Showing posts with label Kim Novak. Show all posts

Friday, March 5, 2021

‘I had to leave Hollywood to save myself’ / Kim Novak on art, bipolar, Hitchcock and happiness

Kim Novak

Interview

‘I had to leave Hollywood to save myself’: Kim Novak on art, bipolar, Hitchcock and happiness

Simon Hattenstone

Kim Novak starred in Vertigo – voted the best film ever made – but knew she was too fragile for fame. She talks about her tough childhood, the sensitive side of Sinatra and starting again in her forties

Simon Hattenstone

Monday 15 February 2021

im Novak apologises for the mess. And, to be fair, the studio at her Oregon home is fabulously messy. Behind her are a couple of canvases she has been working on; to the left and right, all sorts of all sorts. At the back of the room, her rescue dog, Patches, lies on a sofa, half snoozing, half listening. Occasionally, Sadie Ann, her husband’s pudelpointer, wanders in, sniffs around and leaves.

Novak, who turned 88 two days ago, is so much more than a Hollywood legend. The star of Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a wonderful artist, a mental health activist (she is proudly bipolar), an anti-bullying campaigner, a vet’s assistant and one of the greatest life forces I’ve spoken to.

THE SIXTIES

The Color of Love

BY SAM KASHNER

SEPTEMBER 3, 2013

Kim Novak was Harry Cohn’s revenge on Rita Hayworth. Sammy Davis Jr. was Kim Novak’s revenge on Harry Cohn. What began as a boldface item in Dorothy Kilgallen’s gossip column in the New York Journal-American threatened to become a national scandal on the eve of America’s long struggle for civil rights.

Kim Novak

It started in 1957 at Chicago’s most famous nightclub, Chez Paree. The man known as “the greatest entertainer in the world” was onstage, the smoke from his cigarette trellising the air. You had to see him: the gorgeous shirt, the cuff links, the way everything billowed. He was in the dark and suddenly the spotlight picked him up—he was electric, he was hot, it was almost a sexual thing. He was singing to Kim Novak, sitting at a stageside table; she had just finished work on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the most challenging film of her career. That night would be the first and virtually the last time that Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr. would be seen in public together. At the heart of their star-crossed affair was one of Hollywood’s sacred monsters: the notorious Harry Cohn.

Vertigo / No 3 best crime film of all time

Vertigo: No 3 best crime film of all time

Alfred Hitchcock, 1958

Ryan Gilbey
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.53 BST
T

he rehabilitation of Hitchcock's Vertigo is now fully complete – its reputation is as assured as that of Citizen Kane, and can only have been helped by a long period in which it was out of circulation – but what an oddity it is. Viewed as a conventional thriller, this adaption of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's 1954 novel, Sueurs Froides (D'Entre les Morts), is hardly the tightest of constructions. And there is also the notorious left-field touch of giving away the twist some distance before the end. But then, plot matters far less in Vertigo than the machinations of desire and obsession – and about those there is no finer film.

James Stewart plays Scottie, an acrophobic private eye who receives an unusual assignment: to follow Madeleine (Kim Novak), the wife of an old friend, who is drifting around San Francisco in a dazed funk. She seems to be under the spell of a long-dead ancestor named Carlotta, who committed suicide, but soon Scottie is lost in his own reverie.

At this point, the plot takes a sharply disorienting turn, and Vertigo moves into darker and even more unsettling territory. Stewart's performance as a prototype stalker is especially troubling as we watch his soft features harden and his wholesome persona become mangled and corrupted; along with Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West, it is one of cinema's most effective instances of casting against type. Meanwhile, Novak is a model of fraught beauty in her tombstone-grey suit. She was always a reluctant star, and her natural anxiety contributes to her character's vulnerability, which peaks in the heartbreaking line to Scottie: "If I let you change me, will you love me?" No wonder the writer David A Cook said of the film that it "suggests not only the fraudulence of romantic love, but of the whole Hollywood narrative tradition that underwrites it."

Stylistically, Vertigo features some of Hitchcock's most expressionistic work; the film includes the famous zoom-in/track-out shot, also known as the "trombone shot" (and later appropriated by Steven Spielberg for Jaws), which gives the impression of both moving toward and away from the subject simultaneously. Even the misstep of the nightmare sequence created by John Ferren, which sees Scottie's disembodied face floating in a psychedelic void, cannot undermine the stifling atmosphere of romantic intensity epitomised in the ripe colours and Bernard Herrmann's grand, encircling score.

THE GUARDIAN