Friday Night at the Movies with Adam Kiss

Hi, I’m Adam Kiss,

Marc and I share a love of movies, especially older film noir. Today I'm very glad to be talking to you about the movie Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, one of my favorite movies. It's been a big inspiration to me for many years now, I absolutely love this movie and I just really can't wait to start talking about it.

Vertigo is often considered to be Hitchcock's Masterpieces and I can't really argue with that. It might not be my absolute favorite Hitchcock movie but it certainly is one of my favorite movies of all time—so many Hitchcock movies are among my favorite movies? of all time. It's definitely very different from certain other of his films like obviously North by Northwest or Suspicion or even Rear Window. The film almost starts in a “noir-ish” fashion where James Stewart kind of acts as the detective for a while but it's definitely not really a “noir” film. It really kind of has its own genre—there's not many movies I can compare it To. De Palma did a quasi remake of it and other people have obvious done movies now that are somewhat similar to it or have

similar themes but in terms of Hitchcock I would say that it's probably his deepest movie and it's probably his most emotional movie. He really goes to those emotional depths that you don't always see in his movies and I think that's really a great thing. A lot of people do? criticize the plot and say that certain things don't make sense but it's not about that. Something that I want to stress that a lot of times in movies things maybe don't make sense with the plot but in life things don't make sense as well. We like to think that movies are so logical but life is the farthest thing from logical sometimes.

Essentially the film is about Scottie, played by James Stewart, and he suffers from vertigo as we see in an early incident at the beginning of the film. Basically an old college friend hires him to follow his wife. He develops feelings for her and when she ends up dying he blames himself and then he meets another woman who mysteriously looks exactly like her. That’s really the whole bare bones of the plot. And there’s plenty of mystery and suspense thrown in. Interestingly enough Hitchcock did not consider his films mystery films—but this film obviously does have a big mystery which he gives away in the middle of the movie. Hitchcock gives away that mystery because he favors suspense over mystery. Hitchcock’s theory was that if you have a bunch of people sitting around a table talking about something like baseball or math or whatever it can be very boring they’re just sitting and talking—but if you show the audience there's a bomb under the table during the conversation suddenly that conversation becomes very interesting. That’s suspense.

The performances, cinematography, script and direction are all great. Interestingly enough Hitchcock didn’t like to direct his actors very much in terms of exactly how they should portray their characters—he considered the acting to be largely their responsibility and famously had a disagreement with Paul Newman when Newman asked Hitchcock about his character’s motivation in another film.

Anyway those are some of my thoughts on Hitchcock's Vertigo. An absolute classic and one of the greatest films ever made by one of the greatest directors ever! As a filmmaker, writer, actor and director myself I appreciate everything that went into the making of a film like this!

Adam Kiss was originally trained in opera and attended Manhattan School of Music and the Curtis Institute. It was during the pandemic that he got into acting and appeared in the leading role of Boris Eros in two episodes of the Emmy-winning TV show “We Speak NYC” and on the Emmy-Winning HBO Series “Succession” alongside Brian Cox! He made three short films that won over thirty awards from various international film festivals including six best actor awards, and received a writing award for another screenplay he wrote from the New York International Screenplay Awards (NYISA) in Manhattan!

To learn more about Adam and all the awesome stuff he does, Check out his website https://adamkissofficial.com/