MAGNET contributing writer Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’20s through the ’80s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.
Vertigo (1958, 128 minutes)
With the seldom discussed topics of mental illness and suicide at its heart, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was panned by critics and ignored by movie-going audiences upon its release. It’s now considered one of the prolific director’s most enduring works.
Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) had to retire as a detective with the San Francisco Police Department after his sudden attack of vertigo while chasing a suspect across a Victorian rooftop caused a uniformed officer to plunge to his death. “I had to quit,” he tells Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), the girl hopelessly in love with this confirmed bachelor. “I wake up at night seeing that man falling from the roof. I have acrophobia. Heights make me dizzy. Boy, what a moment to find out I had it!”
Hearing of Ferguson’s retirement, old college friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), now managing his in-laws’ shipbuilding interests, asks Scottie to shadow his young wife. “Do you believe someone out of the past can take possession of a living being?” a troubled Elster asks Ferguson. “I believe this has happened to my wife. She’ll be talking to me, a cloud comes over her, and suddenly she’s someone I don’t know.” Elster says he followed her last week to Golden Gate Park, five miles away, where she just sat all day by the lake. “But the speedometer on her car showed she’d driven 94 miles. Where does she go?” he asks.
Behind the wheel of his two-door DeSoto the next morning, Scottie tails the green Jaguar sedan of Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) as she drives to Mission Dolores. He follows her into the church’s cemetery and watches her standing before the gravesite of Carlotta Valdes, who died in 1857. The mysterious wife then visits the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, where she sits on a bench staring at a portrait of the same Carlotta Valdes. She’s brought a spray of pink roses, similar to the one held by the girl in the picture. Both women wear their hair with the same tightly rolled twist in the back.
A baffled Ferguson reports his findings to Elster who reveals that Carlotta was his wife’s great grandmother. “Madeleine’s grandmother went insane and took her own life. Her blood is in Madeleine,” says Elster somberly.
In the morning, Madeleine drives through the Presidio out to old Fort Point, an abandoned military installation at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. After tossing rose petals into the foam, without any warning, she jumps into the swirling water below. Scottie immediately leaps in after her. With the girl barely able to keep her head above the icy water of San Francisco Bay, he tows her to safety, revives her back at his apartment—and the mystery of Madeleine Elster begins to unspool.
