Barbara Bel Geddes was certainly best known for her potrayal of Miss Ellie, the matriarch of the Ewing clan on the 80s TV series Dallas. But she was also one of the best things about Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo. In the film Bel Geddes plays Margaret "Midge" Wood, the plaintalking, upbeat, and pragmatic friend to Jimmy Stewart's Detective Scottie Ferguson. A police officer on leave, Ferguson has recently suffered a traumatic near-death from a rooftop while chasing a criminal, and he suffers from the psychological malady that provides the film with its title. Midge tries to helps Scottie overcome his fear of heights and becomes alarmed and jealous when Scottie becomes obsessed with a mysterious blond named Madeleine Elster. Midge drives Scottie away when she paints a parodic self-portrait of herself posing as Scottie's mystery woman. If my memory serves me, her last scene in the film is when she brings soothing music to Scottie, who has suffered a complete nervous collapse and is recovering in a mental institution. In this scene she demonstrates her loyalty and attempts to atone for her insensitive joke.
Critics have warmed up to Vertigo since its initial appearance. Apparently it was neither a critical nor a commercial success, and it was only nominated for two academy awards: for sound and art direction. Over the years it has ascended movie critics' collective best ever lists, and one year, I recall it supplanted Citizen Kane as the best film ever made, according to one list. (These days I think The Godfather has become the new best-ever.)
Vertigo is a good movie, but I think it is better-suited to theoretical analysis than to watching again and again for sheer enjoyment's sake. North by Nothwest, Psycho, and Rear Window all strike me as better Hitchcock films. This is partly because of the film's ponderous quality--it's pretty damn long--but also because of Kim Novak's lead performance. Her take on the dual roles of Elster and Judy Barton is melodramatic, and the film demands much swooning, lip-chewing, and hysteria of both Madeleine and Judy. Still, Novak doesn't infuse these characters which much nuance, playing the sentimental heroines with a large dose of drama, but with too small a range.
Midge, on the other hand, is a much more developed character, even though she enjoys only a fraction of the screen time that Novak gets. In the scene where Scottie coldly chides Midge for painting the parodic picture, Bel Geddes finishes the scene with an utterly convincing fit of self-loathing: "stupid, stupid, stupid!" she says in self-recrimination, giving Midge a very different quality than her otherwise stereotypical role as chipper sidekick. I think it's the most moving scene in the film. And Scottie's cruel treatment of Midge in this scene evinces those darker qualities in the hero that will become central to the film's climax--is Scottie a victim of circumstance and others' machinations? or is he an impetuous, overly passionate man whose obsessions inevitably hurt those he should love?
I've seen Vertigo many times (it served as a textbook example of psychoanalytical and feminist film analysis in the graduate courses I took), and while I'm sure she was excellent as Ellie Mae (I never got into Dallas), I'll remember her as Midge.
Bel Geddes died Monday of lung cancer; she was 82. According to the AP obituary, she was nominated for an academy award for best supporting actress in 1948's I Remember Mama, and she was the first Maggie the Cat on Broadway in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
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