Literary Origins of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

Though the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “The Foghorn” wasn't directed by Hitch, it's clear that he had a close hand in its development, as he did with many episodes in the early years of his TV show.

As mentioned in my previous post, Hitch's magnum opus, Vertigo, was very much in the air around Shamley Productions -- Hitch's TV production company -- when "The Foghorn" was being created. Based on a 1933 Gertrude Atherton short story of the same name, a quick comparison between that piece and the AHP episode shows us how Frank Gabrielson's TV adaptation could have been influenced by Hitchcock himself -- and how the short story could also have influenced Vertigo.

In Atherton's story, Lucia decides not to conceal from her lover “the awful truth that she read the Greek and Latin classics in the original text.” That detail is left out in the TV drama; instead, she and Bliss explore bookstores, and she reads this illuminating passage from Elizabeth Browning's poem “Not Death, But Love” -- which does not appear in the original story:

...Straightway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,--
"Guess now who holds thee!"--"Death," I said, But, there,
The silver answer rang, "Not Death, but Love."

This addition could have been suggested by Hitchcock, who liked to quote Oscar Wilde's dictum that "Each man kills the thing he loves." The poem hints at the pair's destiny, whose love was entwined with death. And that most definitely brings us back to Vertigo and its Liebestod theme of love that is fulfilled in death (which in turn originates in the myth of Tristan and Isolde, as hinted at by Bernard Herrmann's allusions to Wagner's opera of the same name.)

Based on the 1956 French novel D'entre les Morts (The Living and the Dead, 1956), Vertigo could be Hitch's most resonant, complex film, and its influences reach far beyond the book. Films as disparate as Marilyn Monroe's debut movie Niagara (1953; as I've pointed out) and Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948, as Ken Mogg has shown) left their stamp on Vertigo. Its literary sources go all the way back to ancient Greece, with the aforementioned stories of Tristan and Isolde as well as Pygmalion.

I would add that Atherton's “The Foghorn” influenced the development of Vertigo. Surprisingly, scenes described in the story that didn't make it into the TV episode do show up in the movie.

In this scene, Scottie and Judy walk by the Palace of Fine Arts, evoking the wanderings about San Francisco of Lucia and Bliss of "The Foghorn," who, after a lecture “in the Greek Theatre... imagine themselves in Greece of the fifth century B.C., alone in that vast gray amphitheatre, the slim, straight tenebrous trees above quivering with the melody of birds!”

In a scene that doesn't appear in the French novel, Scottie and “Madeleine” explore the ancient redwood forest. That scene could have been lifted straight from Atherton's lovers and their meandering among “dim aisles of redwoods, born when the earth was young, whose long trunks never swayed, whose high branches rarely sang in the wind — unfriendly trees, but protective, sentinel-like, shutting out the modern world; reminiscent were those closely planted aisles of ancient races... forgotten races... god-like races, perhaps.”

Vertigo is a pastiche of 19th century romantic literature, taking that era's fascination with female dementia, spiritualism and classicism and viewing it through the modern, rational lens of James Stewart's Scottie Ferguson, "the hard-headed Scot." Throw a rock at a pile of Romantic novels and poetry and you'll likely hit a page that relates to Vertigo. For my money, Gertrude Atherton's "The Foghorn" is a very likely source.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Greatest Sandbox Ever

Alfred Hitchcock Presents gave its producer a chance to stretch out and mess around with new ideas.

For Orson Welles, RKO Studios was “the biggest electric train set any boy every had.” But for Alfred Hitchcock, who tested film ideas on his long-running show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, it would seem that, for him, television was the greatest sandbox.

On March 16, 1958, the AHP episode “The Foghorn” aired. You could call it a sandcastle variation on his monumental Vertigo, which premiered two months later. Watch the full episode free on Hulu.

The episode starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Lucia, a young woman who falls in love with a married man, Allen Bliss (Michael Rennie). This being the 19th century – and a 1950's TV show – their relationship remains fashionably chaste, frustrated by his wife's refusal to grant a divorce. Then one day they decide to go for a sailboat ride in San Francisco Bay, where they hatch plans to run away to “the fortunate isles” of "the Orient." But their boat gets lost in the fog and they're struck by an oncoming ship. It capsizes and... well, I don't want to ruin it for you. But for the sake of this post, let's just keep in mind that the entire episode slips like a loose gear between hazy present and lucid-dreaming flashback.

You might have already noted a resemblance between "The Foghorn" and the first half of Psycho, when Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) attempts to run away with her married husband to a "private island." But let's focus on Vertigo. For starters, Bel Geddes starred in both the TV show and the movie. Also, "The Foghorn"'s setting in Gold Rush-era San Francisco – with its mix of amoral greed, seafaring criminality and astonishing wealth, quickly obtained – is echoed in Vertigo's historic locations. In that movie, Gavin Elster's longing for the “things that once spelled San Francisco.... the color and excitement... the power... the freedom” – take us right back to the era of "The Foghorn"'s Forty-Niners.

"The Foghorn" opens with the haunting image of a woman dreaming (see "Madeleine"'s "beautiful, phony trances" in Vertigo, as well as the opening scene, two decades earlier, in Rebecca). What follows is a flashback – or is it? That confusion of dreaming and reality also forms the diegetic core of Vertigo.

Rolling in from the Bay, San Francisco's iconic sea fog envelops "The Foghorn" with a funereal, dreamlike atmosphere – similar to that in Vertigo.

It isn't hard to see "The Foghorn"'s Allen Bliss as a nice-guy version of evil mastermind and shipping tycoon Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) of Vertigo, who also escapes out of the country – though his plans entail disposing of his marriage from a great height. They even a share an occupation. As another character says of Bliss, “He's the one from Boston Trust I hope to form that shipping corporation with.”

Bliss even looks like Elster. Of the latter, Vertigo's screenplay says that he has "cool, watchful eyes. He is beautifully tailored, and gives the sense of a man who relishes money and knows how to use it." The same could be said of Bliss.

In Vertigo, the uncanny shock of recognition strikes most jarringly when Midge shows Scottie her self-portrait. "The Foghorn" ends in a similar "big reveal" plot twist. In both the film and the TV episode, a nun looms up like a specter, to shocking effect. Both end in a dying fall, too.

It almost goes without saying, then, that the sonorous moan of a foghorn that recurs in both works can hardly be a coincidence. (In Hitch's movie cameo, he walks through a shipyard carrying a manual foghorn case; in his introductory piece to the TV episode, he mimes a foghorn blast, ala the housekeeper's cry that is replaced by a train whistle in The 39 Steps.)

The "The Foghorn"'s resonance doesn't end there. Hitch mined the Gertrude Atherton short story on which the AHP episode was based for ideas for Vertigo. Stop back for my next post and see what I mean!