Kim Novak’s Vertigo: an intimate audience with a candid Hollywood star

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Kim Novak has to play a woman who knows she is being watched, but who cannot acknowledge the watcher’s presence for fear of breaking his illusion. In other words, she has to play a movie star, doing everything for the camera except look at it. But as we rewatch the film, our own illusion having been broken by its denouement on first viewing, we might see her doing more; we might see a trace of self-consciousness where there should be none. Hitchcock’s unhelpful line about the necessity of treating actors like cattle does not get an airing in this documentary portrait by Alexandre O. Philippe, but it serves as a kind of rebuttal. Whether Hitchcock liked it or not – he wanted Vera Miles for the role – Novak’s performance was indispensable to the success of the film that was, at least between August 2012 and December 2022, dates of the last two Sight and Sound critics’ polls, the greatest of all time (it was dethroned by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) in the 2022 poll).

Philippe’s film is an intimate affair, beginning arrestingly with a voicenote from Novak, aged 91 at the time of recording, short of breath and recovering from a fall, telling him that she’s close to the end. Most of the time we are with Philippe in Novak’s Oregon home, very far from Hollywood, and without a supporting cast of experts and fellow stars to contribute context and anecdotes. While it assumes we know Vertigo’s significance, it is also tacitly understood that that even cinephiles cannot be relied upon to have seen her other films, though these were by no means minor. Novak was A-list in the mid-late 1950s, for the brief window of time that Hollywood gave and largely continues to give young female stars before they are pensioned off. (Arriving at this stage in the game meant pairing with male stars, with their more extensive windows, who had made their names in the 1930s).

“Hollywood swallows people whole,” says Novak at one point, and while her story has certainly been shaped for the purposes of the film, specifically for the purpose of making Vertigo a story about watching movie stars – about watching Kim Novak – her strong ambivalence for the business, bordering on antipathy, feels entirely authentic. She talks about her loss of identity, her father’s disapproval of her career, and her eventual withdrawal from the scene. What Philippe has created is a well-deserved and sometimes moving tribute.

► Kim Novak’s Vertigo is in UK cinemas 3 April.