This was published 9 years ago
Walking Vertigo, falling anew
The Hitchcock film provides a perfect map for a curious wanderer exploring the city.
By Simmone Howell
James Stewart and Kim Novak against familiar San Francisco scenery in Vertigo.
The last time I saw Vertigo was at the Burke & Wills Mechanics Institute in Fryerstown. The screen was small and the sound crunchy. The audience, mostly vintage, sat on fold-up chairs. There were no advertisements exhorting you to switch off your mobile phone and I would have been surprised if anyone had even had one.
The film was in two reels. Twice we heard the lovely click and roll and saw the flickering edges, and the experience was as thrilling and transportive as when I first saw it as a teen.
At intermission, over a buffet of homemade lemon slices and cups of tea, I heard a woman declare: ''What a horrible man!'' She was talking about Scottie (James Stewart) who, by that stage of the movie, was cultivating the transformation of Judy into Madeleine (Kim Novak). I was affronted by the woman's words. Scottie wasn't horrible. He was doomed and tragic and romantic. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised she was right.
Another still from the movie.
Alfred Hitchcock summarised Vertigo as being about ''a man who wants to go to bed with a woman who is dead''. The director, no slouch in the creepy deeds department, insisted Novak wear constrictive clothing throughout the filming to enhance Judy's discomfort at playing Madeleine. ''I felt free when I was Judy,'' she later said.
Earlier this year, when Novak appeared at the Oscars only to be scorned for her cosmetic enhancements, I couldn't help seeing her as Judy pleading with Scottie, ''If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, will you love me? All right then, I'll do it.''
Vertigo is a film full of beautiful things that all conspire to hide the fact that at its core it is a dark, dark story. Perhaps I saw it too young. I understood that Scottie was duped and Madeleine/Judy was doomed, and I thought Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) was cool but deluded. I loved the clothes and the sweeping score. Most of all I loved the way Vertigo doubled as a travelogue, showing San Francisco as a city of stories, a place of mystery where clues could be found in flower stalls and antiquarian bookshops and art galleries.
There are things from the film I will never get over: the velvet dress Madeleine wears when Scottie first takes her to Ernie's, Midge's bohemian apartment with its uneven bamboo blinds showing the spread of the city, past lives, melancholia, the lure of the lonely wanderer.
When Gavin Elster hires Scottie to tail his wife, he laments: ''And she wanders, God knows where she wanders.'' Gavin wants her followed because she has developed an obsession with her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, who went mad and died by her own hand.
Madeleine wears Carlotta's jewellery and spends hours sitting in front of her portrait at the Palace of the Legion of Honour. Scottie follows Madeleine around the city, then further, across the bridge to the redwood forest and the Mission San Juan Bautista, where the film's first and second climaxes play out.
San Francisco is ideal for wandering around. Recently I explored the city using Vertigo as my map. There are tours you can pay for, but they are costly and go against Madeleine's law: ''Only one is a wanderer. Two together are always going somewhere.''
A Google search showed me that I was not the first but I gave myself limits: one day, and all of it on foot or public transport.
My first site was Scotty's apartment at 900 Lombard Street in Russian Hill. It sits conveniently at the bottom of the block known as ''the crookedest street in the world'' and, if you look south, you can see the bay and Coit Tower, used by Hitchcock as a phallic symbol.
Scottie's apartment no longer has Chinese gates or conifers or even the chimney. The owners, tired of gawkers, built a wall around the building in 2012. Yet, standing out the front, I felt I could have been Madeleine parked outside in my green Jaguar, driving off without saying goodbye.
The ''crookedest street in the world'' feels vertical when you walk up it, but it is worth it for the view. I walked 12 blocks along Hyde Street to Sacramento and then down to the Brocklebank Apartments at 1000 Mason Street, home to Madeleine and Gavin. This is where Scottie's stalking begins.
The building is almost unchanged from the film and calls to mind a classy convalescent home. It also featured in the TV adaptation of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City.
These pop-culture collisions were a common theme. En route to Sutter Street, I discovered the plaque commemorating where Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, was ''done in'' by Brigid O'Shaughnessy, from Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. That site is mere steps from where Johnny Ross escaped from the mob in Peter Yates' Bullitt, which in turn is several blocks from the hotel where Charles Willeford wrote Pick-Up. At 786 Sutter Street is the Argonaut Book Shop, the inspiration for the Argosy Book Shop, where Scottie and Midge go seeking information about Carlotta Valdes.
The next address on my list was 940 Sutter Street, the site of the Empire Hotel, where Judy lives and where her transformation into Madeleine becomes complete. In the film, the hotel had a seedy cast, marking the difference in class between Judy and Madeleine. It has since been trussed up and renamed Hotel Vertigo, but there is no mistaking its grand earthquake-evading Victorian bones. A print of Vertigo loops on a small screen in the lobby and if you ask nicely, you can even get Judy's room - 401.
I caught the light-rail train to Mission Dolores, the oldest intact mission in California and the oldest building in San Francisco. Scottie trails Madeleine here to Carlotta's grave, but the headstone, left behind by the film crew, has been removed.
With more time, I could have rented a bike and pedalled to the Palace of the Legion of Honour, then on to Fort Point beneath the Golden Gate bridge where Madeleine jumped into the bay and Scottie dived after her - the start of it all, the end in the beginning. I did it all out of order, but that's OK, because it was my Vertigo map of San Francisco. It sits in my mind next to my Lost Vertigo map of San Francisco, where the McKittrick Hotel still exists and I can duck into Ernie's for a Tom Collins.
My day of wandering showed me more of the city than I would have seen otherwise. When I next watch Vertigo, I will forget that Scottie is a haunted pervert and that Novak has had fat injected into her cheeks. I will think: ''I was there! And there! And there!'' And then I will fall into the film and forget that too.
Simmone Howell is the author of Girl Defective.
Sign up for the Traveller newsletter
The latest travel news, tips and inspiration delivered to your inbox. Sign up now.