Okay, I’ve always had one beef with this movie. About two-thirds of the way through, shortly after Scotty first talks to Judy, she sits down and starts to write him a letter which explains everything. She changes her mind and gets rid of it, but after that, the audience no longer has a mystery to solve; we just wait to see how far Scotty’s obsession will go, and whether he’ll realize what we already know.
I’ve never understood why the letter-writing scene is even in the movie. Everything in the letter is repeated by some passionate dialogue right at the end of the movie. It does give us some character development on Judy, by showing that she has a conscience and feels remorse, but it also ends any ambiguity about what’s going on. If you wanna get all Freudian, after that point the viewer is almost like Scotty’s subconscious, carrying a knowledge that he doesn’t want to face consciously. In the end, his restless analytical detective’s mind won’t let him avoid the truth any longer.
Anyway, I always thought the movie would have been better without the letter-writing scene. Of course, it’s still a great movie, with strong themes. Was Scotty in love with a woman, or an illusion? Can we ever really see the person, or just our image of them? Why are old nuns so creepy? Thoughts?
The timing of the revelation about Judy always bothers me as well, but Hitchcock does have a justification for it in his interviews with Truffaut. It’s not done this way in the novel - there the reader only gets confirmation at the end. Hitch explains:
Though Stewart isn’t aware of it yet, the viewers already know that Judy isn’t just a girl who looks like Madeleine, but that she is Madeleine! Everyone around me was against this change; they all felt that the relevation should be saved for the end of the picture. I put myself in the place of a child whose mother is telling him a story. When there’s a pause in her narration, the child always says, “What comes next, Mommy?” Well, I felt that the second part of the novel was written as if nothing came next, whereas in my formula, the little boy, knowing that Madeleine and Judy are the same person, would then ask, “And Stewart doesn’t know it, does he? What will he do when he finds out about it?”
I see the merit of the argument, though I think this gets into whether he was mainly making the film for one-time viewers or those who could come back to it.
The thread also gives me the chance to quote an old conversation with my late father, as I was sitting down to watch a late TV screening of it.
“What are you going to watch?”
“Hitchcock’s Vertigo.”
“Don’t remember that one. Who’s in it?”
“James Stewart.”
“Still don’t remember it. What’s it about?”
“Necrophillia.”
“That doesn’t sound like a Jimmy Stewart picture.”
There’s a difference between surprise and suspense, as Alfie once explained in some other interview…
Paraphrasing: When a bomb blows up, that’s a surprise. When everybody in the audience knows a bomb is about to blow, but the hero on screen doesn’t, that’s suspense.
I see the Judy/Madeline dichotomy as the same general idea.
In the passage immediately following the bit I quoted, he explicitly goes on to tie the decision back to their earlier discussion of “surprise vs. suspence” and states that this an example of the general rule.
So be it. Then let’s make it guns loaded with blanks. I of course will choose the boy in the restaurant who covered his ears before Miss Kendall shot me.