After years of retirement and general seclusion, Kim Novak returned to the public eye as a presenter at the Oscars in 2014 — a welcome surprise for classic film buffs and a vicious snarking opportunity for tabloid media and social media’s worst, including one Donald Trump, who seized on the 81-year-old star’s physical appearance and vocal delivery with crushing cruelty.
For Novak, who hit back with a comparatively gracious statement against bullying and ageism, it was proof that Hollywood misogyny endures decades after her 1950s heyday — and perhaps a reminder of why she took early leave of the industry in the first place. She doesn’t bring up the matter in “Kim Novak’s Vertigo,” and one hopes she doesn’t think of it much. But her legacy, and sentiments binding past and present, are much on her mind in Alexandre O. Philippe‘s warmly conversational documentary portrait.
If you’re wondering whether the title “Kim Novak’s Vertigo” is a dig at the legendary director of the actor’s single most celebrated film, it isn’t: Alfred Hitchcock is fondly recalled throughout the doc, to the point that his ghost is even thanked in the closing credits, for being “undeniably present during the making of this movie.”
Some viewers may want to deny that, though Novak appears to believe it, and she’s a hard figure to argue with. Funny and expressive and thoughtful in her nineties, she’s also brazenly, engagingly eccentric in ways that have little to do with age: Having willingly passed through the madness of movie stardom into a state of post-celebrity isolation, she speaks as someone not altogether of this time or place. Slight in some respects, Philippe’s 76-minute film resonates as what is today a vanishingly rare first-hand window into the joys, terrors and vagaries of Hollywood’s golden age.
This isn’t the first Hitchcock-adjacent project from Philippe, the prolific Swiss-American director of cinema-centric documentaries who previously deconstructed “Psycho’s” iconic shower scene in his 2017 film “78/52.” Philippe’s oeuvre has focused with an endearing obsessiveness on direction and formal craft: Star portraiture is newer territory for him (beginning with a William Shatner study in 2023), but there’s a palpably relaxed affinity between him and Novak that makes for discursive and illuminating interview material, as well as a striking vulnerability in various voice notes sent by the star to the director — in which she can strike a more melancholic note than in their in-person dialogues. “I feel like I’m very close to the end,” she says in one of them, at the film’s outset, adding, “I need to free something that’s been in the closet of my mind.”
More than something, it turns out. Novak’s musings range from anecdotal but unsentimental reminiscences about her beginnings in the film industry — she was signed by Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn, who changed her name from Marilyn and persistently dubbed her “the fat Polack” — to more searching reflections on her craft (“I feel more proud of having been a reactor than an actor”) to sometimes lacerating recollections of family life, and her creative but hard-up parents’ conflicted reaction to her stardom.
Her father kept the miscarried foetus of his only son in a jar in the garage, while her mother admitted that she attempted to abort her. Her grandmother, a freer spirit with a bluebird tattoo, was more of a role model to the young Novak, and her image recurs frequently in the swirling, surreal paintings that the star produces to this day. Painting, which Novak took up after quitting Los Angeles for Big Sur and pivoting away from a full-time acting career in the late 1960s — a shift she refers to as “getting reborn” — is the art she describes as her “survival mode.”
Well-chosen clips track the evolution of Novak’s star persona from the ingenue days of “Picnic” to her sleeker transitioning into femme-fatale parts to the flintier, more liberated possibilities of her turn in the 1968 industry satire “The Legend of Lylah Clare.” But it’s Novak’s dual role as Judy and Madeleine in “Vertigo” on which the film fixates most intently, and the star — who appeared to have had a better time working with the Master of Suspense than various other Hitchcock blondes — is most forthcoming both on her experience making it, and how the film happily haunts her still.
“It’s a wonder ‘Vertigo’ didn’t blow my mind,” she says, though to hear her speak of it, you wonder if it kind of did. The tension between the images of Madeleine and Judy, merged into each other at a man’s instruction, still strikes Novak as akin to her own struggle to maintain her identity and a sense of self in an industry ruled by male desire and ego.
Uncovering the original gray suit worn by Madeleine from a box in the attic, she’s overcome with feeling for a garment she found dowdy at the time of shooting. “It’s part of me,” she sighs. “That’s the good thing about getting old — you can look back and everything is beautiful, because it’s life.” Simply constructed, with no agenda more important than simply letting its subject talk and eagerly listening in, Philippe’s enjoyably besotted film is inclined to agree.