I will be watching and reviewing all of the films included on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list. The list contains the 100 greatest love stories in American cinema and I plan to consider how our views on romance and social issues have changed over the years as well as judge whether the romances in these films actually made me swoon. As a fan of the romance genre, I expect to love each and every one of the nominees but I also don’t know if I would consider all of them romantic.

Does a film need to be flawless in order to be considered a masterpiece? I don’t think so but I don’t like it when people feel the need to argue that something is perfect simply because they love it. I would admit that most of my favorite films have one or two significant flaws but there is one overriding factor that causes me to overlook all of those negligible shortcomings. I think I understand why people are so obsessed with Vertigo as it puts them in a unique headspace. The protagonist exists in a world where nothing makes sense and he has to cling to his obsession as he makes sense of what is going on around him. This does not mean that the plot isn’t rather silly. Alfred Hitchcock brings in most of his usual preoccupations and crafts some of the most beautiful shots of his career as he puts the Golden Gate Bridge to use in an unforgettable manner and is able to put the audience in the position of a creepy voyeur whilst making the audience relate to said, creepy voyeur. I can’t help but feel like Vertigo is more of the same from Hitchcock as it explores all of the themes and motifs that were present in Hitchcock’s previous works but it brings everything together. If you want a Hitchcock extravaganza then this is the film for you but if you are slightly more resistant to his style, as I am, then you might end up feeling a bit unsatisfied.

The aforementioned silly plot involves Detective Scottie Ferguson, James Stewart, who has a fear of heights and develops vertigo after he almost dies while chasing down a suspect and has his partner fall off the rooftop he is holding onto. He hangs out regularly with ex-fiancée Midge Wood, Barbara Bel Geddes, but finds himself drawn to the enigmatic Madeleine Elster, Kim Novak when he is asked to tail her by her husband Gavin, Tom Elmore. Gavin believes that she has blackouts in which she becomes her ancestor Carlotta Valdes, who had a tragic life and commit suicide. Ferguson and Elster fall in love but she commits suicide and he is not blamed for her death. He looks for her in other women after her death and when he finds a woman who resembles her in Judy Barton, Kim Novak, he forces her to change her physical appearance to appeal to him. His controlling behavior ruins their relationship and when he forces her to pretend to be Elster again, she ends up plunging to her death from the top of a bell tower.

When I describe that plot it does sound overly convoluted and I think it is as Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor could have dropped some of the melodramatic twists and turns and allowed Hitchcock to return to capturing the woozy dream state that he is looking for. For me, the story is what stops me from fully embracing this film as we get caught up in intricately plotted moments that stop Hitchcock from getting to the good stuff. It feels like he is obsessed with staying faithful to the scripts that other people have written for him but he doesn’t add any flourishes when it comes to the delivery of bland exposition that character actors need to choke out at several points. He was famously unwilling to do much work when it came to directing actors and viewed them as cattle but this means that he often got wooden, unnatural performances from actors when he needed vibrant, fully realized characterizations in order to fully bring his characters to life. When we find out about the big plot twist here we have to sit through a long sequence in which everything is explained to us. I’m usually not for ostentatious twists that aim to dazzle the audience and to me, the twist in Vertigo interrupted a story that was just becoming exciting.

I would also say that I just wasn’t involved in Vertigo during the first act. Yes, I could appreciate the cinematography and the framing and I could sense that this was all building up to something but in a truly great film I would have been fully engaged in the first thirty minutes. In one of Hitchcock’s more successful efforts, like Shadow of a Doubt (1943), you find yourself oddly compelled by the scenes that lead up to the scene of shocking violence or psychological torture. You get to hear Joseph Cotten delivering chilling monologues about his hatred of little old ladies who happen to be wealthy but frugal because he is oddly compelling even though he plays a psychopath. I did not feel that way with Vertigo because I was forcibly distanced from Ferguson and Barton by Hitchcock. These are most of my major complaints and this is what stops me from adoring Vertigo in the way that most critics do but from here on out, I will outline all of the things that I loved and admired.

I have to talk about the visuals first as Hitchcock took the phrase “Every frame a painting” to heart. Nobody would deny that he was not a brilliant visual stylist and yet he outdoes himself with Vertigo as it is full of rich, striking colors and symbolism leaves any critic hurriedly writing notes as Hitchcock hits us with the third close up on the twist in Barton’s hair. I sound thick when I say that I was simply amazed by the use of color but I can’t deny the fact that I appreciated the prettiness of many shots, as glib and shallow as that statement sounds. At the same time, I was able to pick up on the fact that Hitchcock intended for the audience to be aware of the fact that they were watching a film that had been controlled by an auteur and he is as much of a character in this story as Barton and Ferguson. Yes, Ferguson is his self-insert character to some degree but Ferguson also becomes the subject of his voyeurism to some degree as he is allowed to be more vulnerable than some of Hitchcock’s male leads. He obsessed with a woman and ends up abusing her but Hitchcock is also looking upon Ferguson as one of the pieces of art that he has molded.

As Ferguson molds Barton into the woman he wants her to be, we can sense Hitchcock doing the same to everything else in the film. He can’t fully let go of her creations and this has the strange effect of making everything feel a little too controlled and sterile. It is incredible to see a piece of art that has been relentlessly shaped and prodded at by an individual and it ends up feeling like a cry for help from Hitchcock. We all know that the man was deeply flawed and I don’t think we should hold him up as some martyr who was deserving of all the sympathy in the world but he was a tortured human being and often his neuroses and insecurities bled over into the content of his art. He offers us a window into his soul and I did find myself trying to come to terms with this man and his confusion about the way that regular social functions. In some ways, the fake universe that he can construct in his films is a fantasy for him as he can have complete control over it and he can live through attractive male stars who get to romance beautiful women and confidently run away from threatening thugs. Some of these fantastical elements are present in Vertigo and you can feel Hitchcock salivating whenever we see a particularly well-composed shot but there is also a sadness to his direction. Perhaps the distance that I felt from the characters in the first half was intentional. Hitchcock has created a world that is perfect in his eyes but his own self-hatred prevents him from being a part of this world. If he were to insert an imperfect being like himself into this universe he would be ruining it, so he has to lurk in the shadows and pull the strings instead of getting to take center stage. His mad, frenzied anguish can be felt in the second act and his perspective overshadows anything else that is happening but the separation between Hitchcock and his art turns this into a real tragedy.

If we are going to argue that this is a love story then we might as well talk about the distinction between obsession and love. The central love story in the film is supposedly the one that exists between Barton and Ferguson but I don’t think they were necessarily in love. Ferguson is pleased by the idea of turning Barton into his ideal woman but he also turns her into somebody who is like himself. In pursuing her he is opening himself up and getting over the anxiety that has left him so debilitated after his accident but he is pushing all of his problems onto Barton. She is the human embodiment of all of the problems he faces as she becomes a nervous wreck who lives to please him and she loses her own identity as she gets closer and closer to being his ideal woman. We see them kissing and acting out the steps that people go through when they are courting but we always feel like Ferguson is driven by his desire to confer all of his issues onto her rather than his desire to kiss her or go out on a sweet date with her. This is why I don’t necessarily see it as a romance and I don’t think it should have qualified for this list. Like Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), this is a piece of art that is worthy of admiration and yet it has been grossly miscategorized. If any of you readers have treated your partners the way that Ferguson treats Barton then feel free to tell me that I’m wrong.

We have to get into Hitchcock’s relationship with women if we are going to talk about this film as his views on women do impact the depiction of the relationship between Ferguson and Barton. He liked his icy blondes and when Barton is playing Elster she fits into that category but she becomes an earthier brunette when she returns to being Barton. Ferguson then tries to turn her back into the icy blonde that he admired. This is very simple analysis but I suppose one could theorize that Hitchcock loved this type of woman because she was inaccessible and unattainable and that only made it easier for him to justify his voyeurism. These women wouldn’t submit themselves to his self-insert characters willingly so his male leads would often force themselves into the lives of these women and take control of them by manipulating them and picking up on all of their insecurities. His male leads seem to take pleasure in picking apart these women who act superior to them and in bringing these women down to their level they have achieved a victory of sorts. This behavior often ends up having a negative outcome for them as they become less interested in the women when they turn into the female equivalent of themselves. Their self-hatred consumes them and they reject the product of their efforts because they hate the fact that the women in their life was ‘weak’ enough to submit to them even though they actively sought to destroy this woman.

When these women are taken down from their pedestal they are often humiliated as they are revealed to not be the classy, refined ladies that they pretend to be. The men bring out the sadomasochistic urges in them or discover their affair with another man who inevitably comes to a bad end. All of this has caused Hitchcock to be charged with misogyny and his behavior towards women in real life, such as Tippi Hedren, certainly doesn’t bolster his reputation as a feminist ally but there is something more than blatant hatred of women going on here. Barton is seen through the eyes of a man and we are invited to see her as his creation but the film also suggests that Ferguson is hurting himself by taking control of these women and bending them to his will. I think that this is a charitable interpretation as Hitchcock is still resistant to adopt the viewpoint of female characters and Barton does come across as a pretty object at many points. You could say that this is beside the point as we are seeing this story from Ferguson’s point of view and he is so disturbed that he can’t fully understand women. I keep going back and forth when it comes to the points that Vertigo tries to make and I find it endlessly fascinating. You can have long conversations about singular scenes and you don’t get sick of coming up with different theories as there is so much material to work through.

Another Hitchcockian trademark is the use of notable locations in big set pieces and because Vertigo is set in San Francisco it has to feature the Golden Gate Bridge. We have all seen the famous image of Stewart pulling a wet Novak out of the water and walking up the steps with her cradled in his arms while the bridge stands strong behind them. The shot is haunting as Novak’s body is limp in Stewart’s arms and there is something ‘romantic’ about the way she is positioned. When I say romantic I am talking about a romanticized vision as it was common for sickly, vulnerable women to be glamorized in this period. The idea of a saintly lady who endures a horrible illness, all the while becoming more gorgeous as she approaches death, has officially become a trope in the woman’s picture genre. This is a fairly troubling trope as it implies that weakness and suffering make women more attractive and it makes audience members believe that almost dying could be a positive thing. Hitchcock taps into the morbid fantasies that the women who loved Camille (1936) had but he puts his own spin on this trope. The nightmarish music tells us that this is not a heroic rescue that should be celebrated and the way that Stewart chucks Novak’s lifeless body into the back of a car just seconds later reminds us of the fact that he is using her. The visuals are lushly romantic as the green waters and Novak’s chic black coat fool you into thinking that this is a dream and not a nightmare but ultimately this scene makes us uncomfortable as we see two people acting out something that should be romantic and yet this is a story about obsession and abuse and it is saddening to see the two of them reaching for a love that is not there.

I know I promised that I wouldn’t include any more criticism but as a final note, I thought I would say that I wasn’t a big fan of Novak’s performance. I have already criticized a lot of the performances in Hitchcock’s films but I would like to note the fact that Henry Fonda is stupendous in The Wrong Man (1956) which proves that it was not impossible to give a full-bodied, layered performance in one of his films even when he wasn’t offering you much direction. Novak feels like she was left out to dry by Hitchcock as he spent far more time paying attention to the location of the brooch on her lapel than he spent instructing her on how to convey her character’s emotions. I suspect that these two never had a discussion in which they talked about Barton’s motivations and I doubt that Hitchcock politely offered her notes on her work after every take. I imagine that he would have been happy if she had mechanically delivered every line as long as everything around her was in the right position. My confidence in Novak as an actress is low as she has never impressed me in anything I have seen her in and I don’t even admire her as a great screen beauty. Even the dreaded Audrey Hepburn had an incredible face but Novak looks plain and doesn’t have any screen presence so it is difficult to forgive her for her uncompelling turn.

For a lot of people, it is nearly impossible to conjure up any film that is equal to Vertigo but I looked through the list and I think I came upon something that is in its league. Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) is also a beloved classic that provides a lot of food for thought. Is Phyllis Dietrichson the greatest femme fatale of all time? Quite possibly. I can’t wait to ponder questions like this next week but I also get to enjoy the pleasure of seeing it again. I have not seen it in a few years and I have very fond memories of it so I hope I can keep those cherished memories intact. I do have a sneaking suspicion that Edward G. Robinson might steal the show because you never know what will happen when he is around.

I will be watching and reviewing all of the films included on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list. The list contains the 100 greatest love stories in American cinema and I plan to consider how our views on romance and social issues have changed over the years as well as judge whether the romances in these films actually made me swoon. As a fan of the romance genre, I expect to love each and every one of the nominees but I also don’t know if I would consider all of them romantic.

When we talk about Woman of the Year, we all end up thinking about the final scene. Instead of being the light, fluffy romantic comedy that it was intended to be when it was released in 1942 it has become a major talking point among feminist film critics. Part of the reason for this is that it could have been a feminist classic that presents an ideal world in which a flawed woman can balance her responsibilities and have a happy marriage and a thriving career. Katharine Hepburn was the ultimate strong, independent heroine in this era and played the sort of complicated, intelligent career gals that women liked to see on screen. Unfortunately, there was a dissonance between the energy that Hepburn brought to her films and the scripts that she worked with as they often felt the need to punish her for being strong and confident. Almost everything went wrong when it came to Woman of the Year and it ends up feeling like the sort of propaganda that is cooked up by conservative politicians to warn women against the dangers of taking on jobs.

It is all about foreign affairs reporter Tess Harding, Katharine Hepburn, who is internationally respected and has political connections, but she comes into conflict with sportswriter Sam Craig, Spencer Tracy, when she suggests that baseball not be played during World War II. When the two meet, sparks fly and they are quickly married but married life with Harding is not what Craig expected and he discovers that she is inconsiderate and does not listen to him. He breaks up with her because he believes she will never change, and she is shocked by this development as she had thought that the two of them had the perfect marriage. She resolves to win him back by cooking breakfast for him but her attempt to make waffles is disastrous and she breaks down. She tells Craig she will quit her job to be with him and he agrees to take her back.

I don’t have any problems with the basic concept of this film as this is the rare romantic comedy that deals with marriage and not the early period of a relationship. It tries to be about the difficulties that married couples face when they rush into a marriage too quickly and discover that they aren’t ready to deal with the sacrifices that come with this decision. Harding is often cruel to her husband and the way that she forces him to take on so many responsibilities is unfair. I don’t support her poor treatment of her husband throughout most of the film and I thought this set up a fascinating situation. This could have been a story about a difficult woman learning that she has deep character flaws and we could have had several finely observed scenes in which she comes to grips with the fact that she must go through the onerous process of making significant changes to her lifestyle in order to accommodate for this relationship. This would have been a fine message to send to the audience as we can all relate to the feeling of trying to become a kinder, more patient person for the one we love. Instead of sending that message the film goes entirely too far and tells women that they have to give up everything just to be with their significant other. Their only responsibility in life should be taking care of their man and doing whatever he directs them to do. They will apparently experience bliss when they let go of silly interests like politics because women just aren’t smart enough to really be accepted in the political sphere.

The scene that establishes the fact that Harding should give up everything for Craig involves her cooking breakfast for him. As described in the plot description she fails as she has no background in simple domestic tasks because of her background as a wealthy reporter who has always relied on others to perform the tasks that housewives would typically take care of during this era. She does this in an effort to prove to Craig that she can be the caring, stay at home wife that he wants and he responds to her actions positively. When she says that she will give up her job he is enthusiastic about this decision and we are meant to believe that this is the fairy tale ending that every woman should want. There is a very careful use of language in the scene as Harding states “I’m going to give up my job, I’m going to be your wife” which implies that the two things are mutually exclusive and Harding must give up her job to be his wife. She affirms the fact that she will give up his job to her wife and then Craig expresses further displeasure at the idea of her work life bleeding into her personal life. Instead of accepting the fact that she has friends and colleagues who will naturally be a part of their life he decides to beat up her assistant when he arrives at their house. This represents him physically trying to remove every trace of her life as a career woman from their new life and it is very disturbing.

This is all very disappointing because the original ending of the film presented a more balanced view of the changes that would need to be made in this marriage. Craig would go missing and Harding would decide to try to win him back by going to a boxing gym to gain knowledge about sports so she could write an article for him. He would also try to become the man that he thought she wanted him to be by going to a school where he would be taught foreign languages that would allow him to move in her social circles. He reads the article she wrote for him and they reconcile at a boxing match where he assures her that she does not have to give up her career in order to be with him. The film was shown to audiences at test screenings, but audience members did not respond to this ending well. This may have been because the ending went against the typical Hepburn formula at this time. This formula involved her playing highfalutin, rather arrogant types who were humiliated and embarrassed before softening for love and adopting more traditionally feminine traits. She wouldn’t have been overtly humbled in Woman of the Year and men and women in the audience, who bought into the idea that conforming to traditional gender roles was positive, probably would have bristled at the idea of a woman who got away with doing things that were unthinkable. The ending was changed because of the influence of Louis B. Mayer, who likely knew that people liked seeing an ignominious Hepburn, and screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. had to go along with these demands.

His description of the new ending was negative as he said, “She had to get her comeuppance for being too strong in a man’s world so they wrote a scene where she tries to fix breakfast…and gets everything wrong.” Hepburn allegedly called this new ending “The worst bunch of shit I’ve ever read.” Even though there was all of this pushback they had to go ahead with filming this new ending and the message of the story was fundamentally changed. Audiences ended up eating this film up and the strong box office returns encouraged studios to continue pairing Hepburn and Tracy together in similar romantic comedies. It is discomforting to realize that they loved it because it reinforced the retrograde views that they already held and that means that this does not hold up.

Beyond my issues with the messages about a woman’s role in society that this film tries to send, I don’t think that it is funny or romantic. The script is deficient as the bare bones of the story are appealing but Craig is written as a smug, sanctimonious chauvinist who also happens to be a salt of the earth fella that we are meant to fall in love with. I didn’t like him for a moment and because this story was largely told from his perspective it was important that I either rooted for him or had some interest in his actions or responses to the choices that his wife makes. It is hard to care about him but he is also infuriating in moments when he should be endearing. This is partly because of Tracy’s performance as he chooses to sport a self-satisfied grin during the infamous final scene and it only makes you hate him more when you understand why he is so elated. The screenplay is very into the idea that he is a man of integrity who sees through all of her fancy-schmancy crap and doesn’t respect her for knowing philosophers and receiving prestigious awards. This anti-intellectualism is a turn-off and I question whether the screenwriters would have used the same approach if Harding had been a man and his wife had been the righteous sports reporter.

I believe that this is the first comedy that I have reviewed and I am stymied as I am almost always at a loss for words when it comes to explaining why I found something funny. I laugh and I often don’t know why. It is much easier to pick something apart when you don’t find it funny as you have time to dissect the scene in the moments when you would have otherwise been laughing. Most of the comedy in this film either revolves around Tracy’s confused reaction shots or slapstick scenes that involved food. The screenwriters seemingly thought that Tracy had a million different facial expressions in his arsenal so they wrote plenty of lines that would allow him to display his array of countenances. These lines are usually based around Hepburn doing something ridiculous or knowing something that Tracy has no frame of reference for. He also has to make these faces when Hepburn throws an orphan at him or tells him that she is going to be partying all night. The hilarity is meant to be derived from the fact that Tracy has such a rubbery, expressive face but he was not the Jim Carrey of his era and you can tell that he had to make these faces about five times before he could reach the right level of intensity. He looks rather haggard even when he is supposed to be bamboozled and energetic and it is hard to laugh at something when you can see that somebody has put so much work into making you laugh. The food slapstick just angered me as Hepburn messes up the most basic aspects of cooking and George Stevens asks us to titter while we witness waffle batter seeping out of a waffle maker. Where are the laughs meant to come in? Hepburn is stressed out and she has a lot of different responsibilities to balance but none of her reactions to her failures are all that funny.

As a romance, this should have delivered by presenting marriage as the romantic ideal even though it is something that people have to work very hard to maintain. We don’t typically think of marriage when we think of romance. Usually, the tension in these films is derived from whether two single people will end up getting married or whether two married people will step outside of their existing relationship and have an affair. Marriage is seen as the ultimate goal in the first case but married life is too dull to take up a whole film and we are asked to enjoy the fighting and flirty banter that can only exist before marriage in the eyes of certain filmmakers. In affair-based romances, we see marriage as something that is restrictive and suffocating and the spouses of the adulterers are either monsters who deserve to be cheated on or hopelessly unattractive but tragic figures. Woman of the Year aims to hit back against the traditional narrative by mostly focusing on the trials and tribulations that people face when they are married as well as capturing the subtle joys of day-to-day life in a committed relationship.

It is so emblematic of its era in the way that it deals with marriage. I have already touched on sexism and gender roles but I kept feeling like Woman of the Year was awkwardly sandwiched between two different eras and couldn’t figure out which template it wanted to follow. On one hand, you have the screwball comedies of the 1930s in which you could have perfect marriage. The Kerbys in Topper (1937) are inseparable and spend all of their time trading witty barbs, getting drunk, and singing show tunes at nightclubs. They both seem to find pleasure in the small benefits that they derive from being together and even find time to perform good deeds. They are the perfect couple but they are untouched by the problems that ordinary people face as they are extremely rich and neither of them have to work or worry about responsibilities outside of their marriage. Woman of the Year wants to have the witty barbs as it goes to great pains to illustrate the fact that Craig and Harding are opposites and therefore they have occasional fights in which they surreptitiously flirt with one another. It also wants to tell its audience that marriage can be a positive thing but, as stated before, it goes about making this point in the wrong way. It comes up short in wanting to be realistic as it tries to impart a serious message about marriage and has some interest in giving the audience insight into the lives of reporters. It can’t blend daffy comedy with heavy doses of realism and it ends up not delivering the yuks or the hard-hitting truths.

On the other hand, it wants to be a glossy soap opera from the 1950s in which we get to indulge in seeing women behaving badly before being punished in the last thirty minutes. Soap operas from the 1950s could be seen as a forerunner to exploitation films from the 1970s as they are chock full of sadism and violence but feel the need to mask their dirtiness by moralizing to the audience about Christian values. Woman of the Year doesn’t involve sadism but it does want to turn two wild, reckless people into ordinary folk who act just like everybody else. The production values might have been at home in something like Peyton Place (1957) and the office space setting is fitting as it allows gossip to spread. It falls behind in featuring black and white cinematography as Cinemascope and glorious Technicolor would become prerequisites in this genre in the following decade. It also isn’t naughty enough to really get the audience going as the sins that Harding commits are not shocking enough to make anybody gasp and announce “Well, I never!”

The 1950s were also the decade in which the ideal marriage on screen was one that involved a non-speaking wife letting her husband go to work without asking any questions or it was a hell that men wanted to escape from at any cost. The Seven Year Itch (1955) deals with a mid-life crisis that a man experiences as he gets older and becomes dissatisfied with his henpecking wife. He desperately wants to get rid of her and run into the arms of the sexy Marilyn Monroe who stands around in skimpy outfits and doesn’t ask him to be held accountable for his actions as a wife would. Woman of the Year doesn’t fall prey to these clichés and Craig isn’t tempted to cheat by some good-looking floozy but it also doesn’t manage to make any progressive statements on marriage and it doesn’t recapture the magic of the 1930s comedies that seemingly inspired it.

If you couldn’t figure it out already then I am hear to tell you that I don’t think this is a successful romantic comedy. I am almost offended by the fact that it made this list and I have to assume that it happened because the partnership between Tracy and Hepburn is legendary and this is possibly their most famous collaboration. This is another case where I assume they selected this film based on reputation alone rather than putting themselves through it and realizing how shockingly unfunny it is.

As I look forward to next week I am rubbing my hands as I am going to discuss the film that is touted as the greatest movie of all time by Sight and Sound. Of course, I’m talking about Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) which has inspired an obsessive cult following that analyzes every little detail of every frame. I have discussed Hitchcock before and talked about my issues with his lack of interest in character development and performances but I remember feeling differently about Vertigo. I know that I will be lambasted if I identify any issues with something that is often spoken about as a masterpiece but I plan to dissect Vertigo as though it doesn’t have a fearsome reputation.