I just saw Vertigo for the first time- I know, for a supposed film buff, this is inexcusable. I love the “Hitchcock shot.”
DIANE: Uno dos tres catorce!
Kim Novak is hot, but in a 1950s way- her platinum blonde hair and eyebrows plucked to the center of her eyes made her look patrician in the 1950s, but combined with her overbite and wide face makes her look old by today’s fashions. When her character gives her age as 26, I couldn’t believe it- I thought she was much older.
Looking it up, it turns out she was actually 25 at the time. I think if you if you were making a period film for the 1950’s you could analyse her face and how it differs from modern starlets to come up with a good measure of how fashion in women’s faces has changed. I know it’s less marketable, but it seems to me that when you make a movie set in a different era, a different place, you should make an effort to match the tastes of that setting. You could could have rich Mayan girls with foreheads compressed from birth, or Japanese courtesans with blackened teeth and eyebrows painted inches above the natural line of their brow. Yeah like anyone is going to go through the trouble to do that!
We had fun placing the locations in different neighborhoods in San Francisco… Also, the scenes in San Juan Batista were fun, because we were looking for the wooden shack on display in the background… in real life this shack was on my grandfather’s farm. At some point some historians arrived and told him they wanted it; they ended up lifting it whole and loading it on a truck or something. It was constructed by settlers, without nails. Grandpa was using it as a tool shed at the time. I’m not sure it was at San Juan Batista in 1958 however.
In the tower, we see the Hitchcock Shot twice… not nearly as dramatic as the way it’s used now. And what happens next is so fast and anticlimactic… Diane insisted that since Barbara Bel Geddes was in Dallas, it must have been “all a dream,” completing a “circle of Dallas.” They even refer to oil wells at one point.
Speaking of anticlimactic – Scotty’s friend Elster’s final speech in the courtroom is so quick and he’s out of the picture so quickly that it reeks of a character being written out of a soap opera. Kind of weird. There are other artifacts of this kind of writing too- like in the Legion of Honor, when Scotty gets the booklet. Can I have this? Yes. Poof! The guy is gone. Maybe that is intentional, to set up this later scene with Elster.
ELSTER: Don’t blame yourself Scotty- we both know who killed Madeline.
DIANE: Yeah! Bono did!
Did I mention we were drinking while we watched this movie? While I’m free associating, the beginning of the dream sequence is like the Beatles Yellow Submarine. And have I bagged on Jimmy Stewart yet? Boy is he Mr 1950s. What a sap. Golden Age my butt.
BRIAN: This is the Mission? Wow it looks much less crappy than I remember.
One more thing: Hitchcock is very consistent with movements between cuts. Jimmy reaches out his hand; in the next shot it’s in exactly the same position. Movement is never started or stopped across cuts- when Madeline drifts towards the ocean, Scotty stands there like a gaping mullet in a reaction shot, THEN walks over the next time we see him. It’s one of the things that dates this movie. On the other hand, the use of backgrounds is still great- you are always aware that the scene is set in San Francisco. When Scotty’s driving you can see the street; when the scene is in an apartment you can see the view of the skyline.
I hadn’t realized how much of Basic Instinct was a reference to this movie- even down to her hairstyle. The notion of the look-alikes, the stepped-on Barbara’s “Betty” to Kim’s “Veronica”… Except in that movie Verhoeven / Eszterhas have purposely made the characters more perverse… The money now belongs to Catherine (Sharon Stone), Scotty now is still a cop, but just as much of an obsessive asshole. Making him masochistic is just extra funny. The husband character is elminated; all the power now rests with Madeline/Catherine, made into a lesbian for extra edginess. The ruse is still there, ambigously with either the same number of people, with more, or with less. If you’ve seen both movies, hopfully you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Actually come to think of it, it’s entirely necessary that he’s a masochist, because the lust interest is now the antagonist. The Betty is now the identity swapper as well. Catherine’s girlfriend, if you think about it from a structure persepctive, is now mostly superfluous. I read an analysis once which said that Basic Instinct fails because it tries to combine a Detective/Cop story with a Noir – but in a Noir everything is futile, and a Cop story ends in success for Law. While I agree with that, I don’t think that’s what makes Basic Instinct weird; I think it’s the jumbled roles of Catherine. I don’t want to sell that movie short, even though it’s sort of clumsy. It’s not entirely a rip-off of Vertigo. But it’s pretty similar!
Incidentally, on the other Vertigo, Bono says “1, 2, 3, 14” because How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is their 14th album.
Links:
- Total DVD looks at Basic Instinct
- WideScreen Cinema does the tour of San Francisco