“The ghost of Alfred Hitchcock was undeniably present during the making of this film,” says a note in the closing credits of Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest artisanal documentary. For once, though, the film’s subject has nothing but affection for the late master of suspense, clearly having fared better than Tippi Hedren did in the pantheon of Hitchcock blondes. Indeed, the 92-year-old sees their one and only collaboration — on 1958’s celebrated thriller Vertigo — as the highlight of her movie career, which opened with a bang and ended with a slow fade after she willfully absented herself from Hollywood (she now lives in Oregon).
Philippe tells that story in a roundabout way; like some of his previous films (Chain Reaction, Lynch/Oz or Memory: The Origins of Alien), Kim Novak’s Vertigo is all about subtext and nuance as opposed to any kind of objective truth. Towards the end of the film, Novak decides that she has lived “a big, beautiful circle”, and this is the approach Philippe has embarked on, taking no small inspiration from Vertigo’s unforgettable title sequence and the hypnotic, almost psychedelic spirals devised by graphic designer Saul Bass.
In this respect, the title has a double meaning, the more literal interpretation being Novak’s uneasiness with life at the top. Not only does she recoil at the thought of ever having been a movie star, she even refutes the word actor, claiming to have been more of a re-actor, like her Vertigo co-star James Stewart, whose toes come under special scrutiny in a clip from their second 1958 pairing, Bell, Book and Candle. In fact, the Hollywood years are recalled with something approaching horror; having stumbled into acting after a brief stint modelling for a refrigerator company, the Chicago-born Novak soon found herself under contract to Columbia Pictures and its notoriously controlling head Harry Cohn, who called her “the fat Polack” and made her change her first name from Marilyn to Kim.
This particular experience is at the very heart of Philippe’s film and leads us to the other meaning of the film’s title. Though it is ostensibly a thriller about a very elaborate murder plot, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is actually a study of obsession in which Novak effectively plays two roles: the mousey brunette Judy and the ice-cool blonde Madeleine. It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to see how this relates to Novak’s own insecurities — “I was Marilyn Novak from nowhere,” she says — and her feelings of impostor syndrome. It also rather brilliantly illustrates her frustrations with Hollywood, a town she talks so much about leaving that it’s easy to forget her movie career lasted nearly 40 years.
“I had to get reborn,” she says, and running through the film — alongside clips from her mostly underrated performances in the likes of The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Pal Joey (1957), Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), and the delirious, almost Fassbinder-esque Hollywood drama The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) — is her ethereal artwork, which she paints with her left hand. Hitch’s influence can be seen here too, in the circles and spirals that fill the frame, although the director — inserting himself into his own story, which might be a first for Philippe — points out that her romantic depictions of birds, and bluebirds in particular, is distinctly at odds with Hitchcock’s famously dim view of them.
The climax of the film, if it can be called that, comes when Philippe discovers the iconic gray suit that Novak wears in Vertigo when she’s playing Judy, who’s pretending to be Madeleine. The emotion Novak shows is a lot, especially considering it’s just been sitting in a box upstairs the whole time and it hasn’t taken any special effort to find it. It does, however, take her spinning back in time, to a brief but clearly momentous period in her early 20s, and her power of recall is truly remarkable, not even just for her age. “My body was in this, and my body and soul were in it too,” she marvels, and it immediately takes on the significance of a sacred relic. (Does she try it on? Spoiler: She does not.)
Chances are, the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock was also in the house when Philippe’s film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where he debuted Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955). Hitch would undoubtedly approve, because Kim Novak’s Vertigo only adds to the mystique of one of his many masterpieces, augmenting its many layers of mystery without seeking to explain and thus destroy them. More importantly, it gives Novak an excuse (she humbly calls it “permission”) to look back on her life and give us her side of the story — unapologetic and, right from the start, impressively unfiltered.
Title: Kim Novak’s VertigoFestival: Sundance (Out of Competition – Non-Fiction)Director: Alexandre O. PhilippeDistributor: DogwoofRunning time: 1 hr 16 mins
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