VERTIGO
Tit. it.: “La donna che visse due volte”; Scen.: Alec Coppel e Samuel A.Taylor, dal romanzo “D’entre les morts” di Pierre Boileau e Thomas Narcejac; F.: Robert Burks; M.: George Tomasini; Scgf.: Henry Bumstead e Hal Pereira; Cost.: Edith Head; Mu.: Bernard Herrmann; Effetti speciali: John P. Fulton; Int.: James Stewart (John “Scottie”), Kim Novak (Madeleine/June), Barbara Bel Geddes (Midge), Tom Helmore (Gavin Elster), Henry Jones (uff. giudiziario), Raymond Bailey (dottore), Ellen Corby (padrona dell’albergo); Prod.: Alfred Hitchcock per Paramount 35mm. D.: 124’. Col.
Film Notes
Both Vertigo and The Searchers are stories of unfulfilled love. According to Dan Auiler’s apt definition, Vertigo can be seen as a “depiction of impossible memory” – words that could also be applied to The Searchers. The protagonists in both films, Scottie Ferguson and “Uncle” Ethan, obsessively seek a love that is lost in time. Both eventually bring this lost person transformed by time and psychosis, into the present, and in both cases the result is something of a surprise. Vertigo: Kim Novak begins as an ideal, but then becomes a banal substitute when real love is experienced. The Searchers: a memory is transformed, then deformed, and only becomes real thanks to a highly implausible twist in the plot, where a little girl, Natalie Wood, is lost to the savage Indians but found again 7 years later when she has turned into a beautiful woman. Beauty, truth, illusion: VistaVision.
Peter von Bagh, in “Cinegrafia”, 17, 2004