A dream, to some... A NIGHTMARE TO OTHERS!

Dearest Scottie ... and so you've found me.

Oh dear...

The frame above encapsulates everything that, for me, is wrong with an otherwise brilliant movie: Alfred Hitchchock's 1958 thriller Vertigo.

This one could have been Hitchcock's all-time masterpiece. There is only one flaw: the scene in which Judy is writing the confession of her crime which she will never send. Without that scene, the ongoing obsession of the James Stewart character to transform Judy Barton (Kim Novak) into the woman he loved and lost, a cancerous insanity overtaking him, would have instead set him up for a climax that would have been so much more shocking to him and to the audience.  It could have delivered the same shock as Diabolique (1955), had it not been for that one wholly unnecessary scene blowing the whole scam.

In this scene, we learn very prematurely that the woman Scottie Ferguson (Stewart) had been hired by his old wartime friend, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), to watch over —supposedly his wife Madeline— was in fact an imposter hired by Elster for the express purpose of using Scottie as a dupe to establish an ironclad alibi for the murder he had planned out.  His plot unfolded a false story of a Madeline Elster obsessed with the portrait of a woman who committed suicide long ago, and so identifying with her that she becomes suicidal herself.  Having used Scottie's crippling acrophobia to his advantage, Elster made the murder look like a suicide dive off the top of a mission church's bell tower and thereby had his own man, a retired police detective and private eye and therefore a wholly credible witness, right there to establish the "fact" of Madeline's suicide at the coroner's jury inquest.  Elster was thus able to get clean away.  The perfect crime.  Except that the imposter decides to hang around in San Francisco because, during the job, she had fallen in love with Scottie, as he had fallen for her.  After recovering from the nervous breakdown he suffered resulting from Madeline's apparent suicide, he runs into the woman, now sans her Madeline disguise.  And noticing the slight resemblance between the girl from Salina, Kansas and his lost love, Scottie forces himself on the seemingly reluctant Judy and commences transforming her into a perfect doppleganger of Madeline.

I ended up getting into a debate on a Facebook classic movies page over the confession scene.  The opposite view was that the scene was necessary because it revealed just how much Judy had really fallen in love with Scottie and that, without the confession, the movie degenerates into a conventional mystery and would have destroyed any sympathy the viewer could have had for Judy as well as degrading the romance between the two characters.

My position, and the one I believe is the valid one and supported by some of the behind-the-scenes wrangling that took place during production, is that Vertigo was in no way a conventional mystery nor a romance.  What has to be remembered is that a Hitchcock movie is always pinned upon one central idea, around which every other device is slaved to its service.  In the case of Vertigo, that main theme is obsession.  The focus is not upon the nominal mystery Scottie was hired to investigate and not upon the Judy/Madeline character and her romantic aspirations, it is rather upon Scottie: his own questionable mental state and emotional ruthlessness in forcing his "new" girlfriend to become somebody different. That is the lever of the plot to Vertigo. Judy/Madeline is not the object of Scottie's quest, she is Hitchcock's primary plot-device in twisting Scottie into knots and driving him twice to the brink of insanity.

It would still not have been like a conventional mystery to have cut the confession scene. Indeed, to have reserved the fact of the murder plot as a shock reveal would have all the more highlighted the manipulation the two characters were practicing upon each other.  The situation in Vertigo would never have been anything akin to a standard mystery in any case. The psychological drama had far outweighed the nominal mystery Scottie was investigating.  And in fact, until he saw the necklace on his "true" love's neck, Scottie really had no clue that he had been the pawn to cover a murder. He had taken Gavin Elster and the situation wholly at face value. So had the audience up until the confession scene. Up to that point, there was no mystery, per-se.   But then, the confession scene is put out there in the open and it not only actually turns the movie into more of a conventional mystery, it gets in the way of the psychological study of this manipulative relationship, because at the back of our minds we're now aware that: a) Scottie was a dupe all along, and b) we're looking for that little slip-up the woman is going to make which blows the caper.  Because we now know it's got to come, that the whole romance is going to crash because it's been telegraphed, in fact shouted out with a bullhorn.  And far from emphasizing the romantic angle, the confession actually destroys it because it is revealed to be as false as the woman who is the object of Scottie's obsession.

Being that it was a sick and debased relationship to begin with, which was so clearly evident by Scottie's manipulative recreation of Judy into Madeline, there was hardly any question that it was doomed.  My opposite in the discussion stated that one purpose of the confession was to generate sympathy for Judy, but I cannot see any room for sympathy here. What Gavin Elster and Judy connived in, and the mental collapse it drove Scottie into, went far beyond the point where sympathy is possible.   Maybe Judy/Madeline believes she loves Scottie or maybe she's trying to attach herself to him for cover and protection, but it hardly makes a difference.  The confession scene serves no real purpose in this film.  Judy protests her love to Scottie during the confrontation at the bell tower so we still know, as far as it is possible to do so, that she "loves" him —which also makes the confession redundant, and the only effect is to drain the energy out of the revealation when Scottie spots the necklace which Judy shouldn't have had, which exposes the crime and the true depth of the evil Scottie had been subjected to by Gavin Elster.

The inclusion of the confession scene was controversial at the time of production.  The revelation of the murder plot did not take place until the denouemont of the novel on which the film was based, The Living And The Dead (D'entre les morts) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.  It was Hitchcock's original idea to include the confession two-thirds of the way through the picture to illustrate Judy's mental dilemma, but after the first preview, he doubted the wisdom of its inclusion and subsequently told associate producer Herbert Coleman to remove it.  But when Paramount boss Barney Balaban got wind of the deletion, he ordered Hitchcock to restore the scene, and so it made it into the final cut.

It was, like many such decisions made by studio bosses, the one that should not have been made.  The punch of the revelation is taken out and, from that point forward, you're only looking for the romance to crash and burn, and a lot of the dramatic tension over Scottie's ongoing manipulation of Judy is negated because now the man is cast solidly into victim territory and this masks the fact that Scottie really is a bit of a bastard in this movie.

Ah well.... It could have been worse.  There was, in fact, an alternative ending, a coda, filmed at the insistence of Geoffrey Shurlock of the U.S. Production Code Administration; in which Scottie and his friend and former fiancee Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes) are in her apartment listening to radio reports of the pursuit of Gavin Elster across Europe for the murder he was now known to have committed in the United States.  Shurlock was determined that the movie demonstrate that Elster would be caught and punished for his crime and that right would prevail.  It would only have added a wholly redundant ending on top of the one in which Scottie is looking down from the ledge of the bell tower at the body of the woman he lost twice, with the result of draining away what shock the movie had left to deliver.  Fortunately, Hitchcock succeeded in getting that scene dropped.  It is only a pity that he had failed to get Vertigo's other wholly unnecessary scene cut as well.