The lavish 1996 restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” premiered at San Francisco’s Castro Theater, with Kim Novak and Hitch’s daughter Patricia in attendance. I didn’t even bother trying to get a ticket; I was interested only in the restoration and not the bling. I caught the movie a few days later—by which time the Castro Theater was more or less empty. Apparently interest in “Vertigo” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, even here in the city for which the movie serves as an unofficial travelogue.
Sixteen years later, that much-ballyhooed restoration is common coin and has popped up in the Free Movies section of my cable TV provider’s on-demand offerings. I gave it another go. I’ll allow that it is a very good movie. Gripping, even. But to my mind it doesn’t remotely qualify as a landmark of American cinema on the level of “Citizen Kane” or other such fare. For one thing, the lead is badly miscast: Jimmy Stewart gave a fine performance but he was far too old for the role. For another, it suffers from editing problems: there’s a weird jump in the continuity in the scene by the ocean when Stewart and Kim Novak first kiss. The objections pile up. Midge Wood, Stewart’s whilom fiancée, is an obvious plot device who provides Stewart an opportunity to explain background info, as well as serving as a marker for the passage of time. Speaking of time, there just isn’t enough for Stewart’s and Novak’s love affair before she goes plunging off the tower of San Juan Bautista. I’m willing to allow the movie’s license with the reality of San Francisco, in that Jimmy Stewart always finds a perfect parking place for his big DeSoto. We all know what would really happen, even in the 1950s.
None of that, however, is of any major import. More to the point is that “Vertigo” is hokey and melodramatic, its two main characters being ostensibly intelligent people who are as willfully stupid to the plain reality before them as is Lois Lane regarding Clark Kent’s eyeglasses. It’s stagey and one-dimensional, its studio artifice unconcealed and its threadbare plot washed over with a lush musical score and glamorous camerawork. For a big-budget 1950s Hollywood movie, it’s definitely a cut above the average. But that’s really about it.
And yet: over the years it has risen in critical estimation to near-Olympian stature amongst American movies. Thereby hangs an observation, which is that “Vertigo”—warts and all—is a bonafide feast for movie critics and scholars. It provides them with endless fun and games as they dissect this scene or that motivation or come up with theories to make sense of this point or that. They can wax eloquent on the car scenes, noting how Stewart and Novak always drive down the San Francisco hills, never up. They can analyze this, scrutinize that, praise this, question that. It’s almost an Etch-a-Sketch for movie critics. No wonder they love it so much.
Which explains the ballyhoo over the 1996 restoration and its premiere, followed by near-empty houses for the rest of the initial run. The PR people were happy, the critics were in overdrive, but the public in general wasn’t really all that interested. Just another of those old Hitchcock flicks, after all, a movie to be seen once and then never again. Sometimes movie critics forget just how ephemeral the general public considers movies to be. Your average movie-goer treats a movie as Kleenex; use it for its purpose, then toss it away. Film critics have a different take—so they discuss movies with each other and write essays for each other. But they’re frogs croaking their song to a very small pond. Your average Joe at the multiplex doesn’t give a flying you-know-what.
We have a similar situation in the music world, in that certain composers receive critical praise and attention but do not engage the public. Professional musicians tend to be blind to that, given that we all croak our songs in our own small pond. We do our thing within the confines of conservatives, colleges, universities, orchestras, and opera companies. In many cases we give our performances in situations that tend to attract only the faithful: new-music ensembles, old-music ensembles, university-sponsored series, or recital halls within rarefied cultural nexuses. But we lack direct contact with the big, bad world out there—the world in which the Beethoven Violin Concerto isn’t old-hat concert fare, the world in which the audience is not assumed to be heartily sick and tired of the Brahms 4th, the world in which Bartók’s language is still a bit off-putting, the world in which names such as Schoenberg and Webern and Stockhausen and Babbitt aren’t even blips on the radar screen. I’m not talking about the crassly ignorant teens at the local mall. I’m talking about the general makeup of your typical Symphony or Opera audiences: people who love fine music and attend concerts regularly. They’re the equivalent of moviegoers who make it a point to see all of the worthwhile new flicks coming out, but who shun low-ball drivel and mindless pap aimed at gullible kids.
Thus composers of the Tristan Murail or Gérard Grisey stripe receive respectful, even fawning, praise from many critics. Yet I think of a good friend of mine, a diehard music-lover with vast experience and sophistication, a man who has been attending SF Symphony concerts since the Pierre Monteux days, who has never missed an SF Opera production, who owns something to the tune of 100 recordings of the Brahms 1st, who has written voluminously and beautifully on all kinds of music and published a number of excellent books. The SF Symphony played a Grisey composition last season. My friend’s reaction: I wanted to run SCREAMING from the concert hall! He couldn’t stand the thing, nor anything else of Grisey’s. For that matter, neither could I although I was less inclined to bolt. SF Symphony audiences are notably voluble and lavish in their praise for their glorious home band, but the Grisey elicited only politely tepid applause. (Well, save one chap in the Terrace who was bravo-ing and bravissimo-ing like no tomorrow. In context he seemed more weird than discerning.) I was giving the pre-concert lecture that week and I chose to focus on the Sibelius 1st, which made up the second half of the program. I wasn’t about to squander any of my precious half-hour on Gérard Grisey’s sonic heavings. Yet I received an e-mail from a local critic excitedly asking me if I was going to be covering the Grisey in my talk. I replied courteously. No, I said.
Thus critical fare, music that gets it up for critics but leaves the rest of us limp. Such music winds up taking up a great deal more shelf space than it should, for the simple reason that critics write about their passions while the general public does not. Other critics read said writing, and incorporate it into their own writing, then other critics adopt that, and so forth. An upward spiral ensues as one critic’s faint praise becomes another’s measured approval, followed by respectful enthusiasm from another that morphs into out-and-out fawning from yet another. As the critics chit-chat over the newspapers and journals and web sites, what was once tepidly endorsed goes warm then white-hot. Eventually bits of the journalistic spatter make their way into textbooks, and before you know it you’ve got a “major” composer about whom nobody save the critics and academics gives a damn. From time to time a speck of critical doo-doo hits the fan by way of a high-profile performance. Commentarial kudos waft hither and yon, the public claps a few wan claps, and then it’s over. Critics fulminate about those unadventurous symphony patrons who withhold their love from critical fare and insist instead on embracing La Mer and the German Requiem. But it’s the critics who are missing the point, not the symphony patrons.
I have a foot in both worlds. As a longtime habitué of a conservatory, first as a student and since 1978 as a professor, I live in that small pond of professionals and apprentices who view the musical world through an understandably specialized aperture. We’re the in-crowd, the folks who mostly talk to and play for each other or like-minded auditors. But in my capacity as a writer and lecturer for mainstream musical institutions, as well as a professor of music to just those mainstream audiences—via my music-as-breadth-requirement classes at UC Berkeley and my music-lit courses at USF’s Fromm Institute—I see things from the broader-public perspective. It’s an interesting tightrope walk, the hive-born and ingrown conservatory professional one day, the populist preacher of music and culture to the general public the next. Such a combination really shouldn’t work and usually doesn’t, given typical professorial myopia combined with that glutinous polysyllabic glop that passes for English prose in academia. But my mindset and my sympathy lies with the general public rather than with academics, in music as in film as in just about everything. My tastes are cultivated but not elitist, plebeian rather than aristocratic, broad rather than narrow. A blue-collar academic, if you will. Some of my conservatory-type colleagues view me as being a bit unsophisticated, uninformed even, especially where contemporary music is concerned. My general-public audiences tend to treat me as an Unimpeachable Authority. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between.
So while I like “Vertigo” well enough, I’m not about to erupt all a-twitter into critical raptures. The flick is OK. But it’s just a garden-variety movie, nothing more, just as Grisey and Murail and their ilk are just garden-variety academics. I’ll leave them to their arcane theories, ponderings, and manifestos, while I prepare for this week’s pre-concert lectures at the SF Symphony. I’m going to talk about the Rachmaninoff 2nd Symphony.