Kim Novak reflects on movie ‘Vertigo’ for 60th anniversary
NEW YORK—Last fall, on her ranch in southern Oregon, Kim Novak found herself doing what she calls “my own Me Too painting.”
Novak, who turned 85 on Tuesday, had recently broken her left wrist—her painting hand—but was compelled enough to give it a try with her right. Seeing woman after woman come forward with their stories of harassment stoked Novak’s own recollections. She titled the result—a swirling, vibrantly colored abstraction of a menacing face looming above a woman—“A Time of Reckoning.”
“In that period, the same things went on. I never told these stories but my painting has it all,” said Novak, speaking by phone from her 240-acre ranch, where she lives with her husband Robert Malloy, a retired veterinarian. “It was very cathartic, I’m sure just like the gals of today found it cathartic to tell their story.”
Novak recently granted her first interview in several years to mark the 60th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterwork, “Vertigo.” On Sunday, as part of the TCM Big Screen Classics series, “Vertigo” will be back in theaters (see FathomEvents.com for the 650 locations), with an encore on Wednesday.
The initial reviews for “Vertigo” were tepid. The box office was disappointing. But “Vertigo”—entrancing, dreamlike, deranged—has steadily grown in reputation over the years to become one of the most widely acknowledged masterpieces in film. In 2012, it even displaced “Citizen Kane,” after a 50-year reign, as the top film on the Sight & Sound critics’ poll. “Vertigo,” a movie overwhelmed by the sen- sation and fear of falling, keeps climbing higher.
And with the film’s rise, Novak’s performance, alongside Jimmy Stewart, has similarly surged in stature. Film critic David Thomson has called it “one of the major female performances in the cinema.” Francois Truffaut, in his famed interviews with Hitchcock (who was critical of Novak in the role) tried to convince the director he had it wrong: “I can assure you that those who admire ‘Vertigo’ like Kim Novak in it.”
Novak’s performance in “Vertigo” is exceptional not only because it’s two-fold—she plays both the mysterious, suicidal Madeleine and Judy, whose similar appearance to Madeleine mystifies the Scottie (Stewart), the obsessed detective who had trailed Madeleine before her apparent death—but because it’s so representative of how male fantasies are projected onto women. In Scottie’s elaborate efforts to recreate Judy as Madeleine, Novak recognized Hollywood’s own manipulations of her.
“I identify so very completely with the role because it was exactly what Harry Cohn and what Hollywood was trying to do to me, which was to make me over into something I was not,” says Novak, referring to the iron-fisted Columbia Pictures founder who contracted her. “In the beginning, they hire you because of the way you look, obviously, and yet they try to change your lips, your mouth, your hair, every aspect of the way you look and the way you talk and the way you dress. So it was constantly fighting to keep some aspect of yourself, trying to keep some of you. You feel: There must have been something in you that they liked, and yet they wanted to change you.”