Kim Novak is 93 years old and not in the greatest of health: among other things she was in a serious horse-riding accident in 2000 and was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010. She sometimes struggles for breath when speaking but is clearly determined to say what she has to say. And boy does she have a lot to say in Alexandre O. Philippe’s new documentary Kim Novak’s Vertigo: about her family, her career, the movie business, and her post-Hollywood life. To give you an idea of how the frank this documentary can be, in the first five minutes she tells us that her father kept the remains of her miscarried brother in a jar in the basement and referred to him as “my only son” (Novak had a living sister) while her mother tried (fortunately without success) to about her with knitting needles and later to suffocate her with a pillow.
Philippe doesn’t dwell on Novak’s childhood but spends most of his on her career in the movies and her life after leaving. Interviews with present-day Novak form the through-line, holding together an impressive lineup of clips from Vertigo (with commentary from Novak) and her other films, archival materials like screen tests and family photographs, and her current home and some of her paintings. The latter reflect an early interest (she won a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) to which she returned after retiring from the movies.
It’s telling that Novak is a great admirer of Grete Garbo, not only for her accomplishments as an actress but also for remaining her own person in a business that often wanted to tell women who they are and what they should accept. She notes that the story of Madeleine and Judy in Vertigo is also her story, and that of many other actresses: first Hollywood gets you, then it wants to make you over into something else, as Jimmy Stewart’s character tried to do with the shop girl from Salina Kansas. Novak particularly disliked the control producer Harry Cohn tried to exert over her life—what she wore, where she went, who she dated—likening that period of her life to being in prison. Cohn was also given to calling her “the fat Polack” despite the fact that her heritage was Czech and her figure typical of female stars of the day. Ultimately Novak had enough of the movie business and retired in the mid-1960s to a beautiful seaside home where her primary activities included raising animals and painting.
Philippe’s film can be a bit obvious and underdeveloped but fans of Novak and of Vertigo will surely want to see it, and it’s also interesting for anyone who wants a firsthand account of it was like to be a female Hollywood star in the 1950s and early 1960s. One tendency Philippe indulges far too often is that of mickey-mousing Novak’s interviews with clips from her films. For instance, her remarks about Harry Cohn are matched with a clip from The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) in which Peter Finch’s character criticizes the way her character walks down a staircase and one from Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) in which Dean Martin and Ray Walston scrutinize her character’s figure and speculate on her weight.
We get it—the attitudes she found oppressive were common in Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s, but they’re still familiar today and not just in Hollywood. Even more egregious is his choice to illustrate her recollection of the California wildfire that destroyed one of her homes with clips featuring fires from The Birds (1963) and The Notorious Landlady (1962), as if fire is some strange new concept that must be seen to be understood. I appreciate the need for interesting visual material when archival footage may not be available, but Novak expresses her feelings perfectly well without the need for this kind of illustration. | Sarah Boslaugh
Kim Novak’s Vertigo is distributed on DVD by Kino Lorber with a street date of Oct. 13.
