Vertigo
What the fuck is that ending, spooked by The Nun? Hays Code morality strikes again. And the friendzone girl is also evicted from the film unceremoniously.
Kim Novak is so fucking sexy, with those tight sweaters, can’t believe this is not R rated. It leaves little to the imagination.
Our protagonist, like most of Hitchcock’s leading men is a kind of bufoon horndog. He’s a cop gunning for the police chief chair, but when he needs to chase some dude through rooftops, he gets a bout of vertigo and makes a beat cop fall to his death while he sweats bullets, holding on the gutter for dear life. He gets away (offscreen), but leaves the force, one near death experience is enough.
Since nearly all the main characters are “independently wealthy” aristos, he doesn’t know what to do with his life. A buddy from college proposes some seemingly lowly private dick job, and he is reticent at first, but finally agrees. His tack changes when he takes a look at the absolute smokeshow he will be tailing.
She does aristo stuff, just driving around all day, doing jack shit. Buying flowers, admiring paintings, checking in into an hotel, alone. Every time he expects to walk in on the woman fucking some guy, he finds nothing.
The husband spoke of a weird story about his wife being possessed by some ghost of an old suicidal ancestor, but our down-to-earth protagonist struggles to find his more pedestrian explanation.
One day, the woman goes to the base of the Golden Fate bridge and jumps into San Francisco Bay! Our protagonist saves her, takes her to his room, fully undresses her, then retires to the living room for coffee. She wakes up very flirty for a married woman, but our horndog protagonist strings her along.
From the point, he is the one goading her into getting to know each other more and more, getting hands-y, inviting her to dinner. This is all couched in unlicensed psychiatric services. Some friend he is.
He tries to pattern match on her weird pipe dreams, and finds a museum that keeps a Spanish Mission as it was hundreds of years ago. She gets upset and goes to the top of the bell tower to kill herself, when our protagonist chickens out from the vertigo.
She dies, there’s a funeral and all. The friend had told our protagonist she had the dough, he was only an administrator. When he notices his wife is dead after he sent his buddy tailing him, he is pretty chill about this. Red Flags galore.
We, the audience are then informed of the bait and switch: the rich “wife” with the mental problems was just a working girl, the protagonist is a patsy fall guy, and the real wife is indeed dead, but not the hooker. The hooker fell in love with the mark.
Months later, the protagonist finds the hooker again, and they start dating “again”. He keeps asking of her to be more like the “other girl”, going into pukesome territory: dress like her, die your hair blonde, go to the same restaurant.
It seems he was actually aware she was the woman he flirted with, because they go back to the tower where his previous love was declared. He then succeeds in “curing” himself as the reaches the bell room.
By this time, they both “accept” the underlying crime, but out of the shadows comes a nun and she falls to her death. It’s like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s ending, all over again.
I see that the opening scene is (kinda) the source for The Matrix, when Trinity runs on the roof, chased by cops. That’s impossible…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.