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Was Hitchcock a closet Surrealist? With the re-release of 'Vertigo' in 70mm, Peter Wollen examines mystery, perversion and psychosis in the most personal of the director's films
* I first saw Vertigo in Santa Cruz, California, very near Hitchcock's own home, because a friend of a friend, Tim Hunter, who later became a Hollywood director, had a bootleg print. I had somehow missed it when it first came out in 1958, and it was not released again until the early 80s, soon after Hitchcock's death. Now it has been re-released for a second time, nearly 40 years after it was made, and it still retains all its old power and beauty, however much critics may quibble about the remixing of the soundtrack or the regrading of the print. In fact, seeing it again on the big screen with a paying audience, I was more convinced than ever that it is the master's greatest film, the one which will outlast even Psycho (or my own idiosyncratic favourite, Rope). It is also, I think - and these two judgments are related - Hitchcock's most intimately personal film.
Vertigo is based on a novella by Boileau-Narcejac (Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac), a pair of French mystery writers who composed it with the idea of attracting Hitchcock explicitly in mind, as François Truffaut revealed in his 1967 book-length interview with Hitch. Boileau-Narcejac had apparently learned that Hitchcock regretted not having bought the film rights to their earlier thriller, Diabolique, which was made into a classic film by Henri-Georges Clouzot, so they decided to write another one specially for Hitch. Sure enough, he bought it and turned it into Vertigo. Of course, in the process of transferring their book to the screen, he made significant changes to the original story. The locations were switched from Paris and Marseilles to San Francisco and, as Hitchcock himself noted, it is revealed to the viewer that Judy (Kim Novak) is Madeleine (also Novak, of course) before Scottie (James Stewart) realises the truth for himself. In this way, the second half of the film is governed by suspense - "What will he do when he finds out about it?" - rather than by continuing mystery followed by surprise and shock when the truth...