Public Domain Day - 2025

Today we begin the new year with our annual celebration of Public Domain Day, and some of the films that are entering public domain January 1st, 2025.

Mickey Mouse speaks for the first time in The Karnival Kid, hawking hot dogs and singing "Sweet Adeline" to his sweetie, Minnie Mouse.

Another Disney cartoon is The Skeleton Dance.

The Marx Brothers' first movie, The Cocoanuts enters public domain, and we discussed that one in this previous post.

Best Oscar film The Broadway Melody, and The Hollywood Review of 1929 gives us a song and a Charleston dance by Joan Crawford, as well as the first presentation of the song "Singin' in the Rain."

We have a few firsts and lasts among the 1929 films:  Blackmail, director Alfred Hitchcock's first sound film;  Hallelujah, the first film produced by a major studio with an all African-American cast; and Spite Marriage, Buster Keaton's last silent movie.

For more on the movies, books, music, and art of 1929 that now enters public domain, have a look at this Center for the Study of Public Domain, part of the Duke Law Center website.

Here's a look at past posts on movies entering public domain:

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2024

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2023

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2022

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2021

Another Old Movie Blog: Public Domain Day - 2020

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.

North by Northwest - 1959

“North by Northwest” (1959), a forerunner of James Bond-type spy action flicks, a witty who-done-it-and-where-is-he, is also, at times, a comedy with style, elegance, sexual innuendo, and trains, sometimes all at once.

It’s the train we’re going to discuss today, now that I’m in withdrawal from my favorite holiday - National Train Day.

And we’ll also talk about the sex. Never have the two been so closely linked.

Today’s post is our contribution to the For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III. This year, the intrepid host trio of Farran Smith Nehme of Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Roderick Heath of This Island Rod are raising funds for the National Film Preservation Foundation's project, The White Shadow, directed by Graham Cutts -- which was “written, assistant-directed, and just generally meddled with in a number of different ways by the one and only Alfred Hitchcock”.

Please visit the three blogs of our hosts for lists of other blogathon participants and contribute if you can to the National Film Preservation Foundation.

In “North by Northwest”, Cary Grant is an advertising executive caught in a web of cold war intrigue and murder when he is mistaken for somebody else. His wit and his charm make for easy transitions to the moments of the film that are by turns elegant, mysterious, and even quite funny. Director Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman skillfully blend all these elements in a delightful way.

There is of course another element, one of suspense, of danger if not outright terror to Grant’s character, who through the course of the film is kidnapped, nearly killed several times, chased by the police as a suspected murderer himself, and dance partner to a homicidal crop duster.

The terror, I think, would be stronger if someone like James Stewart were in the role. Mr. Stewart had the ability, greater than Grant’s, I believe, to convey panic and psychological torment. If Stewart had been the man on the run, we’d worry more about him. Cary Grant, however, has that panache, that confidence in himself that makes us have confidence in him. We somehow know all along he’ll be fine.

He is, however, more fitting for the erotic train sequence than Mr. Stewart, whose vulnerability was part of his own particular charm. Grant shuttles us into the sexy 1960s.  He's more swinger than victim.

In “North by Northwest” the train, though often a place of mystery and even terror in Hitchcock films, instead becomes a safe haven, a place of romance, and at the end of the film is revisited for a happy ending.

Mr. Grant, on the run, and on his way to Chicago, slips aboard the 20th Century Limited in New York. Have a look at our previous trip aboard this famous train in “Twentieth Century” (1934).

The stowaway bumps into Eva Marie Saint in a corridor, where she smoothly diverts the cops who are chasing him. We might wonder why, since they are strangers and she seems not to care that he is wanted by the police. We soon learn she is not all she seems to be. For now, her mystery, like a delicate perfume, fills the train car and that is enough. We are in no great hurry, and neither is she.

Grant encounters her again in the dining car, where their ordering of brook trout invariably invokes for me the scene of Claude Rains’ petulant ordering of brook trout in “Deception” (1946) discussed here.

When you’re in a train dining car today, you still get the tablecloth, the bud vase with the flowers, but if you want a chance encounter with someone like Cary Grant, you’ll have to arrange that beforehand.

Which, it seems, is what Eva Marie Saint and her cohorts did.

Thorough planning is the sure way to a more pleasurable trip.

Though Cary Grant’s patented suaveness leads us to expect a tryst with the lady, it is really Miss Saint who controls the scene with such leisurely, and serene, seduction.

“It’s going to be a long night…and I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started…You know what I mean?”

“Tell me, what do you do besides lure men to their doom on the 20th Century Limited?”

She cups his hand when he lights her cigarette, drawing his fingers close to her lips so she can blow out the match.

We cut to her compartment where he is stuffed into the closed upper berth, hiding while the cops inspect her room. They spend the night together, without us. She will hide him a third time the next morning when she disguises him as a redcap carrying her luggage.

We are always aware of the threat against Grant, racing from the cops, racing against time, but the mystery and the threat is diminished on the train because we are distracted -- by Eva Marie Saint, and by the scenery, some of it quite lovely, passing outside the train. The looming Hudson River following us, the industrial backyards of steel and soot, and the blinding red sunset into which we are flying. Rather than leaving behind the outside world, it comes along for the ride.

Other locations in the movie, the mansion, the hotel rooms, the United Nations Building, even the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial are interesting and evocative -- but they are all mostly sets, and rear screen, and stagy looking. The train, with its controlled closed environment and rear screen scenery, is oddly natural looking, the only part of the film where we find dependable reality. However, here the familiar and ordinary is made exotic with the introduction of sex.

So powerful is the train in this movie that later in the film, when Grant and Saint are clinging to the rocky cliffs in South Dakota, about to plunge to their deaths, he says, “If we ever get out of this alive, let’s go back to New York on the train together…”

“Is that a proposition?” she replies.

Oh, yeah. Trains and romance. It’s the best kind of proposition.

Our final scene, he pulls her up to their awaiting upper berth, once more in the safety, but irresistible intrigue of the train.

“This is silly,” she says.

“I know. I’m sentimental.”

The last shot has the train entering a tunnel. Yes…well. Obvious and sophomoric perhaps, but at least symbolic and not graphic. Hitchcock may lead us around by the nose, but he still expects us to have an imagination.

Have a look at the other blogs participating in this worthy event, and please make your donation below to the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Rich Girls - Part 2 - With this Ring, I Thee Kill

“Dial M for Murder” (1954) and “A Perfect Murder” (1998) provide a contrast between supposedly what was and supposedly what is in terms of film techniques, acting techniques, and women of means. They are the same story, told 44 years apart, and demonstrate not only what has happened to the movie rich girl, but what has happened to the telling of whodunits.

“Dial M”, like “The Heiress” mentioned here in our last post, was adapted from a stage play, and so the action is centered mainly on one interior set, the lines delivered crisply, measured as if paced for the stage, and in an orderly, logical manner to tell the story. In stage plays, the dialogue moves the plot along, whereas sometimes in films, we almost get the feeling that the dialogue is what gets in the way of the plot.

Ex-playboy tennis star Ray Milland is the husband of rich girl Grace Kelly. She has just terminated an adulterous affair with visiting American Robert Cummings. Milland plots to kill her, but not out of any Othello-like rage of jealousy. It has occurred to him that if she takes to falling in love with other men, she might divorce him. And there would go his Easy Street life. He doesn’t mind losing her, just her fortune.

It’s not Easy Street, but actually the Maida Vale section of London where they reside, in a garden apartment Edwardian building that, except for the affluent address, really doesn’t seem to indicate extreme wealth. With what appears to be one bedroom and a kitchen both off a central living room, there’s not much here of which to be covetous. Makes you wonder why they need a daily charwoman to come and clean. Makes you wonder what Miss Kelly does with her time, when she’s not having an affair with Bob Cummings.

It’s somewhat unusual for a sympathetic female character to have some flaw like adultery as part of her baggage, with the Code usually so strict about heroines being unbesmirched. It’s also mighty unusual for a female lead at this time to beat up a guy in hand-to-hand combat.

Ray Milland enlists the aid of a former acquaintance, a two-bit ne’r do well with a record, to kill his wife. It’s an intriguing scene where they visit companionably with drinks in hand and Mr. Milland, in his oily, suave way, blackmails the man into doing his dirty work, which is to kill his wife. Trapped, and considerably greedy, the would-be-killer goes over the plot with Milland step-by-step until he, and especially the audience, is well-trained on what is supposed to happen that fateful night when Grace goes to answer the telephone in the dark. When the plot unravels, we then get plan B and a whole new movie..

We mentioned last time how director William Wyler took what seems to be a light touch in the camera work for “The Heiress”, letting most of the action appear as natural as it would on stage. But “Dial M” is a Hitchcock film, and so Mr. Hitchcock, master self-brander that he was, took this stage play and viewed it through his own unique perspective and never lets us forget this is a Hitchcock film. His trademark cameo appearance in this one is in the photo Milland shows the killer of an old college reunion dinner. Hitchcock is seated at the table in the photo with a Milland and a group of gents, all looking at the camera.

There are many table-level shots as in film noir, and when Milland starts to choreograph the murder for the killer, we jump to a shot looking down on them from the ceiling. This shot is reprised later when we see the police scurrying about the apartment inspecting the crime scene.

When Grace is shown in a dream-like sequence summarizing her trial, she stares directly into the camera, similar to James Stewart’s dream trance in “Vertigo” (1957).

Mr. Milland is charming as her duplicitous husband, who couches his considerable ego and greed in a remarkably likeable demeanor. This is the fun thing about his character, and makes his quite long explanation of the murder plot fascinating. Even his occasional bursts of petulance are somehow cute. Grace, despite straying from her marriage when she feels abandoned and neglected by him, never really falls out of love with Milland’s character, and that makes her shock at the end of the film upon discovering his plans to murder her all the greater.

Grace Kelly, in her first of a few memorable Hitchcock films, is believable as the troubled woman looking for balance between her guilt for having an affair, and her desire to have the kind of romantic and trusting relationship with her husband that she apparently has enjoyed with Bob Cummings.

One scene I get a kick out of is toward the end of the film when Mr. Cummings and the police inspector are hashing out the plan to catch Milland at his own game. They are both standing behind Grace Kelly, who sits on a chair. They are speaking, the focus is on them, but in the foreground we have Grace hunched over so that her hair keeps falling messily in her face despite attempts to push it away, crying and blowing her noise in Cumming’s handkerchief. Any other female star would have dabbed at the corner of her eyes delicately so as not to smudge the makeup, and eked out a few strictly for the camera boo-hoos.

Grace, as if intentionally interrupting what the men folk are discussing, keeps heartily, and thoroughly, blowing her nose, unfolding the handkerchief, turning it over in her hands and looking for a clean spot to blow some more. It is so natural and human, that I am never sure if she was actually deep into her character’s misery, or if she was just a great scene stealer. Or if she had sinus infection.

But the most amazing aspect of this film is how she stabs her would-be-killer to death.

Since this script, minus a few changes, was taken from the stage play, it would be hard not to have Miss Kelly kill the killer, since this is how it was done on stage, but such a graphic scene was not the norm for Hollywood, even if what was judged acceptable for film was changing a bit in the early 1950s.

The killer attacks Grace Kelly in the dark as she answers the phone, which her husband called right at that time purposely to get her out of bed. She is strangled in a brief tussle which despite a discreet keeping the violence to a minimum, evocatively shows her bare legs dangling over the desk in what many critics have judged to be Hitchcock’s substitute image for rape.

She reaches for her scissors, stabs him, at a rather unrealistic angle, but we’ll let that go. Then, of course, the killer may be judged to have caused his own death because he falls on his back, driving in the scissors and killing him. Brief, but ghastly.

Milland, who has enjoyed plotting the murder almost as if it was a hobby, kind of like Henry Travers and Hume Cronyn in Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943), quickly switches gears and sees that he still has a chance at killing his wife by framing her for the murder of this man, thereby sending her to the gallows.

It nearly happens, but an 11th hour bit of dogged detective work by the veddy British Scotland Yard inspector saves the day. He is played by the ever reliable John Williams, whose comic dignity is such a pleasure in roles like these. The mystery of the switched house keys is solved, and the louse Milland gets caught, still as suave as ever.

It’s interesting that Grace Kelly’s character, like Dorothy McGuire’s character in “Invitation” (1951) which we mentioned in our last post, is a woman with inherited wealth, but no seeming place in society except as a rather young matron, the supportive wife of a man with no pedigree and few talents, men who have mainly their charm to recommend them.

We might assume that as wealthy women of leisure, who have servants to clean their homes, they might fill their time with other pursuits, perhaps charity work, but the films do not show us this. It is perhaps not thought necessary to round out their characters in order to tell the complicated plots of these films. They are like types, and we do not see as much into their characters as we do Olivia de Havilland in “The Heiress.”

“A Perfect Murder” (1998), which is a remake of “Dial M” gives us the old chestnut plot about the house keys, and the phone signal, and the husband plotting to murder his adulterous wife, with a new coat of paint that reflects much about how filmmaking has changed and what we expect as a society from our rich girls.

It also shows the difference between filming a stage play and filming a script meant for film, just as we saw differences in style between “The Heiress” and “Invitation”, one which showed action in a confined space, and the latter which relied on several sets and locations (even if they were all soundstage “locations”).

“A Perfect Murder” takes the murder plot out of the Maida Vale flat and runs all over New York City with it. There are shots of the couple’s spectacular apartment, Central Park, subways, a Brooklyn industrial loft, offices, the United Nations, bars and restaurants. We are freer, there are many places to run, so we do a lot of running.

The couple is played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Douglas. In this case, Douglas is not the washed up sports hero that Milland was, relying on his wife’s money to give him the good life. Mr. Douglas is a Wall Street investor, a man of considerable drive and power. He is a self-made man, and his marriage is weakened not by neglecting his wife, but being overly controlling. She is less his meal ticket and more his trophy wife.

Viggo Mortensen is his wife’s lover, who, in this drastic change in the plot, is also the one Douglas blackmails into killing his wife. No bland if trustworthy Bob Cummings will do for the 1990s. Mortensen is sexy, mysterious, rather grubby-looking, and has that regrettable habit of most film actors today who speak in choked syllables from the back of the throat that makes it difficult to hear everything they’re saying. The old style of stage speech for film has long been regarded as artificial sounding, but I prefer it to guttural mumbling. I know stage speech is not always realistic, but I also know the movie is not real. It’s only a movie, so making it “realistic” is sometimes irrelevant.

Which is probably why most car chase scenes bore me to tears. I know it’s not real. The director yelled cut and everybody went to have lunch. Big deal. Show me some acting.

The biggest change comes in the character of the wife. Gwyneth Paltrow is excessively wealthy, but we see no malaise, like Dorothy McGuire and Grace Kelly, on her part because of it. She is educated, multi-lingual, works for the U.N., though we easily understand she does not need to work for a living at all. But she needs to work for the movie because it would more difficult for us to be interested in her character, these days, if she did nothing with her life. It’s hard to have sympathy with someone who does not work as hard as we do.

The kicker is, like any modern superwoman, she actually solves the crime rather than letting the police inspector, played by the terrific David Suchet, do it. There is the attack scene as well, where instead of using scissors from her sewing basket (how un-1990s), she jabs the killer in the neck with a meat thermometer.

Which is why I never cross through darkened parking lots and inner city back alleys without my trusty meat thermometer. It’s like a hat pin for the modern woman. And it tells you when the roast is done. Try doing that with a hat pin or scissors.

The attack scene is a bit more prolonged, violent and bloody. Another major difference is that by the end of the film, we rack up three dead bodies, among them her husband. As in most modern films, he does not have to face the wrath of society and the courts of justice. Too tedious. Just blow him away with a gun we had no idea she even had in her pocket. Problem solved.

Though Mr. Douglas’ main motive for attempting to have his wife killed is for her money, just as it was for Milland, we sense there is a bit more of Othello’s rage in Douglas. This may indeed be a crime of passion for him as well as for income, or at least a crime of ego. With Milland, we sense it is almost for the fun of seeing if it will work.

But the modern world is complicated, and instead of dial phones and clicking mechanical phone exchanges, we have cell phones and computers, a tangled world in which “the perfect murder” or rather we should say, “the perfect movie murder story”may be impossible because we cannot easily follow the twists and turns anymore. We may understand about greed and lust, but most of us are a little overwhelmed by automatic computer stock programs and how that could have made David Suchet no longer suspect Michael Douglas. We saw him toss his disposable cell phone out the car window. We may wonder why Suchet did not think of that.

And in a world where keys come in clusters on lanyards and chains, why would the killer carry a single key in his pocket? What makes sense in 1954 is harder to justify in 1998, and the problem is us. We tend to try to justify the complicated machinations of modern films which are more interested in being “realistic” than being entertaining. Those of us who watch old movies tend to accept a lot of what we see without justifying too much of it. Like accepting a convicted Grace Kelly, scheduled to be executed in a few hours, can be released on the hunch of a police inspector.

“A Perfect Murder” also tends to drift a bit when the focus on the action falls on the cat and mouse tactics of Mortensen and Douglas and we wonder not if they are going to kill Paltrow but each other.

I like the exchange in Arabic between Paltrow and Suchet, and their brief camaraderie. It’s a shame she has to be a modern woman who can do it all and therefore not have him do his own police work. I’d like to see more of him.

Another brief scene I like is when Mortensen makes his getaway on the subway with his $400,000 in a shoebox, and he glances furtively around at strangers who he hopes do not know he is carrying that much money. We always see him, looking like a hip slob and slipping in and out of shadows, a man capable of surviving anywhere. Suddenly a shoebox full of money makes him vulnerable in a way even pointing a weapon in his face does not.

In all of these films, “The Heiress”, “Invitation”, “Dial M for Murder” and “A Perfect Murder”, the wealthy heiress is shown as someone vulnerable, unhappy, and reaching for contentment, mainly through romance which seems to have nothing to do with her wealth. She seems curiously indifferent to her money, and remarkably innocent about the attraction it has for the men in her life.

No “madcap heiresses” here, unlike the ‘30s comedy films we mentioned in our intro last week. Clearly, money is no longer a joke. It’s a bit of a burden.

"Vertigo" Restored and Redeemed

“Vertigo” (1958) still shocks, thanks to its restoration in the mid-1990s. Especially shocking is the realization that until its restoration, the film was fast on its way to disappearing for good.

“Vertigo” is regarded by many as Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, and his most personal film. The restoration done by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz saved the film, but also shows us what this story is about in a manner that was not fully appreciated when it was a fading Vista Vision fifth or sixth generation reprint.

We get it now. It is a curious set of circumstances when a film is not merely given new life by restoration, but that its reputation as a classic among future generations will be based almost entirely on the restoration and not on the original.

Rich in imagery and a complex plot, the film relies on the use of color, light and dark contrast, and shading to texture the storyline. We discussed “Vertigo” in this previous post, so I won’t review the film again. Instead, its post-premiere life is what we might focus on to understand the peculiar legacy of this film.

Its earnings upon release were mixed, and its reviews the same. The New Yorker called it “far-fetched nonsense.” Time famously called it “another Hitchcock and bull story.” According to “Vertigo, The Making of a Hitchcock Classic by Dan Auiler (St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1998), the film was re-released in theaters in 1963, and again in the late 1960s. In 1968 the rights for the film reverted to Mr. Hitchcock. After a limited period of exposure on television, the film was pulled from all distribution by Hitchcock in 1974. It was not seen again until its release in December 1983, after Hitchcock’s death.

In those years, the film’s reputation grew somewhat among film scholars. However, until its early ‘80s release, it was unknown to a new generation of filmgoers. Instead, it was famed to the public more for being one of the five so-called “Lost Hitchcock’s”, which included “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956), “Rear Window” (1954), “The Trouble With Harry” (1955), and “Rope” (1948).

When the public finally got a chance to see it, the film they saw was seriously faded, with a diminished sound and visual quality that must have made some wonder what the big fuss was about. I can remember being less than impressed with a television print of it in the mid-1980s, but being unaware at the time that the movie I saw was reprint of a reprint of a reprint of a film that was disintegrating. When Mr. Katz and Mr. Harris set to work restoring the film, they discovered cans of rotting film stock.

A very interesting documentary about the restoration, originally an American Movie Classics channel production, called “Obsessed with Vertigo” is part of the bonus features on the “Vertigo” DVD released in 1999. It’s a fascinating look at the meticulous work of film restoration, and the enormous challenge of finding enough original material to compile into a restored film. Before and after shots are remarkable, not only for the success of the restoration which made faded scenes vivid again, but for the realization that this film was only a couple decades old before it began to fade. Keeping the original safe in a vault was not keeping it safe at all.

We are accustomed to believing that film stars achieve a kind of immortality on film. They don’t. They are only as alive as long the nitrate does not decompose.

Many film buffs and historians will point with regret how so many silent films, particularly most of the body of the work of the great Lon Chaney, has been lost forever. It is unfortunate, but perhaps more understandable that would happen to those old films, with poorer film stock of that day, inadequate storage methods, and the practice of films being routinely discarded, or recycled for their silver content.

It is somehow harder to swallow the thought that a well-made film from 1958 (its Vista Vision production was technologically the top of the line at the time), of esteemed and well-known reputation could have been lost as easily as an obscure film from 1908.

It was almost too late. The documentary of the restoration recounts the scramble for prints of the film of dubious quality from various parts of the world, of searching for analog sound clips of 1950s cars for to replace on the new soundtrack, of using Hitchcock’s original notes to recreate lost elements. They found the green dress Kim Novak wore as “Judy”, and used it to discover what hue the now much faded green dress in the movie was really supposed to be.

Thanks to the efforts of the restorers, “Vertigo” has been transferred with painstaking detail from Vista Vision to 70mm, digital sound, in a manner Alfred Hitchcock himself never saw. It is all there, the breathtaking colors in the flower shop when door is first opened, the evocative score by Bernard Herrmann, the pastel backdrop in sharp detail of San Francisco, the vibrant, classic color of the Golden Gate Bridge, and Judy’s now very green dress.

Now, we get it.

All film deteriorates, and most is not restored, but only copied and copied again until it is faded. Restoration is difficult technical work. It is expensive. The purpose of this blogathon sponsored by Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films is to generate awareness about saving America’s film heritage. The National Film Preservation Foundation, a non-profit organization set up by the U.S. Congress, is where you can donate to make this happen.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

Please visit the other blogs taking part in the blogathon. You can find a list of them over at the Siren’s place.

Vertigo (1958)

“Vertigo” (1958) is called director Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece these days, but received criticism at its release. It might be coincidental to the original unpopularity that this is a film so rich in imagery it takes more than one viewing to catch everything. In a sense, you could say this is one of those classic films saved by television, VHS and DVD, where multiple viewings are possible. For years this film was unseen due to copyright restrictions.

Then again, it might not be coincidence that it takes many viewings to appreciate the film. That is the way with works of art. The first time seeing the film one is absorbed by the mystery. On subsequent viewings, one is diverted more by the colors and reflections, and the artistry of the film. A film with an abrupt, disjointed ending, it becomes on subsequent viewings less a suspense story and more a character study with unanswered questions. We are left not so much with an unresolved story, but a story with an ending of our choosing.

Any discussion of Alfred Hitchcock films invariably becomes an analysis of the psychosexual quirks of Hitchcock himself; of his use of blonde actresses both idealized and humiliated, of domineering mother figures, of mirror reflections and double images, of impotence. Perhaps no other director’s films takes on his own personality so intimately. I humbly confess to being ill-qualified to psychoanalyze the Master of Macabre, so I will keep this essay on his “masterpiece” to the qualities about it I find most arresting even after you’ve seen the film a few times.

James Stewart and Kim Novak give what are among the best performances of their careers. Mr. Stewart, able to play the good guy, with a wry comic delivery and a bit of goofy charm throughout his younger years, never lost this boyish appeal as he aged, but he also had the ability to play on man on the edge of sanity. Hitchcock used him in a few films probably for this reason. Underneath his “aw shucks” personality, Stewart could appear shockingly desperate and sickeningly afraid. It is used sparingly and has a far greater effect than the most violent scene played by a more brooding actor. It can be said that the creepiest part of the film is not the murder mystery, but the way Stewart’s personality changes as he become more obsessed with Kim Novak’s role as Judy, trying to remake her as Madeleine. His domination of her to the point of choosing her clothes is what we least expect from the average Joe with a fear of heights that we meet at the beginning of the film.

Kim Novak plays a person imitating another person, so her role is not exactly dual as it is layered. You don’t catch this on first viewing when you really think she is playing two people. It’s after you’ve seen the film again, knowing the ending, that one can really appreciate the depth of her fine performance.

The location shots in and around San Francisco, with sweeping rooftop views of the city and the bay, the iconic image of the Golden Gate Bridge, the sharp, steep hills, all create the texture of this film. It is a city of jagged fault lines. The music by Bernard Hermann, particularly with its Spanish suggestion of castanets is subtle and contemplative in the art museum, and during Stewart’s nightmare, becomes grotesquely exaggerated and frightening. It follows us in one variation or another all through the film, just as James Stewart tails Kim Novak.

One could make a game counting all the mirror reflections and shots in profile, and patterns of swirls and spirals. Beautiful Miss Novak looks especially striking in profile, and it is obviously reflective that we are never shown a full picture of who Madeleine is, who Judy is, because neither are as important as what James Stewart wants them to be.

We are also never told who Midge is. Played by Barbara Bel Geddes, Marjorie, with the less glamorous sounding nickname of Midge, is Stewart’s friend from college days. She appears in pastel sweaters and skirts, as if perennially the college girl. We are told they were once engaged, but their relationship now is more of camaraderie, and he teasingly refers to her mothering him. We get only a brief, concerned glance from Midge, and the suggestion that perhaps though it is she who broke off their engagement, she still loves him. When he climbs a stepstool to challenge his fear of heights, a disability which made him recently retire from the police force, he becomes dizzy and faint, and falls into her arms. Her embrace is indeed motherly, comforting, supporting.

We discover late in the film that Stewart’s fear of heights is why the murderer chose him as a ruse to set up his crime, but we see another aspect to Stewart’s character that makes him the perfect chump for the murderer’s scheme. Stewart, seeming emasculated by his vertigo, and appearing to keep an emotional distance from the old girlfriend who mothers him, is immediately attracted by Miss Novak’s vulnerability. Here is a person more lost and vulnerable than he is, and it is a boost to his ego that, at first hired to observe her, he soon becomes her protector.

We are teased throughout the film by red herrings. Kim Novak’s character of Madeleine at first seems to be the victim of possession by the ghost of a tragic ancestor. Then the ghost story appears to become one of the old movie cliché of hereditary insanity. Each of these story lines is gradually ruled out. Stewart, the cynical ex-cop, does not believe in demonic possession. After he falls in love with Madeleine, he also rules out insanity and substitutes a gentler diagnosis of her merely being obsessed with a sad family story, a lonely woman who needs reassurance and comforting.

We are never really shown the moment Stewart falls in love with Madeleine. In his apartment, when they both reach for a cup and their hands touch, the moment is erotic. In an earlier scene, Stewart’s character and Midge are chummily conversing in her studio apartment where she works at a drawing board as an illustrator of women’s undergarments. They examine a bra together like two children looking at a keen model airplane. There is a humorous lack of eroticism. (The blinds and configuration of her windows reminds me of “Rear Window”. He even asks her how her love life is, the same question Grace Kelly asks James Stewart in that film.)

Yet all it takes is his hand to touch Novak’s over a cup of coffee and the moment becomes electric. When he tells her his name is John Fergusson, she comments that it is “a good strong name.” Just this sentence helps him begin to shed the humiliation of his vertigo and his resentment at being mothered.

However, Stewart’s obsession must have started before this. When Madeleine, in her melancholy trance, leaps into San Francisco Bay in a suicide attempt, he rescues her. In the very next scene, he is back in his apartment. We are given a peek at her clothes hanging in the kitchen as if to dry, and then the camera pans over to through the open door of his bedroom, where Novak’s naked shoulder exposed from the blankets tells us on one sweeping movement he has chosen to take her home with him, undressed her while she was unconscious and most vulnerable.

We might have been given an intervening scene which would show his indecision as to what to do, a scene which showed him making this choice. Giving us a point at which he has fallen in love. But Hitchcock leads us on with a scene that is as sexy as it is senseless. A street-wise cop would not take a suicidal woman, unconscious and suffering from hypothermia back to his apartment, strip her naked and put her in his bed. One would assume he would know there might be legal ramifications to this.

It does not occur to him either to take her to her own home and back to her worried husband, or to a hospital. One might argue that in bringing her to his home he was attempting to protect his client with discretion. But Hitchcock never argues this. He just shows it to us and lets our own confusion be his toy. We do not realize that Stewart is being set up until much later.

When Miss Novak awakes, she remains enigmatic, with few words and minimal, if graceful movement. She slips on the robe he has left her, and sits down obediently on the cushions he has tossed on the floor for her. She does not glance around, wondering if a female on the premises removed her wet clothing, no wife or girlfriend, or housekeeper, no visiting old maid aunt. She seems to accept the situation and demurely thanks him. She apologizes for being a bother.

A later outing together walking among a dark and Wagnerian redwood forest deepens her dependence as she unburdens herself to him, and when the waves crash behind them and she begs him not to let her go, what else can he do but kiss her? We know by now he has completely forgotten about his client, her husband, and wants her for himself. Not only he is going to comfort her anxiety, he is now going to cure it, and brings her to the fateful scene at the mission.

When his vertigo prevents him stopping what appears to be her suicide, his guilt sends him on a psychedelic nightmare, which sends him to a sanitarium. There, even motherly Barbara Bel Geddes is unable to comfort him this time, and she walks down the long gray corridor in her long gray coat and out of the film. We never are told the beginning of their story together, and we are shown no goodbye. One wonders why it does not occur to Stewart that young women who hide behind enormous eyeglasses and wisecracks might also be concealing their vulnerability.

Many months pass, and when we next see James Stewart, he is roaming the familiar venues of 1950s San Francisco, still haunted by his lost love. He sees similarity to her in Judy, as Judy, a dark-haired shop girl stands for a moment, in profile of course, before him on the street. He follows her, and strikes up a friendship with this girl who though favors Madeleine, is not an exact replica. She dresses more colorfully, with a lack of Madeleine’s sophistication and taste. She speaks in a harder Midwest accent, not the cultured eastern finishing school, slightly English-sounding tones which Madeleine spoke. Judy wears her hair differently, wears heavier makeup. She is a more coarse person, and we may wonder what it is exactly about her that attracts James Stewart. Perhaps it is the same wistful sadness. It is one thing, besides the actress playing them, that the two characters have in common.

Miss Novak is particularly effective as the downtrodden Judy, so desperate to be loved by the man she duped, but helplessly fell in love with, that she agrees to let him make her over into the image of his lost love. Never is good guy Stewart so harsh and disgusting as when he whines, cajoles, and bullies her into her new clothes, stares at her feet in her new shoes like a man with a fetish, and orders that her brown hair be dyed blonde.

But when he sees his creation emerge and his expression shatters into a look of wonder, heartache and unspeakable joy, we are still sorry for him. The 360-degree shot of their climatic kiss was reportedly not trick photography with scenes of the fateful carriage house appearing suddenly in her drab hotel room, but an actual set on a turntable.

Mention should be made as well of the “vertigo affect” by cinematographer Robert Barks that will actually give you vertigo if you haven’t got it already. Robert A. Harris work on the 1996 restoration of this film is marvelous, and should also be noted.

At this point, Mr. Hitchcock does the unthinkable in a murder mystery and tells us the ending before the end of the movie. We see Judy and Madeleine are the same person, and that Stewart was a dupe to a murder arranged by his client. It is a striking moment when Stewart discovers this himself when he notices the necklace Judy wears is the same one in the infamous portrait that had mesmerized Madeleine. However, it may strike the audience as incongruous that so carefully planned a murder would be fouled by coincidence. That the murderer would have allowed Judy to keep both the famous gray suit and the necklace when the rest of his plan was so meticulous seems unlikely. That she would have remained in San Francisco and not be sent away after the crime seems unlikely. That she would have been recognized and pursued by James Stewart makes a wonderful tale of eerie fantasy, but it is based on mere chance which seems unlikely.

Most unlikely of all is when Judy leaps to her death at being startled by the approach of a nun when Stewart, having conquered his vertigo, angrily drags her up the bell tower. The murderer gets off free, and the cycle of death by falling, and guilt, is repeated.

It is a film with no beginning, as we come into it in the middle of a rooftop chase, and Stewart dangling from a drainpipe. It ends with the plot dangling. One can see why the critics and the audience in 1958 might have felt that the movie lacked a complete story and the end was missing.

But repeated viewings show us a different film. Like the paintings in the art museum Madeleine frequents, the film is a painting, not of the ghostly Carlotta or even a series of postcards of San Francisco, or cartoonish parody like the painting Midge does of herself as the portrait of Carlotta. The film might be a little bit of all those things, but it is also in and of itself, a painting.

Sometimes a painting will tell a story, but sometimes it will only suggest moods, meanings that might add up to many different stories. We when we look at paintings we are seeing color, and patterns, and brush strokes if we look really close. We may see different things each time we look at it. That’s what happens when you watch “Vertigo.” The ghost story that is really about insanity, that is really about love, that is really about obsession, that is really about vindication, that is really about a murder mystery where the murderer gets away, is a movie about all these things. The next time you see it, you may notice something else.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

“Shadow of a Doubt” was thought to be Director Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite film. This could illustrate that the Master of Suspense had just as keen a sense of humor as of horror. Though “Shadow of the Doubt” is hardly a comedy, there is much that amuses in the film and Mr. Hitchcock uses his particular brand of humor to throw us off and leave us unprepared, as Young Charlie is unprepared, for the unimaginable psychological terror unexpectedly brought on by the visit of a favorite uncle.

Teresa Wright plays Charlie, a young woman who has yet to throw off the blinders of innocent childhood and is slow to realize her beloved uncle, played by Joseph Cotten, is a murderer. The audience learns this at the beginning, and we are drawn in to the story of how an Average American Family, if such thing exists, faces evil, or chooses not to face it. There is a strong allegory in this film relative to America’s isolationism and its late entry into World War II when facing evil was the only thing left to do once it seemed that choosing not to face it was no longer an option. There are signs or posters in Mr. Newton’s bank and in the library promoting defense bonds, and even the nerdy Herb from next door wears a flag pin on his lapel. Mr. Hitchcock never elaborates, he only insinuates.

Teresa Wright was one of the best young actresses of her generation, and is so far the only actress to win Academy Award nominations for every one of the first three films she appeared in, winning Best Supporting for “Mrs. Miniver,” (1942) , the year she was also nominated at the same time for Best Actress for “Pride of the Yankees” (1942). Her performance of a gentle girl with nerves of steel is, along with Joseph Cotten’s as the sinister Uncle Charlie, for whom she was named, are the only two characterizations in the film not given to whimsy or humor. She is good and innocent; he is wily and twisted, and each is in dead earnest about what they want and what they are going to do about it.

It is the character actors who support these two which give us the background of who these people are and what this family and community are about. Patricia Collinge is particularly affective as the fragile and loving mother (see blog entry March 8, 2007), and Henry Travers is reliable as the kindly if occasionally confused father. His running discussions with neighbor Herb, played by a young but made to look older Hume Cronyn on how best to murder people is a delightful comic foil to the film as the script grows more tense. Both men are fans of murder mysteries, and the books and fiction magazines they trade and the gruesome facts of murder cases are delightedly discussed with utter seriousness. They share favorite methods on how they would murder each other, to the point where Teresa Wright nervously loses her temper in a near fit of hysterics after she begins to piece together the lurid story of her uncle’s past, the current danger to her family.

Edna May Wonacott, the typical little girl Hitchcock found while scouting Santa Rosa, California for this location shoot, is extraordinarily natural and quite funny as the too-serious younger sister Ann, who reads more intelligent literature than her father and wears flowers in her hair, who pompously warns her little brother he is not to make seditious remarks against the government. Underneath the jovial family chaos, some undercurrent of disaster is brewing.

Like many of Hitchcock’s films, this is a character study and the suspense is organic. It comes not merely from a threat from the outside, but from something within the characters, something weak, or ignorant, or wrong that makes them vulnerable to a stronger force. The characters played by Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten play a game of emotional chess with each other, with the Newton family as the stakes, with all this nonsense going on behind them.

Two of the best and most famous shots, however, are technical achievements: the extreme close-up on the ring Miss Wright wears when she drapes her hand on the banister coming down the stairs to challenge her uncle to leave town, showing him she has the evidence, which is the ring, to convict him. The second is the moment in the darkened town library when, searching newspapers while a thunderous chorus the “Merry Widow Waltz” shocks us, she reads details of a crime spree by a suspect called the Merry Widow Murderer which implicate her uncle. The camera pulls back in a long overhead shot, leaving Wright small, exposed and vulnerable as she pulls herself up with difficulty from the library table and walks, trance-like and ill, trudging away into the shadows.

We see here again that Alfred Hitchcock is ever as much a technician as a storyteller picking apart human psychology. He is aided and abetted here, perhaps not so ironically, by screenplay writer Thornton Wilder, who is famous for the play “Our Town,” an iconic piece about a supposedly average American town. He gives Mr. Cotten the chilling speech: “How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you’d find swine?” Not the stuff of Grover’s Corners.

If Young Charlie is the antithesis of Uncle Charlie, then perhaps Hitchcock intends for “Our Town” to be the antithesis of “Shadow of a Doubt.” He never comes right out and says it though; as with the meanings of the many pairings of two in this film, we have to follow his hints, while he merrily strings us along.

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Rear Window (1954)

Rear Window (1954) is shot on one of the most intricate sets ever created for film, and is so much fun I’m surprised someone hasn’t re-created it as a theme park. The set itself, a courtyard showing the backs of several multi-level apartment buildings, is its own character in the film. It has moods and secrets.

Director Alfred Hitchcock allows the audience to become, much as L.B. Jeffries, played by James Stewart has become, a voyeur sneaking glances into the private worlds of his neighbors. Their private worlds are not just the tangle of fire escapes and studio apartments and kitchenettes, but the rejection and disappointment, the loneliness and troubles they face.

In a swift opening shot we see the backdrop of apartments out Jeffries’ windows, his wheelchair and leg cast, his smashed cameras and photographs, and a stack of Life magazines which tell us he is a man of action, and already a sort of voyeur as a professional photographer. The first shot we see of Grace Kelly, who plays his girlfriend Lisa, is stunning, with an almost slow-motion feeling of her leaning over the camera and leaning over him for a kiss while he is sleeping. We soon learn, despite this sensual encounter, that there is trouble between them. She is trying to change him into something he is not; and he does not want to be tied down in marriage.

The dialogue in the film, written by John Michael Hayes is reflective, sometimes overlapping, deceptively simple and spare. There is as much conveyed in a camera glance into one of the apartments, or a facial expression from James Stewart as is revealed through the spoken word, though the insurance company nurse, played by Thelma Ritter, gets some good lines.

“We’ve become a race of peeping Toms,” she says, and one wonders what her character would think of today’s camera cell phones.

She senses impending trouble for Stewart, disapproving of his spying on his neighbors, including the nubile dancer dubbed “Miss Torso,” with his telephoto lens, and when he scoffs at her foreboding, she tells him she also predicted the stock market crash of 1929 based on her observations of her patient, an executive at General Motors.

“Kidney ailment they said. Nerves, I said. And I asked myself, what’s General Motors got to be nervous about? Over production, I says. Collapse. When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go.”

When the lonely woman who lives by herself, dubbed Miss Lonelyhearts, pretends to entertain in a candlelight dinner for two, she raises her glass of wine, as Stewart, wryly and condescendingly observing her, raises his own glass and toasts her, playing her imaginary partner from a distance. We hear street sounds, car horns and sirens, the distant muffled voices of the neighbors, and music as if from a distant radio.

When he begins to suspect his neighbor Thorwald, played by Raymond Burr, of killing his invalid wife, Jeffries’ boredom with his neighbors and his sarcasm toward them changes. He becomes fascinated, and with the help of Kelly and Ritter, tries to prove to his detective friend that a murder even happened. His relationship with Kelly changes as well, and his face lights up with admiration as she reports back on her spying attempt to get information. The audience becomes conspirators, as if, like children, excitedly ringing doorbells and then running away, in an attempt to get the goods on the murderer from a safe distance. In the end, however, his apartment is not Stewart’s haven anymore than his neighbors’ apartments are theirs. Thorwald comes to get him, and Stewart’s only protection is the flash device on his camera, where he pops in the bulbs one at a time into the enormous flash reflector, like a long-ago soldier using a percussion musket that can be fired only once before it must be reloaded each time.

For a guy who spends the entire film in his jammies in a wheelchair, James Stewart has one of the most interesting roles of his career, in part due to his reactions displaying his changing attitudes towards his neighbors. He and Thelma Ritter disgustedly watch a distasteful scene of Miss Lonelyhearts fending off an aggressive date, and later fear her attempted suicide. His attitude towards this neighbor, and the others, has moved from bored disinterest, to fascination, to compassion. Her suicide attempt is stopped suddenly by the rapture she feels at the music coming from the bachelor composer’s apartment (played by Ross Bagdasarian, who later gave us Alvin and the Chipmunks).

Lisa, sneaking into Thorwald’s apartment is also transfixed by the music, but the music that saved Miss Lonelyhearts is Lisa’s doom. Thorwald catches her, and Stewart is trapped by his helplessness, in a black hole of panic when Lisa screams and the lights are turned out. After she is rescued by the police, Stewart broods on his own danger when he knows Thorwald knows he has been watching, and we see the eerie glow of a cigarette in Thorwald’s darkened apartment.

The magnificent set, so intricate despite appearing so ordinary, gives us all these moments. Rear Window is perhaps one of Hitchcock’s best-told stories of murder and suspense because it is played out in such an ordinary setting, and at times with ironic humor. That a grisly murder could happen under such every day circumstances and missed by all the neighbors is creepy. The aura of normality is deceptive, which is a creepy thought by itself.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.