Friday, October 16, 2009

"There's No Bringing Her Back"


At the end of Vertigo (1958), immediately before its jaw-dropping finale, madman James Stewart stands before Kim Novak, who has given him her soul. (Along with her hair color, wardrobe, and manner of speaking.) She stands stripped and naked, wilfully transformed back into his dream image.

The madman doesn't even see her.



If anyone proves that movie actresses are born and not made, it is Kim Novak. Often mistaken for just another dumb blonde-with-big-breasts, a product of Harry Cohn's enormous casting couch, she is in fact the loving spirit of 1950s cinema, the tender germ in the living plasma of the Studio System as it was passing away.

Her training was nil. And it seems as if she did not know what she was getting into, moving to Hollywood from Chicago in 1952. But the camera knew, and was very glad to give us her first wonderment.



There it is, pure Novak: earnest, open, longing, without a trace of narcissism or ego. How many of our greatest movie stars happened by miracle? Mitchum, Lancaster, Wayne, Grant, Stanwyck, Astaire, Cagney, Cooper, Vivien Leigh. And Novak. The heart wants what it wants, she says to us. And so does the camera. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our movie transformation from the Studio to the market-obsessed vampires now in charge of our culture is that happy accidents and miracles are no longer possible.

Her natural ardor became more fully formed as Frank Sinatra's girlfriend in 1955's Man with the Golden Arm, where she recaptures her Chicago accent.



Vertigo, the first conversation.



She is at the heart of perhaps the most radical story moment in theatrical movie history. (Ultimate spoiler ahead.)

Stewart's madman has lost his love object (he thinks to death), yet he sees someone on the street who sort of looks like her. He follows the woman to a small hotel room where she lives. Up to this point in Vertigo, Hitchcock has kept us deep within the Stewart character. Then, it all changes.



Now, we are inside her. Until then, almost 100 minutes into the film, we have cared deeply and obsessively for the Stewart character, dreaming with him as a romantic. Inside Novak until her end and the movie's end, we experience Stewart for what in fact he is: a sick exploiter of this woman purely for his own ego needs. Look again at the ending. ("I heard voices.") She has made herself over for him, head to toe, and what does he care about? Nothing, except how she tricked him. And in her final descent into movie eternity, he returns -- in full crucifixion, martyr pose -- to his land of self-pity and loss. Not caring a damn for the dead woman below.

Hitchcock is often looked at as a cold and calculating manipulator of movie characters and movie audiences. Yet he is also the greatest director of female suffering not named Mizoguchi or Ophuls or Dreyer: Bergman in Notorious; Janet Leigh in Psycho; Suzanne Pleshette in The Birds; Tippi Hedren in Marnie and The Birds. And perhaps most spiritually with Vera Miles as the wife in The Wrong Man, a film not about Catholic guilt or confused identity or the horrors of jail, but a movie about the sufferings of an average 1950s housewife. (Just watch the first scene between husband and wife, when he arrives home near dawn and she is still up with a "toothache." Hitchcock shoots it to make it seem like they are on different moons. And ends it with Henry Fonda swooping down on Miles's neck like a vampire. Before his arrest.) Miles, of course, was Hitchcock's first choice for Vertigo. Lucky for us, she became pregnant and backed out of the role. Without Novak's woundedness, sorrow and operatic desire, Vertigo would have been much less.

The Fifties were over. But in 1960, producer/director Richard Quine cast Novak in Strangers When We Meet -- a suburban soap opera about infidelity. It stars Ernie Kovacs and the incredibly wooden Kirk Douglas, but the movie is all Novak, as a housewife who has an affair with Douglas. Joshua Logan, director of Picnic, once said that Kim Novak wore her beauty "like a crown of thorns" -- a crown on full display here.