Kim Novak makes a mysterious woman feel like someone being misunderstood. We rate her for the unease she brings to Vertigo: she holds our attention while making us question the man watching her.
Fi1m perspective
In Vertigo (1958), James Stewart's detective watches Kim Novak's Madeleine Elster as though enough looking might explain her. Novak keeps her behaviour difficult to read without letting her become merely a puzzle to be solved. We found the scrutiny increasingly uncomfortable because she makes us feel the person he keeps failing to see. Her poise holds his attention, but she never makes his fascination seem sufficient grounds for understanding her. The performance gives us something to worry about beyond what the detective will discover.
Her breakthrough came with Picnic (1955) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), the latter opposite Frank Sinatra. Pal Joey (1957) put her in a musical with Sinatra and Rita Hayworth; Bell, Book and Candle (1958) reunited her with Stewart for supernatural comedy. That is a more varied set of jobs than her frequent casting as a mysterious blonde might suggest. The danger in such casting is that looking beautiful and withholding information can become the whole part. In Vertigo, she makes us care about how the woman is being regarded.
Novak described Alfred Hitchcock as exact about the technical work while allowing her to find her own way into the character. That freedom seems particularly useful in a film where the detective is so absorbed in his own idea of a woman. Stewart makes Scottie Ferguson's fascination painfully convincing, and Novak gives us reason to question it even as we are drawn in. We would not exchange the film's patience for a brisker thriller, though some journeys drag and the mystery is far-fetched. Novak is a large part of why we are willing to stay with it.
The work became intermittent after the mid-1960s, with occasional later appearances before her final film, Liebestraum (1991). That makes it tempting to let the late-1950s films stand for everything she could do. We would be wary of treating one extraordinary part as the limit of an actor's abilities. Start with Vertigo, then try Bell, Book and Candle for another meeting with Stewart that does not ask them to do the same job.
Biography
Kim Novak is an American actress. Born Marilyn Pauline Novak in Chicago, she signed with Columbia Pictures in 1954 and appeared in films including Picnic (1955), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Pal Joey (1957).
She is best known for her dual role as Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Other credits include Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and Kiss Me, Stupid (1964). Novak largely withdrew from acting after the mid-1960s, with later appearances in The Mirror Crack'd (1980) and the television series Falcon Crest (1986–87). She has also pursued painting.
