25-year-old Vera Miles signed her non-exclusive personal services contract with director Alfred Hitchcock in the spring of '55. Born Vera June Ralston, she was crowned "Miss Kansas" in 1948 and took off for Hollywood in 1950. After lots of cheesecake and a handful of meaningless bit parts (and a wedding to Hollywood Tarzan Gordon Scott), she signed with Hitch; but their professional relationship would be limited to The Wrong Man (1956), Marion Crane's sister Lila in Psycho (1960), two episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Hitch's 1955 television debut "Revenge," which kicked off the premiere season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
For all the myths of cold-hearted calculation, hatred of women, and audience manipulation, Alfred Hitchcock gave us a three-decades embrace of female suffering, caused (intentionally or not) by cold, manipulative, sex-hating men. Most intensely: Joan Fontaine in Rebecca (1940), Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946), the butchered wife and Miss Lonelyhearts in Rear Window (1954), Barbara Bel Geddes in "Lamb to the Slaughter" and Vertigo (1958), Vertigo's Novak, Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest (1959) (a lighter version of Notorious), Marion Crane, Suzanne Pleshette and Tippi Hedren in The Birds (1963), Tippi Hedren as Marnie (1964). A list worthy of Ophüls, Dreyer and Mizoguchi. Yet unlike the warm sorrow of Ophüls, who sees Time and the Light of the World as the source of female agony; or Mizoguchi who places it within patriarchy and an overall emotional Japanese repression -- it is Dreyer who comes closest to Hitchcock, in projecting the heart of the pain: romantic and sexual longing and its denial by failed men.
Regarding Miss Lonelyhearts, here's my choice for the coldest moment in Hollywood history -- James Stewart's "toast."
Personal services contract signed, Hitchcock chose the untrained and inexperienced actress to lead one of the strangest (and nastiest) half-hours in television: "Revenge," beginning with John (Psycho) Russell's ominous beachfront stillness.
At this point Miles is not much of an actress, as she's used here by Hitchcock more as a Bressonian "figure," yet what does he highlight within her figure? Miles's debauched insanity. Elsa Spann is a newlywed, a retired ballet dancer, and a breakdown victim. She and husband Karl Spann (Ralph Meeker, literally just off the Kiss Me Deadly set) have arrived in Southern California because they have "moved away" -- we sense to escape the consequences of her derangement (and perhaps not for the first time). He begins a new job in the exploding armaments industry of SoCal, leaving his young wife to the warmth of the sun (and the lustful ogling of Aunt Bea).
Karl returns from his first day at the bomb factory to find his wife "raped" and broken-down. A man came up from the beach: "tall and dark." Watch her eyes and hear her voice as she says: "He killed me... he killed me. . . he killed me!" Fear; or ecstasy? (Dreyer would use the same connection to erotic effect that same year: the sounds of Inger's childbirth from Ordet could just as well be cries of orgasm as they are shrieks of pain.) How many men have "killed" this newlywed? Husband Karl is on the case: "Would you know him if you ever saw him again?" The lights come on again in her eyes: "Yes! Oh... yes. . . ."Elsa Spann is a sex maniac, a very practical girl, and a murderess. As she and Karl search for the tall dark man who came up from the beach, she -- in full black widow mode -- wants the one who "killed" her to become dead, for real. When we see the man whom Elsa picks out on the street, he turns out to be a poop-a-doop: beautifully dressed, soft all over, stupid mustache. Four pops in the head with a small wrench -- and he's dead? What kind of beach stud is that?
The husband murders for her, and the natural born killers move on. Elsa is Rose Balestrero with a sex life and a real man (even the name "Spann") as husband. But this only seems to lead to the same suffering shared by Rose. . .
As we know, The Wrong Man is based on a real case: Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero is falsely accused of armed-robbery because he looks like the real criminal. And the critical takes on the work invariably focus on questions of guilt, Catholicism, miracles, the police and justice system, bureaucracy. The "social issue" focus always underlines the victimization of the wrong man, and indeed -- from that POV -- he is victimized. But never so intensely as by the director himself.
Hitchcock takes the always hale-and-hearty Henry Fonda and weakens him in every way. Beginning with the diminutive "Manny" (Mann-eee); Fonda's intimidated stoop and strange, minced way of walking; his defensive voice; his mealy and closed public face, quarter-smile, pursed lips, unfocused wandering eyes -- meaning nothing. A degraded and clogged personality.
Near dawn, carrying in bottles of milk, the husband comes home into a hallway draped with Caspar David Friedrich prints. First we're with Manny at The Stork, where the house combo plays beneath a grapes-like conglomeration of balls, and where the sense of the club is that the future hangs over Manny like a great sullen hopeless sky. It's four o'clock in the morning and he stops off for tea and toast. (Has any other movie captured so well the cold dreariness of New York subways at night?) For all his lankiness, Manny's consistently reduced in scale by Hitchcock, before the arrest -- with angle and placement, similar to Hitch's own tiny figure in the movie's prelude. He enters her room as if entering the Bates Mansion, sits and looms above her, as she complains of a tooth-ache (in a work about erotic frustrations, everyone seems to have impacted teeth), the husband looking from behind like nothing human: we seem to be looking into a gashed, hollowed-out skull -- she always at odd angle, as if about to fall out of the frame (or out of Manny's life). As he moves toward her through the scene, then away again, the cuts make it seem as if there's great distance between them. The way Rose looks at Manny as he says: "Sure we are (lucky). We're in love." Doesn't he see what we see in her eyes? And she's so frightened of him coming home -- frightened of what? Maybe his arrival. They are on separate moons, only Manny doesn't know it. As he kisses her, she hears five bells: 5:00am. Then turns away from his kiss, to sleep. She asks him: "Will you sit here for awhile?"
Where is he going? To a separate bedroom. The husband rises from the rejection, sullen and peeved. Glances at the racing sheet: This is what she's turned me into, a tout with no money. He swoops down on her neck like a vampire, as we fade on what is surely one of the most unsettling husband/wife scenes ever filmed.
Before his arrest.
Manny is a good father. Rose doesn't care. Next morning, the telephone rings and as soon as Rose realizes he's talking to his mother, she walks toward the conversation like a revenant moving toward doom. Manny leaves the house announcing his "errands" and she calls out "good!" -- but Hitchcock undercuts her approval with the sounds of a raging El-line.
He walks into a den of hysteria. The most hysterical being an obvious spinster, but surrounding her is a bevy of choice 1950s gals: the blue-eyed brunette who greets Balestrero; the sleek office manager with the pulled-back honey-blonde hair; the sassy fox with glasses fresh from a Monk set (and whose eventual aggressive identification hangs Manny). My! how Balestrero brings out the loathing in lonely, sexually-frustrated women. They conspire after he leaves, and bring in the two "men" of the den: Mannys both. Then the girls bring in the pigs.
Out of the den, Manny's picked up by the police, taken on a tour of some of the grungiest liquor stores in Queens, brought in to precinct for booking, then locked up for the night (with Detective Jack Ruby giving the arrest order). But not before he's accused of having a high old time at the fertilizing Stork: "women, drinks, dancing!" "I don't drink," Manny proudly proclaims (as he later boasts of never having any money). And he doesn't dance. Left out of his denials is the women charge. Is Manny a Man at the Stork? Does his possible extra-marital satisfactions deepen his wife's torture? These scenes, apart from Rose, are terrifying and have monopolized critical attention. Fonda is particularly special here, a movie actor containing within him both Manny Balestrero and Wyatt Earp.
At last, Rose gets the call, and we see -- before the brother-in-law announces what has happened -- she is already holding and comforting her left arm.
Rose leaves the first meeting with Frank O'Connor (beautifully underplayed by Anthony Quayle) relieved about Manny's case; and clearly attracted. And the tall, dark, dignified, and handsome attorney watches her walk away, but not before he says, with a glance at Rose: "Let's not think about [money] right now." What does he have in mind? And why is this couple trusting such an important matter to a lawyer with little trial or criminal experience (and who does wind up making a boob of himself in court, to the point where a juror stands up and yells at him, causing a mistrial)? Perhaps the strangest moment in the scene is the way Rose seems when she forcefully announces: "[Manny and I] haven't been separated for more than two days at a time."
They revisit their "vacation": the rain and cold and drabness; a dilapidated inn; playing cards with strangers on the porch. Suddenly, the head and hands of this lovely young woman (Miles was 26, Fonda 51) are covered, as Rose gives comfort to her left arm. And as the arrest intensifies the memories and experiences of her life with Manny, she begins her descent -- represented by looming waterfront bridges and ships. (A patterning: Stewart 46, Grace Kelly 25; Grant 51, Kelly 26; Stewart 50, Novak 26; Grant 55, Eva Marie Saint 35.)
Again with O'Connor, Rose gazes at the lawyer with open, glistening eyes. She is all his -- doesn't he notice? When we see her again, when she realizes her longing again is blocked, she is gone. . .
O'Connor: Is this usual?
Manny: No, I don't understand it.
This man was on the landing with her when they learned of Molinelli's death. He was in the kitchen with Rose as she blamed herself for everything. And he was just sitting next to her throughout enormous pain. I don't understand it. . . .
One of the most moving scenes -- and perhaps the strangest -- in all of Hitchcock.
(Hitchcock and lamps.)
Manny comes home again at pre-dawn, carrying milk -- impervious to the collapsing world around him -- and enters her haunted room. She is still now, exceedingly, like a flower that’s blossomed in a shadowy place; her voice sounds as if she were speaking across to the spirits. The world hangs livid 'round her, a level sheen of silver light, black clouds across white sky. The darkness is falling like a shutter. The world is now a ghostly shadow.
The mirror cracks. He looks at her with disgust. When she needs him the most, he puts her away.
The real robber, it turns out, looks little like Manny; more like a masculine version -- leaner, tougher, stronger -- of the husband. Manny barks out at him: "You realize what you've done to my wife?" Or what you have not done, Mr. Balestrero.
The final Stations of Rose's Cross are some of the most painful scenes in American cinema. What is she trying to confess to the shadowed doctor? As she follows her madness, Manny stays the same: weaker and weaker, more and more prosaic, as she wants blood; she wants everything. (Manny drops her off at the sanatorium as if taking her to the dentist for a monthly check-up.) From where is Vera Ralston/Miles retrieving this pain? From which Kansas memories? Or is it all Hitchcock? And how incomparable is he? Getting greatness from Miles, otherwise an emotionally dull actress (Ford got nothing from her); and then -- in the happiest accident in movie history -- igniting Kim Novak's natural greatness. Back-to-back.
Before we enter her final agony, we should ask: how would Vertigo have been different if Miles had not backed out due to pregnancy? Having seen Vertigo dozens of times, my initial reaction is: it would have been much less. Since the movie -- one of the great works of 20th Century art -- depends on a reversal of identification midway through, what would we enter if Miles were Judy? When we enter Kim Novak's Judy, we enter a world of longing, loneliness, sorrow, guilt, and a consuming desire to be with Scottie. Coming off "Revenge" and The Wrong Man, it is not possible to imagine Hitchcock using Vera Miles in this way. At least not toward James Stewart. For isn't Stewart a more cosmopolitan, comfortable, and relaxed version of Manny Balestrero? There is no sexual chemistry between Stewart and Novak in Vertigo. (Even though she had the body and the reputation to match, Novak's movie presence is a sweeter and more innocent one than is Miles's.) Once getting "her" back, Scottie's only physical attitude toward Judy borders on revulsion. His only thing is possession; and after he realizes the plot against him -- revenge. It is Novak who is the true romantic. Miles as an earnest romantic toward this elderly and rather dry man? No. (See The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.) So Hitchcock may have gone in a radically different -- and lesser -- direction: something more along the lines of Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street: Stewart in the Edward G. Robinson cuckold role; Gavin Elster as Johnny-the-stud (and what a performance in SS by Dan Duryea!); Miles as Joan Bennett's bitch. This may have opened Hitchcock up to all sorts of misogynist avenues, rather than creating one of the most intense anti-misogynist statements in art. But that depended on Novak. Or on Ingrid Bergman in Notorious: Cary Grant's despicable torture of her in that film, leading to his final redemption (unlike Manny -- "I was just a stupid guy, full of pain"), emerges from a similar three-way emotional relationship. Even if Vertigo were re-cast along those lines -- Madeleine/Judy forced to be with Scottie, with Elster highlighted, hovering and directing things from the shadows -- it still would have depended on Miles. And would James Stewart let himself play Claude Rains? (His rage at the end of the real Vertigo suggests he thinks he was played that way. He doesn't even see Novak.) Or switching Stewart to the Elster role. But again -- where's the sex, especially with Miles around? Perhaps we can imagine Sean Connery's Mark Rutland as Elster: Miles caught between a rejecting young and ripe Connery, and the dry and middle-aged obsessed Stewart; Miles using Stewart to try and move Connery. It is still less.
At the end, Manny comes to her uncomprehending, totally complicit in her agony, babbling on about moving, the boys, the Stork Club and Sherman Billingsley, he being "not guilty" and what is he going to do without her? Her face in the light of the sanatorium room is now almost phosphorescent, eyelids heavy, voice half-averted and unconscious. In spite of the unfortunate "happy ending" title card, Rose Balestrero will never leave that room, gazing out her window, holding herself steady in the striped cloth of her dress, inaccessible forever to Manny, the wrong man.
