Vertigo gets symphony treatment to celebrate film festival’s 40th
Moviegoers can also hear TSO play live scores to Back to the Future, Psycho
TIFF’s giving a gift to Toronto: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the dreamlike tale of a man with a fear of heights and an obsession with an unattainable blond.
To celebrate TIFF’s 40th birthday, the festival is presenting the film free Sunday at Roy Thomson Hall with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra playing the score live.
The 1958 film, scored by Bernard Herrmann, was recently named the best movie of all time by the British Film Institute, knocking off Citizen Kane (also scored by Herrmann) after a 50-year-reign.
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful score,” says Piers Handling, director of TIFF. “The score is an essential part of the film, a dreamlike, hallucinatory film.” The TSO continues the movie theme with live scores of Back to the Future, Oct. 16 and 17, and Hitchcock’s killer classic Psycho on the scariest night of all, Halloween (Oct. 31).
Handling points out that Vertigo is dramatically different from Psycho, where a knife attack is accompanied by shrieking violin strings.
He considered showing the musical Singing in the Rainto end the festival, but the fact that Vertigo star Kim Novak could introduce the film in Toronto was the icing on the cake.
The recently heightened profile of the movie is sparking similar theatre showings with live orchestras in New York City and Europe. Novak is scheduled to introduce one in San Francisco on her 83rd birthday on Feb. 13.
New to Hollywood at the time she made Vertigo, Novak says she didn’t know about Hitchcock’s practical jokes when she found a plucked, “naked,” dead chicken beside her dressing table. The director and co-star Jimmy Stewart howled with laughter and Novak laughed, too, although, to this day, she doesn’t know what the joke was.
She was loaned out to do Vertigo, even though Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn said it was a “lousy script,” because Hitchcock was the director.
Novak wanted to do the movie because of the rare chance to play two parts: mysterious elegant Madeleine and common shop girl Judy. Throughout it all, Herrmann would watch the actors.
“He watched the scenes. His ideas were in there brewing. He watched us create mood.”
Conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos will wave his baton at both the Vertigo and Psycho concerts. He has conducted many Psycho concerts in recent years, as live orchestra with film “is a growing symphonic trend,” he says, and a way bring people into concert halls.
He also has conducted orchestras for An American in Paris, The Wizard of Oz, Singing in the Rain, Home Alone, Star Trek and a compendium of Hitchcock films, including Dial M for Murder, North by Northwest and Strangers on a Train.
Using two screens beside his podium, Kitsopoulos watches the movie on one side and a synchronized tim- ing device on the other. This tells him when to pause and cues him 30 seconds before a new section of music.
Unlike today, when the composer is the last one brought into the project, Herrmann composed early and, in some cases, Hitchcock cut the film to match his score, says Kitsopoulos.
Go to tiff.net, call 416-599-TIFF (8433) or visit the TIFF box office to reserve free tickets to Vertigo, Sept. 20, 3 p.m. Go to tso.ca or call 416-5934828 for Back to the Future, Oct. 16 and 17, or Psycho, Oct. 31, 7:30 p.m.