Book of the film: Vertigo

The book Vertigo was originally written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac in French, D’Entre Les Mortes (1954) and translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury as The Living and the Dead in 1956. I don’t believe the book’s beginning would attract a publisher nowadays; as it contains far too much exposition via lengthy dialogue. Still, the story itself is intriguing – hence the adaptation for Hitchcock’s 1958 film. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film diverges considerably from the book, save for the crucial deception.

The book's protagonist Flavières left the police due to his inability to cope with vertigo (or possibly acrophobia), and seemed at a loose end so he was grateful when his old friend Paul Gévigne asked for his help. However, Flavières wasn’t too happy when he found out he was hired to follow Paul’s wife, Madeleine. She was a mystery, it seemed. She had altered psychologically since they married and was obsessed with her strange past. Worse, Flavières found himself being obsessed by the beautiful Madeleine.

Unlike Kim Novak’s curvy blonde character of the movie, the book’s Madeleine was dark and slim. Of course we know that Hitchcock seemed to have his own obsession with blonde actresses. Madeleine wore a grey suit – as did Novak. And only her name was retained for the film; Flavières became Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart) and Paul became Gavin Elster.

The story begins during the phoney war, before the Germans had invaded France. As it was written some nine years after the war, there’s no obvious reason why it wasn’t set in the 1950s, save that perhaps there’s a parallel between the fall from grace of Flavières and the collapse of his country. It’s obviously a French story, as Flavières ponders about Paul’s concern for his wife: after all, Madeleine ‘had every right to have a lover if she wanted to.’ Yes, typically French, that. Though even at this early stage (p22), Flavières found that he hoped she didn’t have a lover, as he felt he’d suffer acutely at the knowledge.

I don’t believe the film realistically showed the growing obsession James Stewart had for Kim Novak. The book conveys this gradually, subtly: ‘… he was mortified by the joy he felt at the prospect’ of following Madeleine. By p32 ‘he had only to think of her to lose his sense of proportion.’

Following the tragic events of Madeleine’s suicide, the German offensive of France began in earnest. Flavières went to pieces and ‘made little distinction now between the national disaster and his own. France was Madeleine lying crushed and bleeding at the foot of a church tower.’

At the beginning of Part Two, Flavières returns to post-war Paris, and his past seems to haunt him still. The similarities between the book and the film are there, though the Paul character died during the war. It would be unfair to detail much else, save to observe that since this is a French novel, it most definitely has noir undertones with an unhappy ending, in effect to gratify Flavières’ ‘taste for melancholy, solitude, and impotence.’

Book of the film: Rear Window

Rather the short story of the film, really, since its length is only about 16,000 words.

Cornell Woolrich was popular and prolific, producing a slew of short stories in the 1930s and 1940s. His influences were F Scott Fitzgerald and James M Cain, among others. His biographer, Francis M Nevins, believes Woolrich’s recurring leitmotif is loss of love. ‘Murder in Wax’ (1935) was his earliest attempt at a first-person narrative from the perspective of a woman. The Black Angel (1943) is about a terrified young wife’s race against time to prove the innocence of her husband convicted of murder, again a first-person female viewpoint. He was introverted and lived with and was dominated by his mother, Claire Attalie. She died in 1957, aged 83. Woolrich died in 1968, aged 65.

Alfred Hitchcock made his film of ‘Rear Window’ in 1954, based on Woolrich’s story ‘It had to be murder’ (1942), starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly. It’s unlikely that anyone reading this hasn’t seen the film, but I’ll still attempt to avoid spoilers. The point of the story is that the hero is confined to his apartment room and idly watches his neighbours – and fears that one of them has murdered his bedridden wife. But how can he prove it?

Many a good film has sprung from a short story, whether by Woolrich, Poe, Kipling, Lawrence, Conrad, James, du Maurier, Philip K Dick or King. The essence, the outline is evident, but there’s scope to add, which screenwriters may find easier than trying to cut out subplots, characters and events from a full-length work when working from a novel.

Woolrich was inventive and wrote with plenty of pace and ‘Rear Window’ is a good example of his shorter work. The first-person narrator is Hal Jeffries and he’s stuck in his apartment for some reason, watching the antics of his neighbours through their back windows. He states ‘… my movements were strictly limited… I could get from the window to the bed, and from the bed to the window, and that was all.’ The humorous ending of the story reveals that Hal was stuck in there with a plaster cast on his leg – which really cheats the reader since if we are to be in the scenes with Hal, we’d see the cast. The film, obviously, begins with a close-up of the cast on the leg of LB ‘Jeff’ Jeffries (James Stewart).

Unlike in the film, the story has no female involvement. Kelly plays a young socialite girlfriend Lisa Fremont. In the film, Stella (Thelma Ritter), a cranky homecare nurse, calls daily; this role in the story belongs to Sam, a black friend/helper who brings in food or papers and is a mite superstitious: ‘My old mammy told it to me… Any time you hear (a cricket), that’s a sign of death – someplace close…’ Another character is Hal’s long suffering pal, Byrne, who worked on Homicide; the film character is Tom Doyle (Wendell Corey). And of course Lars Thorwald, played with such menace by Raymond Burr.

All of the philosophising between Stewart and Kelly was contrived padding and a little foreshadowing for the film – and actually slows the pace and dilutes the suspense which tends to build and build in the story. Indeed, Woolrich was a master at cranking up the suspense, often creating a race against the clock to save his protagonists. He certainly has a way with suspenseful phrasing – ‘I never heard the door open…behind me. A little eddy of air puffed through the dark at me.’

The denouement is slightly contrived in the story, but just believable; the film’s version is almost as bad, though giving Stewart the occupation of photographer makes sense of it.

As with so many works that have been translated into celluloid and reached millions, the action of reading has to attempt suspension of prior knowledge, which is not easy, otherwise the written source material offers few surprises. Even so, this is still worth reading.