Vertigo in San Francisco

Tonight on tv I watched the Hitchcock movie Vertigo.

I especially like this one because it takes place in San Francisco and it's interesting to see how it looked back in the day. The basic storyline of the movie is thus ... Jimmy Stewart plays a former San Francisco police inspector (John "Scottie" Ferguson) who leaves the force after another officer dies trying to save him from falling during a rooftop chase of a suspect. He becomes a PI and an old college acquaintance asks him to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) who seems to be possessed and suicidal. Needless to say, he falls in love with her, and when she finally climbs the endless stairs of the bell tower of Mission San Juan Bautista, and his vertigo keeps him from catching up with her in time to stop her from casting herself off, he's devastated to the point of having to be committed.

He's just starting to get back on his feet when he comes across a woman who looks incredibly like his dead love. He gets to know her, gets her to fall for him, then gets her to change until she exactly resembles the woman he lost. There's a scene in the movie that always moves me - it's when he sees her for the first time after she's bee remade in his desired image - the camera pans around and around them as he hugs and kisses not her, but the person he really loves ... it's both powerful and heartbreaking. Here is how Roger Ebert describes that moment in his review of the movie ...

As Scottie embraces "Madeleine" even the background changes to reflect his subjective memories instead of the real room he's in. Bernard Herrmann's score creates a haunting, unsettled yearning. And the camera circles them hopelessly, like the pinwheel images in Scottie's nightmares, until the shot is about the dizzying futility of our human desires, the impossibility of forcing life to make us happy ...

There's much more to the story, but I don't want to spoil the surprise. For those interested in San Francisco, there's a website that has photos of the spots shown in the movie as they were then and as they are now. And here below is just the beginning of info from Wikipedia on the San Francisco locations shot for the film .....

* The Mission San Juan Bautista. The Mission San Juan Bautista, where Madeleine falls from the tower, is a real place, but the tower had to be matted in with a painting using studio effects; Hitchcock had first visited the mission before the tower was torn down due to dry rot, and was reportedly displeased to find it missing when he returned to film his scenes. The original tower was much smaller and less dramatic than the film's version.

* At Mission Dolores, for many years tourists could see the actual Carlotta Valdes headstone featured in the film (created by the props department). Eventually, the headstone was removed as the mission considered it disrespectful to the dead to house a tourist attraction grave for a fictional person .....