Music from the movies at Symphony Hall

Watching a symphony orchestra at work is like watching a magic trick explained and yet still retain the mystery. One sees the component parts of the music put together, each musician’s contribution to the whole, and being able to see the machinery of it, if you will, is wonderfully dramatic. Music from classic films, removed from their films in the setting of a symphony performance, is revelatory.

I recently had the pleasure of attending an evening of theme music from the movies—mostly classic films—performed by the Springfield (Massachusetts) Symphony Orchestra, which is currently celebrating its 75^th anniversary.  My thanks for the comp ticket to my friend Shera Cohen, whose company, In the Spotlight, reviews the arts in western New England.

Fans of classic films are usually extraordinarily well informed about pretty much every facet of filmmaking in the studio era, and the music—whether a sweeping theme or even incidental background music—is as important to them as a favorite actor or director. Unlike other elements of film, rather than intellectual analysis, the music evokes a purely emotional response.

So it was at Springfield Symphony Hall and “Music Night with Maestro Rhodes.”  Along the same lines as big-screen showings of classic films, this evening brought out not only symphony regulars, but clearly an enthusiastic audience who recognized the film scores.

Maestro Kevin Rhodes conducted and also interspersed between the selections a bit of background information on the composers.  His style of presentation was breezy, lighthearted, and quite funny at times.  When he introduced composer Alex North’s “Prelude” from Cleopatra (1963), he remarked of its suggestion of an exotic ancient world—and Elizabeth Taylor’s presence— “You can just see the blue eyeshadow when you hear this one.”

Other composers included Alfred Newman, who was represented not only by his music from Street Scene of 1931 (which found its way into other films), but the familiar “20^th Century-Fox Fanfare,” which was a delightfully whimsical way to begin the show.

Max Steiner’s Warner Bros. fanfare, and theme from Gone with the Wind (1939)—of course—and Casablanca (1942) were favorites.  The latter was especially stirring for its intricate suggestion of Moroccan intrigue and the sudden swell of “La Marseillaise.”

Works from greats Bernard Hermann, Elmer Bernstein (the theme from The Magnificent Seven tends to raise people out of their seats by at least a foot, and his “Suite” from The Ten Commandments of 1956 concluded the program), and Miklos Rozsa—the percussionist’s lengthy solo on the chimes in the “Prelude” from Ben Hur (1959) is something I’ll remember the next time I see the film.  Likewise, the kettle drums from the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and a light sensation of dancing on the tambourine in Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) kept our attention on the percussionists, whose effort we can see more vividly perhaps than the player of a woodwind instrument.  There’s a certain gallant dash about smashing a couple cymbals together.

Films from later decades included the “Love Theme” from The Godfather (1972), Titanic (1997)—which included a stunningly haunting refrain from the women of the Symphony Chorus first from up in the loge and then on stage (I had no idea the Irish penny whistle ever made its way into a symphony orchestra), and other modern hits, but probably the most charming was when the maestro played a piano solo of the “Ragtime Medley” from The Sting (1973) and then joined by a single clarinet, piccolo, trombone, and tuba to playfully embroider the delicate ragtime theme.  They were brought out to the apron of the stage as if to delightfully demonstrate that only these handful of musicians were required despite the complexity of the arrangement. They belonged on a gazebo in a park in summer.

It was an evening of tribute to these composers whose majestic music is so part and parcel of the films that one cannot be thought of without the other.  Watching people make the already fondly familiar music in front of you makes the experience still more intimate.

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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.

We Hold These Truths - Hollywood Broadcast

A week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a program celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the Bill of Rights was produced on all four radio networks of the day – CBS, NBC Red and Blue networks, and the Mutual network.  It was narrated by James Stewart, and a host of Hollywood players joined him in bringing to life not only the struggles of post-Revolutionary War America to come up with this Bill of Rights, but how important it was to reflect on it, and rely on it, in a time of modern troubles.  The program was performed live.

It is a remarkable and deeply emotional dramatization that not only speaks to us today, but sings, shouts, cries, and cheers.  Norman Corwin wrote the beautiful script, performed on December 15, 1941, and it is estimated over half the U.S. population listened to it.  Performed in a Hollywood studio, live hookups also included performances in New York City, and an address by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from Washington, D.C.  Bernard Herrmann composed original music for the program, and at the very end of the show, Maestro Leopold Stokowski conducted “The Star Spangled Banner.”

James Stewart was, at that time, a corporal in the Army Air Corps, loaned to the project for the occasion.  His fellow players included Edward Arnold, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Brennan Marjorie Main, Bob Burns, Walter Huston, Edward G. Robinson, Rudy Vallee, and Orson Welles.

Walter Huston, rolling his r’s, introduces the program.  Then, the familiar voice of Lionel Barrymore is brought to the mic.

“My name is Barrymore. I’m one of several actors gathered in the studio in California….”  He joins 130 million fellow Americans in praise of a document “that men have fought for, that men are fighting for…”

He announces the cast, and adds, “Our names are meaningless unless your names are added.”  

Then one by one, the cast fills in, leaving their Hollywood personas and adopting the guise, in our imaginations, of post-Revolutionary Americans.  Jimmy Stewart like his character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939),which we covered in this post, leads us on a tour of modern Washington, D.C., and as he describes monuments and their inscriptions, we are reminded of the movie, for he is intentionally channeling Mr. Smith’s awe and wonder.  

Not only the message, but the script beams with elegant writing, no longer in fashion.  Perhaps it is too idealistic, and we have learned to distrust everything.  

On the National Archives building it is written,  “ What is past, is prologue.”  We hear the clicking of footsteps as Stewart climbs the stone steps to see the Bill of Rights in glass – the old parchment with faded writing.  Then Stewart and the other actors proceed to bring it alive.  “The words are dim, but not the meaning of the words…”  Perhaps not.  Perhaps we need this lesson.

Stewart brings us to the hall as the great men rise to speak and call the roll, to sign their names the draft when Constitution is written, which is then brought back to the states for review, but the people are suspicious.  They want guarantees of certain protections.  And so, this is the story of how the Bill of Rights came to be added as the most important addendum in history.  

Other actors jump in to be those common people in the different states who express their curiosity for the new document, but who want more guarantees, more explanations of just what they have won in the Revolutionary War.

Walter Huston is a blacksmith.   He doesn’t want anyone telling him he has to pray the way somebody else tells him.  Doesn’t like state religion.  Wants to make sure there won’t be any.

Others are suspicious of authority.  They know that just wanting law and order isn’t enough—Nero had such.   

Marjorie Main plays a woman whose husband died in the war.  She wants guarantees that he didn’t die  in vain.

Edward Arnold is a bricklayer who argues that the work is unfinished.  There’s only a foundation and no house.

So many voices, so much dissent, so much yearning for rights.   We are taken on a journey not only through history, but through the minds and souls of this nation.

Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison lend their voices, and George Mason warning us not only about a monarchy, but a “tyrannical aristocracy” taking over, the monied class.

Now the First Congress begins sifting through the amendments to the Constitution and hammering them out for the future.  It’s not an easy job, but it’s important and they persist.  Stewart passionately narrates, cajoles, shouts.

Most profound is Orson Welles’ impassioned speech.  He takes over at this point and adds the other voices to the founders of the Bill of Rights – not just the men in Congress, but from the victims of the ages – “They had much help, the many nameless and unknown – from bleeding mouths, burnt flesh – from numberless and nameless agonies.  The delegates from dungeons, they were there.  The delegates from ashes at the bottoms of the stakes were there.”

We hear a voice, weak, pleading.

Orson continues, “The gallows delegates, whose corpses lifted gently in the breeze, they too…”

His voice grows booming, horrified:  “The Christians killed for being Christians, Jews for being Jews, the Quakers hanged in Boston town, they made a quorum also… The murdered men, the lopped off hands, the shattered limbs, the red welts where the whip lash bit into the back.  Must you know what they said?  Must you know how they argued?  Must you be told the evidence?

“Listen, then!”

We hear a blood-curdling scream.

“That was an argument for an amendment.”

They are words for our times, how shockingly, sickeningly current.

“How much of all this must be told to be believed?  How much of this must be diagramed: X marks the spot where decency was last observed?”

Nero was there, Caligula, Cotton Mather, all the tyrants were observing in the hall.  “All the long and bloody history of fanaticism, murder in the name of God.”  

Christ was there too.  “He, too, sat in the Congress, the mild Man, with scars in His hands and feet where the spikes went through.  He was a consultant in the business at hand.  Had He not died because the rulers of the realm denied free speech?  Was He not nailed up on a cross between two thieves because His preachments were considered treason?”

Orson growls, wails his words.  “Out of the agonies, out of crisscrossed scars of all the human race they made a Bill of Rights for their own people…To stand against the enemies within, connivers, fakers, those who lust for power, those who make of their authority an insolence.”

Listen to Orson’s impassioned speech, and think of now.

The Bill of Rights “Threw up a bulwark…and made a sign for their posterity against the bigots, the fanatics, bullies, lynchers, race haters, the cruel men, the spiteful men, the sneaking men, the pessimists…”

The Bill of Rights is ratified!  Jimmy Stewart breathes easier and brings the document to the thirteen states.

Then Edward Arnold, Walter Huston, Marjorie Main, Walter Brennan and others join in as the amendments are read, each one, and voices answer to illustrate what each one means.  We go to the homes of farmers, the blacksmith shop, all the new citizens.  The war gave them separation from Great Britain, but the Constitution and the Bill of Rights makes them citizens.

We hear a woman tending the grave of her soldier husband.  We hear a Colonial folk tune.  Through all, James Stewart’s folksy ruminating weaves a thread to guide us to the present.  Edward G. Robinson is a political protester who praises the rights that allow him to speak and fight corruption in city hall.

“A promise is a promise,” Jimmy Stewart says, “Has America’s been kept?”

It is a fair question, but in only a short time Japanese Americans would have their rights taken away by virtue of their ethnicity.  It was not the Bill of Rights that failed them; it was their fellow citizens and a president and government who shamefully allowed their mistreatment.  Even in those days when war was declared and Americans were coming together for mutual support, even in times of great pride, patriotism and cheerleading, something monstrously unfair could occur.  How much easier it is to occur in times when we are not one, when we are fighting amongst ourselves?  When a foreign enemy knows how to divide and conquer.  Abraham Lincoln said:

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” 

We've come to that suicidal brink, however, with the aid of Vladimir Putin’s mafia, and the fascism that is rotting our government. We have far superior technology in our media than they did when this radio program was broadcast in December 1941, but we have lost the gift of eloquence that they possessed then.  Such well-written and carefully crafted words would today seem to be talking above the heads of the crowds whom the spokesmen try to reach.  Maybe because they are above the intelligence of the spokesmen.

This was a live program, so neatly coordinated, so passionately and intimately put together.  Listen to this program and marvel not only at how it was written, acted, and produced according to the technology of the day when we were only a week at war, but marvel – for God’s sake, marvel at the message of warning, of love, and of integrity, of pride for our Bill of Rights.

At the end of the program, James Stewart introduces in a soft, gentle voice President Roosevelt, who then speaks live from Washington, D.C.   “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the people of the United States.”

Of the people.

It was reported by Screen Guide magazine in the March 1942 issue, from which some of these photos are taken, that after James Stewart introduced the President, he ripped off his earphones at the mic, and burst into tears.

Listen to We Hold These Truths or download at the Internet Archive, or here at YouTube.

That Was Then; This is Now

This blog devotes itself to examining old movies in the context of the times in which they were filmed. Easy enough to say, but not always easy to do.

We are rooted in our environment, our own time, no matter how imaginative we are or knowledgeable, or sensitive to the time machine we climb into when we watch an old film. Some stuff, oddly the more shocking stuff, like racism and sexism one is almost able to easier put aside with a “that was how it was then” attitude. The lesser important stuff seems to grab us by the ankles sometimes and won’t let us go.

I wrote on “Vertigo” (1958) last week. In that essay I did not mention that while watching the slow chase of James Stewart following Kim Novak in the winding drives around San Francisco, mesmerized by Bernard Herrmann’s penetrating music, my mind drifted away from the mystery plot and instead I was foolishly preoccupied with how much gasoline they were wasting. I stopped thinking about the characters and instead become rather tense over how much it would cost to fill up her enormous Rolls-Royce and his huge Plymouth, and over the carbon footprint they were leaving.

Me, I wouldn’t have tailed Madeleine around all day without combining other errands to make the trip more gas efficient. Say, pick up my dry cleaning on the way to the art museum, or drop off my library books and pick up some groceries on the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.

I might even have approached Kim Novak, tapped on the window of her car and said, “Um, Madeleine? I’ve been hired by your husband to follow you. So, as long as we’re going in the same direction, how about we just take one car? Move over, I’ll drive.”

But not James Stewart. He just drives and drives, and follows her for miles, and I am fixated on fuel consumption.

Our friend Laura over at Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings had a similar reaction to a pregnant woman smoking in the waiting room of her OB-GYN’s office. (See her blog entry here.) We can believe any make-believe fantasy the old movies throw at us, except when something jolts our present-day sensibilities. Then it slaps us hard in the face and reminds us yet again that people were living their lives under different laws of the jungle long before we came around.

The movie “The Out Of Towners” (1970) is still an extremely funny movie to me no matter how many times I see it, but as the years pass I find it becomes more and more remote. I may smile at Sandy Dennis’ white gloves (Surely 1970 must have been the last time women would not leave the house before putting on white gloves), but the sight of her and Jack Lemmon proceeding through an airport terminal without any kind of airport security actually makes me rather tense. The final joke of the film when they discover their plane has just been hijacked has long since lost all humor for me. In such an instance, we may look on a film like this with a sad reflection of our former innocence.

Those of us who enjoy old movies, despite our tastes, have one thing in common, and that is the ability to pick out what is eternal about the human experience, no matter the style of clothes or the dialogue. It is thrilling when young fans of old movies seem to understand this. I am deeply touched when they do.

Going back for a moment to “Vertigo”, here is a link to a music video on YouTube. I don’t usually enjoy most music videos, but this one is striking for the creator’s ability to latch on to what is classic, what is universal, and tie it in to a modern sensibility. It has been said that the modern young generation is more oriented to graphics than to the written word. This video is as eloquent to me as any written analysis of the Scottie-Madeleine-Judy triangle in “Vertigo” I have ever read, including my own.

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.