Kim Novak’s Vertigo review – the Hollywood grande dame has still got it

At the time of her ascent as a Hollywood screen siren, actor Kim Novak had something that neither directors or audiences could quite put their finger on. She somehow mixed an air of confident sexual defiance with an undertow of vulnerability and melancholy, and whatever it was that she had exactly, she’s definitely still got it on the evidence of Alexandre O. Philippe’s probing cinephile documentary that examines the film Vertigo as an artwork attributable to Novak rather than its director, Alfred Hitchcock.

Novak narrates from the windswept confines of her Big Sur stack, to which she retreated in the early 1960s and has remained ever since. She recounts how she felt alienated by Hollywood phonies and, after an early flurry of career activity, she got the sense that the creatives and powerbrokers didn’t know quite what to do with her. Philippe opens the film by allowing Novak to give a fairly detailed account of her life and career, including an upbringing at the knee of two extremely volatile parents. But she grew into a woman trying to remain safe and sensible while giving herself over to the often-brutal machinery of the picturemaking industry.

Now in her early nineties, Novak talks with a delicate rasp, like someone with severe asthma – an affliction that she insouciantly blames on her mother for attempting to smother her when she was a baby. The way she talks about art and her own image is deep and lyrical, and she is also highly critical of her screen legacy, which includes her performance in Vertigo. During the film’s second half, the focus shifts solely to a film which, even though it was dismissed upon release, is now considered by large swathes of folks-in-the-know to be one of high masterworks of cinema (and with good cause, for once!).

Philippe intersperses the chat with miniature presentations of material he has unearthed from Novak’s loft, which includes a written pep talk from her late father ahead of her departure for Hollywood and, most movingly, the iconic grey skirt and jacket combo she wore while playing Madeleine Elster opposite James Stewart’s leering private eye, Scottie Ferguson. There’s a real sense of delayed anticipation as Novak holds, shakes, peruses the storage box and slowly opens it up, to reveal the garment to which she claims not to have set eyes on since she finished using it for the Vertigo shoot in the late 1950s.

In the end, though, the film splits its focus between Novak’s life and Vertigo​’s enduring richness as a cryptic cinematic text, and we don’t really end up getting satisfying portions of either. For a film that has spent an inordinate time under the microscope, we don’t get that much in terms of original insight, and seeing the various clips from the film and hearing snatches of possibly the greatest film score ever written (by Bernard Herrmann), it’s hard not to be wishing you were spending time with the real thing again. 

Philippe has become a bit of a one-man film-themed documentary institution, as this one comes hot on the heels of a film about The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre (Chain Reactions), and it’s his second feature to explore the work of Hitchcock, with 2017’s 78/52 breaking down the infamous shower scene from Psycho. This one feels like he jumped on an opportunity and made what he could of it in post production. It’s a slick package, but lacks for a true sense of purpose. Meanwhile, industrious casting agents would do well to see if Novak might be up for one last hurrah as an actor, as on this evidence she’s still very much got the juice.