Hitchcock fakes the required Vertigo epilogue
example · film: Vertigo (Hitchcock) ·
retold in 4 talks
The studio forced Hitchcock to shoot a brief epilogue for *Vertigo* (the murderer Gavin Elster caught in Europe, per Hays Code rules that criminals must be apprehended), he filmed it, showed it to censors, then simply cut it from the wide release. Nobody noticed because he was Hitchcock.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 4
“He shot that, showed this to the censors, and then for the wide release he simply cut that part and nobody cared.”
“First the film was a commercial failure, then it became a classic. Hitchcock said: where is that in-between period when it would be a classic and I could still make money?”
“He doesn't lose her but he…retroactively discovers that there never even was a Madeleine.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Gustáv Husák1Pat Hitchcock1Boris Shumyatsky1Tod Browning1Oleksandr Dovzhenko1Val Lewton1John Garfield1Martha Nochimson1
alongside works
Every retelling 4
The studio forced Hitchcock to shoot a brief epilogue for Vertigo (the murderer Gavin Elster caught in Europe, per Hays Code rules that criminals must be apprehended), he filmed it, showed it to censors, then simply cut it from the wide release. Nobody noticed because he was Hitchcock., illustrating censorship subverted by authorial cunning,Hays Code as big Other
Vertigo was a commercial failure before becoming a canonical classic; Hitchcock joked about where was the in-between period when he could have made money off a film that was already great, Žižek uses this for Lynch's parallel trajectory., illustrating ideology critique via form
Dupuy's reading of Vertigo: when Scottie discovers Madeleine was fake from the beginning, he does not simply lose her, at the counterfactual level the past is changed, retroactively erasing a love that never really existed. This illustrates the political act that changes destiny., illustrating counterfactual logic,retroactive necessity,enlightened catastrophism
In Vertigo, the Hays Code required that the heroine's drying underwear appear as abstract cloth so viewers could not 'prove' James Stewart had seen her naked, but ordinary viewers perceived underwear anyway. The censorship protected not the viewers but the innocent gaze of the Big Other., illustrating the Big Other,ideology and cinema,appearances