rest of his
career. Hitchcock also made a foray into American television with
his series Alfred Hitchcock Presents,which
ran from1955 to 1962 before
being reformatted as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which
ran for another three years. Hitchcock died at
home in California on April 29, 1980,
while working on his fifty-fourth film.
One of Vertigo’s main themes—the attempt
to create the ideal woman—has roots in the Roman myth of Pygmalion
and Galatea in which the sculptor Pygmalion uses his art to create
an ivory statue of the perfect woman and then tragically falls in
love with it. But the film has roots in reality as well. There are
parallels between the Vertigo protagonist’s quest
for the ideal woman and Hitchcock’s relationship with Grace Kelly,
an actress who appeared in three of his films. Hitchcock felt that
Kelly’s blond beauty and distinct acting style made her the standard
by which all other actresses should be judged. Her departure from
the film world in the mid-1950s to marry
Prince Rainier of Monaco led Hitchcock to attempt to mold other
actresses in her image. Kim Novak, the blonde co-star of Vertigo,
was one of these Grace Kelly stand-ins.
Vertigo, like all Hitchcock films, was
influenced by the art-film movement of the 1920s,
which stressed experimentation and strong use of imagery. Early
in his career, when Hitchcock worked at the UFA studios in Berlin,
Germany, he absorbed the German Expressionism of F. W. Murnau and
Fritz Lang, whose method of exposing the inner life of characters
through unusual camera angles, moody lighting, and exaggerated mise-en-scène (stage-setting)
influenced much of Hitchcock’s work. Hitchcock’s Vertigo,
in turn, influenced the French New Wave school of film. Filmmakers
such as Alain Resnais and François Truffaut introduced elements
of Vertigo’s plot and certain symbolic and stylistic
details from the film into their own works. By the 1960s,
this group had raised the status of Hitchcock to that of auteur,
or film artist, by reverently deconstructing his work in the film
journal Les Cahiers du Cinéma. Most notable in Les
Cahiers are fifty hours of interviews with Hitchcock conducted by
Truffaut.
The Hollywood premiere of Vertigo received
mainly positive reviews from film trade papers. The Hollywood
Reporter called it “. . . a picture no filmmaker should
miss” and applauded Hitchcock’s “pioneering techniques.” Variety gave
it a mixed review, predicting box office success but criticizing
the film’s first half as too slow and too long.Reviewers
outside Hollywood weren’t as complimentary. Cue panned
Hitchcock’s concentration on scenery, technique, and “gimmicks”
and lamented what it felt, at just over two hours, was an overlong
film. The New Yorker went so far as to call the
film “farfetched nonsense,” and Time magazine labeled
it “another Hitchcock and bull story.” Vertigo had
an average box-office run. In terms of box office receipts, it ranked
twenty-first in 1958, making $3.2 million
domestically. In 1958, the film was nominated
for the Academy Award in Art Direction and Sound. Vertigo returned
to the screen in 1983 as part of a program
to re-release Hitchcock’s films, and it was carefully restored in 1996.
Today, Vertigo is a critically acclaimed film that
is still hotly debated by film critics, academics, and Hitchcock
fans alike. In 1998, the American Film Institute
named Vertigo number sixty-one on its “100 Greatest American
Movies of All Time” list. The Institute also ranked the film eighteenth
on both the “100 Most Thrilling American
Films” and “100 Greatest Love Stories of
All Time” lists.
