The Book of the Film

It's always fascinating to see what film adaptations do the stories on which they were based. Sometimes it's just the hand of a big studio at work, as in Breakfast at Tiffany's for instance. A short novella about two unusual, morally complex, sexually complicated people becomes a boy-meets-girl story in which all their faults are redeemed by love. But sometimes the transition is more interesting than that. My research recently lead me to read Sueurs froides by the French writing duo Boileau/Narcejac, and this is the book on which Hitchcock's Vertigo is based. The duo loved Hitchcock's work, and although the novel wasn't commissioned, they wrote it in the hope that the great man would chose to adapt it to the screen. The film and the novel are close – probably because B & N had the cinema in mind when they were writing, but the changes reflect interestingly on Hitchcock and his view of the relationship between the sexes.

Vertigo is a film of two halves. In the first we meet Scottie, recently retired from the police force after a traumatic incident on a rooftop; a colleague plunged to his death in his attempt to aid Scottie, who was paralysed by vertigo. Now Scottie's old friend, Gavin Elsteer, commissions him to watch over his wife who he believes has become possessed by the suicidal spirit of her grandmother. Scottie falls deeply in love with Madeleine, but recreating the scene from one of her dreams in an attempt to break the spell of the past, she escapes him, runs up the steps of a church tower (where his vertigo prevents him from following) and plunges to her death. Humiliated by the enquiry into her death where he is judged harshly, and grieving the loss of his love, Scottie has a mental breakdown.

Already this is a fascinating diversion from the book. In it, the hero begins the narrative mentally fragile, a chip-on-the-shoulder type of person whom we can easily imagine latching on to the idealised figure of Madeleine as a kind of reward for his empty, embittered life. And Madeleine's death coincides with the outbreak of war in France, for which the hero is glad. At last the emotional climate of the world around mirrors the melancholy and anxiety inside him. He slinks off to Africa to sit out the war and returns four years later, undoubtedly depressed and ill, but mostly through his own drinking. So there's a big difference. In the novel it's the man's innate sadness which seems to suck in tragedy, whereas in the film, it's the woman's. In the film, the woman is dangerous for the man, whereas in the novel, the man is dangerous to himself.

This must be Hitchcock's famous sadism at work. Pick any Hitchcock film you like to think of and notice how women do not come off well. I always felt most sorry for the actess Tippi Hedren, who suffered the double ignominy of being raped by Sean Connery and set upon by birds. But time and again the statuesque blonde is threatened, humiliated, traumatised and murdered. The second half of Vertigo adds intriguingly to this catalogue of disaster. In both book and film, a chance encounter with a lookalike sends the man off in search of the lost Madeleine. The woman they spot who reminds them so much of the lost ideal now turns out to be common and ordinary. In both plots the man then tries to change her, to mould her into the cherished memory, buying her clothes and altering the colour of her hair, all much against the woman's will. In the novel, the hero become aggressive and brutal with the woman, bullying her into admitting she is Madeleine and treating her with the disgust of a man who never really wanted to possess what was once on a pedestal. In the film, Hitchcock makes a large but brilliant change; we know as soon as Scottie meets her, that Judy and Madeleine are the same. Judy was hired to play the part of Elsteer's wife and impersonate a spooky self-harmer so that a verdict of suicide could be brought on what was in fact a murder (Elsteer throws his real wife out of the church tower in a last moment substitution). She accepts Scottie's interest in her, dangerous though it is, because she has fallen in love with him.

Most critics see the scenes in which Judy/Madeleine is forced to alter her appearance as providing a parallel with the relationship between director and actress. Kim Novak famously detested the way Hitchcock made her look to play the idealised woman, but he overruled her ('Actors are cattle,' he said). But I always find this part of the film the most grippingly uncomfortable to watch, and feel that it displays a truth of the female condition. To watch Judy sobbing and struggling but ultimately submitting to Scottie's desires, is to watch any woman giving up possession of her external appearance in the vain hope of being loved for the invisible, elusive 'real woman' within. And her need for love here is intrinsic but also sidelined; the focus in the film is what will happen when the appearance of Judy coincides with that of Madeleine and Scotty realises he's been tricked. How will he react?

I won't give the final ending of the film away. It really is one of cinema's greatest films, I think, and I can watch it over and again with the same enjoyment. But reading the book was an eye-opener, as the whole emphasis of the plot shifts from woman as victim in the book, to woman as villain in the film – and a villain even when she is a victim, as that second half shows. I'm going to keep looking out for the differences between books and their adaptations in case they are as revealing as this one was.