by Alex Ross
New York Times, October 6, 1996
NEARLY FOUR DECADES after its commercially
indifferent first run, ''Vertigo'' has become the most widely
celebrated of Alfred Hitchcock's films. It is prized not simply for its
razor-sharp suspense technique but also for its air of mystery, its
tragic dimension, its literary layering of memory and obsession. Scholars
have compared it to Proust, ''Tristan und Isolde'' and the Orpheus
myth; critics have voted it Hitchcock's masterpiece. Robert Harris and
James Katz, the film restorers who previously revived ''Lawrence of
Arabia'' and ''Spartacus,'' have completed the canonization by
releasing ''Vertigo'' in a 70-millimeter, digital-sound version, which
opens today (with a video to follow early next year).
It would
be heresy to suggest that the greatness of ''Vertigo'' is owed to
anyone but Hitchcock, whose fingerprints cover every aspect of the
production. But there is a second genius at work in ''Vertigo,'' and
his voice will be heard more clearly in the restoration. Mr. Harris and
Mr. Katz refurbished not just the images but also the sound, bringing
digital technology to bear on the Bernard Herrmann score, whose
original tape turned up in a vault nearly intact. Herrmann was an
absolute master of the strange art of film scoring, and in a career
that stretched from ''Citizen Kane'' to ''Taxi Driver,'' the 1958
''Vertigo'' was probably his peak.
How much, indeed, of this
film's famous atmosphere is owed to Herrmann? Close your eyes and think
of one sequence, and you may well remember Kim Novak's somnambulistic
tour of San Francisco, from a chapel to a graveyard to a picture
gallery. It is the music as much as the lighting and the filters that
gives those scenes their eerie shimmer. None of which is to detract
from Hitchcock's glory; he knew the nature of the talent he had
engaged, and he created extraordinary opportunities for Herrmann to
make his mark. ''Vertigo'' is a symphony for film and orchestra.
Herrmann
was born in New York in 1911; he made his name first as a composer at
CBS radio. He arrived in Hollywood with the young genius of the
airwaves Orson Welles. His first effort at film scoring was ''Citizen
Kane.'' Like Welles, he was viewed with intense suspicion by the film
community; his life in Hollywood was fraught with difficulties, many of
his own making. He was a passionate, irascible, unpredictable character
who often treated film people with contempt. He wished more than
anything else to make his name as a composer of concert music and a
conductor on the international circuit.
If Herrmann thought
himself a failure at the end -- he died in 1975 on the night of the
last recording session of ''Taxi Driver'' -- then he sadly undervalued
his achievement. Over four decades, he revolutionized movie scoring by
abandoning the illustrative musical techniques that dominated Hollywood
in the 1930's and imposing his own peculiar harmonic and rhythmic
vocabulary. In place of lush melodies, he wrote short, obsessively
repeated figures, static collections of chords, parodies of past
styles. The sound was original, even experimental, but also useful: it
wonderfully matched Welles's electrifying fast style.
It took a
while for Herrmann and Hitchcock to come together. The director tried
many times to engage Herrmann before finally signing him for ''The
Trouble With Harry,'' the first of nine collaborations. Hitchcock, too,
had long been impatient with the busily illustrative type of score
perfected by Central European emigres like Max Steiner and Erich
Wolfgang Korngold. While making ''Lifeboat,'' he was heard to complain
that the audience would wonder where the music was coming from, out
there in the middle of the ocean. (''Ask Hitchcock where the cameras
come from,'' the composer David Raksin famously replied.)
Hitchcock
was not deaf to music; he simply wanted to make its use more pointed.
He always enjoyed experimenting with ''live'' sources for music on
film. In ''Rope,'' for example, Farley Granger's guilt-ridden character
nervously plays Poulenc at the piano. In ''Rear Window,'' a
cocktail-piano sound streams in from an adjacent apartment. In
Herrmann, Hitchcock found a composer whose music would blend into the
action with the same uncanny directness, but now on a different level.
Herrmann would address the unconscious regions, summon atmosphere and
dread. Music would play its own starring role; at times, it would take
over the action.
''VERTIGO'' fired Herrmann's imagination
because its byzantine plot perfectly matched his Gothic sensibilities.
A retired police detective afflicted by vertigo is hired to follow and
protect a woman named Madeleine who seems to be suicidally possessed by
a spirit from the 19th century. Although he discovers that she has been
playacting as part of an elaborate murder plot, his intensifying
obsession causes history to repeat itself in terrifying cycles. The
scenario has resonances with any number of doom-drenched Romantic and
Symbolist dramas. It also closely resembles an operatic model:
ironically, Korngold's youthful masterpiece, ''Die Tote Stadt.'' (In
that opera, too, a man tries to make over a woman in the image of his
dead beloved.)
Right from the famous title sequence of
''Vertigo,'' we are in the presence of something marvelous. Saul Bass
created a hypnotic design of spirals rotating in space, overlaid with a
few uncanny shots of Kim Novak's eyes. The music rotates in tandem:
endless circles of thirds, major and minor, interspersed with
shuddering dissonances. Herrmann did not invent this off-center
tonality; it was used often by Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy and Ravel. But
the relentlessness is all Herrmann's. The music literally induces
vertigo: it finds no acceptable tonal resolution and spirals back on
itself. Herrmann has told us what the movie is about.
It cannot
be said that Herrmann always understood perfectly what Hitchcock was
getting at. In commenting later that Jimmy Stewart was too easygoing an
actor to pull off the lead role of Scottie, he sorely misjudged both
Mr. Stewart's skill and Hitchcock's master conception of the ordinary
collapsing into madness. And in any case, it was Herrmann's job to help
summon the extraordinary emotions of an ordinary man. He supplied
Desire and Doom; he kept away from the early, extended stretches of
dialogue in which Scottie's affable exterior is established, his mind
not yet invaded by the icy, ghostly figure of Madeleine.
Indeed,
Hitchcock significantly inserts ''live-on-camera'' music into two of
the Herrmann-free scenes. As the film-music scholar Royal S. Brown
points out in his invaluable book ''Overtones and Undertones,''
Scottie's bright, sensible ex-fiancee, played by Barbara Bel Geddes, is
twice accompanied by background gramophone music: first an overture by
J. C. Bach, then Mozart's Symphony No. 34. She tries to use Mozart as a
therapeutic device, drawing Scottie back to the rational world. She
also tries to win back his love. But he does not respond: Herrmann's
music, which exclusively represents his deeper emotions, remains
silent.
Compare these witty but emotionally static scenes with
the long, 15-minute sequence in which Scottie trails the woman alleged
to be Madeleine. The images are beautifully shrouded in a strange,
foggy light, but they say relatively little by themselves. You see
Scottie driving through the streets of San Francisco; Madeleine buying
flowers; more driving; Madeleine walking through a chapel and a
cemetery; driving again; Madeleine looking at a painting, and so forth.
There are a couple of brief bits of dialogue as Scottie gathers
information about the places he is visiting, but essentially
''Vertigo'' becomes a silent film.
Except, of course, for the
music, which plays almost without a break and gives the whole sequence
its air of ineffable mystery. What is going on is difficult to
describe: Herrmann shifts fluidly but uneasily among a few simple,
cryptic chords, augmentations of familiar triads. Wistful hints of
melody circle back on themselves instead of building into thematic
phrases. The orchestration is dominated by high or low instruments
(notably, violins and bass clarinets). The sequence is profoundly eerie
but also very beautiful: it is neither tonal nor dissonant.
This
music of expectation, which also somehow communicates a visitation from
the past, returns with ever-darkening effect several times later in the
film. Herrmann moves into even more obscure territory in a scene where
Scottie and Madeleine together visit a grove of giant sequoias. Here
Herrmann writes ''cluster'' chords: piled-up collections of tones that
would be shockingly dissonant if they were not shiveringly low and
soft. It is a measure of Herrmann's venturesomeness that more than a
few measures in this sequence could have been composed by the solitary
American experimentalist Morton Feldman.
When Scottie declares
his love for Madeleine (or Judy, as she comes to be known), Herrmann
faces a very different challenge, which is to write love music
circumscribed by destructive obsession. In the stretch of music
entitled ''Scene d'amour,'' he turns to Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde''
as an example. One hears citations not only of the sweeping phrases of
the ''Liebestod'' (''Love-Death'') but also of the savage leitmotif of
daylight, the black-as-night Prelude to Act III and the delirious
ecstasy of the central love scene.
Film composers are often
accused of derivativeness. Their borrowings are sometimes shameless,
although the time constraints of the Hollywood production schedule make
certain shortcuts understandable. Herrmann's use of Wagner, however, is
a matter of deliberation and subtlety. The main melodic contour is his
own; the harmony is still his idiosyncratic construction. He is jogging
the memory of those who know ''Tristan'' and the subconscious of those
who don't. His veiled citations indicate in their own way the
unstoppable recurrence of the past. Once again, the score is not an
illustration of the film but a metaphor for it.
Herrmann's
''Scene d'amour'' also steers clear of sentimentality. Even at its most
ecstatically upward-rushing, it is troubled by passing dissonances,
undercut by harmonic rootlessness. All of it is the music of Scottie's
mind, and this character is, in the last analysis, completely mad. Mr.
Stewart delays that realization with all his practiced reasonableness;
the final tableau atop the San Juan Bautista Mission tower is all the
more stunning in its finality. Herrmann, steeped in Victorian
melodrama, gets to write a fanfare for the triumph of Fate. With all
dialogue finally out of the way, the whole orchestra rises to its feet
to proclaim, ''This man is lost.''
THE ''VERTIGO'' SCORE vastly
enriches the images it accompanies, but it has also found a life
outside the film. As an excellent complete recording on the Varese
Sarabande label testifies, it can be heard on its own terms -- if not
quite as a coherent narrative, then as a mesmerizing succession of
fragments. Herrmann is a puzzling paradox: most of his ''serious''
compositions don't quite come off, yet his film scores can be taken
seriously as concert music. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the rigorously
European-trained conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, proves as
much with a new Herrmann anthology on the Sony Classical label.
Alas,
the original 1958 recording suffered from less than ideal conditions.
Herrmann could not conduct it himself because of a musicians' strike;
most of it was recorded in London, the rest in Vienna. The playing
sometimes sounds ragged and murky, at least on current copies.
The
restoration may tell a different story: Mr. Harris and Mr. Katz have
discovered a clear original tape, partly in true stereo, and revamped
the whole soundtrack in digital sound. Royal treatment indeed for a
mere movie score -- but there is none greater than ''Vertigo.''
