Headscratchers / Vertigo

• So at the end Judy confesses to Scottie that Gavin Elster had strangled the real Madeleine before throwing her - rather, her corpse - off the bell tower. How did any forensic/ doctor fail to notice that Madeleine had been strangled, not killed by the fall itself?
  • Judy's exact words were, "He broken her neck!" This suggests that maybe he caught his wife off guard and broke her neck swiftly before she could put up a fight. Due to the fall, the coroner would have come to believe the fall resulted in her neck being broken, along with other bones broken when her body impacted the roof. Keep in mind, she impacted against a hard roof from a large height.
• How did Madeleine escape from her hotel room with neither John nor the hotel desk clerk noticing? This was part of the tease that Madeleine is haunted by a ghost, but once it's revealed that she's just conning John, there's no explanation. Hitchcock himself admitted that this was Fridge Logic.
  • The receptionist is a bit old. Maybe she just has poor memory and forgot that the room was used.
  • I feel like we should note for historical interest that this is the original Fridge Logic! This is the specific incident that Alfred Hitchcock said people would only notice hours later, as they got some chicken from the fridge.
  • Another possibility is that the old woman lied about the last time she saw her. Judy could have easily told her that she was being followed by someone creepy and that she needed a quick way to trick her tail and leave. The old woman may have thought he was a creep and told her about an alternate route to exit the building, and she was playing dumb to stall him so Judy could exit the building and get to her car to leave.
  • With the receptionist showing a key on the rack and saying that she's sure that Carlotta didn't come in, it seems likely that the receptionist is in on the plan to fool Scottie.
• Why did Judy even go through with the plan? The only benefits mentioned in the film are that she gets to finally be with Gavin, now that Madeleine is out of the way, and she got one necklace. But by the time it came to actually do the thing, she was in love with Scottie and thus her only motive was the necklace, and that's...really weak.
  • Well, it depends on how you look at Judy and what we were/weren't told about what happened. If you take the film at face value, and Judy as Gavin's mistress (which some do), she may have been easily manipulated into doing so (this would fit with the character, as we see how little of a fight she puts up when Scottie remakes her back into Madeleine, as well as how naïve she is about falling in love with men so easily as well). Though non-canon, there is a non-official novel called The Testament of Judith Barton which sets up an alternative character interpretation/Perspective Flip of Judy's past and her actions during the events in the film, which is also equally possible. In the story, Judy was hired by Gavin to play Madeleine because Gavin lied to her about Madeleine having a stalker and needing to know if this stalker was dangerous, and Judy needed the money because the store she worked for had closed down (in the story, she learned how to create and repair jewelry from her father and had found a small jewelry store to work in with a nice old man as the owner. Unfortunately, during her time there, this led to her meeting Gavin Elster because he needed an appraisal of Madeleine's jewelry and seeing Judy gave him the idea on how he could commit the murder. Also, the old man who owned the store had a stroke and the store had to be closed down, leaving Judy without a job and she was interested in starting her own jewelry store. Having had some stage acting experience in Salina, and having had taken Method acting classes while in San Francisco, and seeing Gavin had told her the stalker story and that he was willing to pay her for her assistance, she agreed to do the job). For the novel, Judy was completely unaware of what Gavin had been planning until she saw him toss off the real Madeleine's body from the bell tower (but she had begun to suspect he was lying to her due to some details mentioned by Scottie, which occurred during some of the time in-between scenes in the film, with one scene taking place between the big kiss scene and the scene at Midge's apartment following it). Afterwards, she couldn't go to the police because though Gavin lied to her and she was involuntarily involved in the death of Madeleine Elster, he had threatened to name her as the mastermind behind the murder and would have painted her as his mistress if the police hauled him in and tell them that she confessed to the murder and linked him to it out of spite for breaking up with her. So, there's two possible explanations, one that is technically canon and the other from a non-canon source that is based on the film itself. I'm sure there's probably more interpretations available as to Judy's motive that others can provide. I mean, there is the interpretation that Scottie died after the first scene and everything after that fade out was just a dying dream mentioned in the WMG section. So maybe someone has a better interpretation behind Judy's motives besides what's been mentioned.
    • In that book, what did Judy think the plan with the tower was?
    • I had to get the book back out, as it had been quite some time since I read it. Gavin comes to the McKittrick Hotel (which is where Judy had been staying during her time as "playing" Madeleine at his insistence), pissed off at her from doing certain actions without his say so (namely, her going back to Scottie's apartment after the tumble into San Francisco Bay was not a part of Elster's plan, nor was her and Scottie's trip to the woods. Her leaving the note was actually a genuine thing that she had intended to leave in his mailbox while he was away and had managed to borrow Elster's car in order to do it). Of course, he scared the hell out of her, with him and her having the conversation in the dark of the room (the front window room seen in the film BTW), with her telling Gavin that Scottie doesn't want to hurt Madeleine, but that he cares about her and "wants her to be happy", which Gavin of course disregards. He turned on a lamp showing a picture of the mission sitting on the bedside table, and instructs her to describe it as accurate as she can and that Scottie will be able to put two and two together. He tells her that at 3 o'clock, she's to climb to the top of the church tower alone. There's no indication in the book that she had any thought about why Gavin is having her go up the tower, but she asks Gavin what would keep Scottie from following her, with him telling her about his acrophobia and how he had a mental breakdown, describing him to be a coward (which Judy knows is a lie, as one of the scenes for the book that take place between the scenes in the film, Scottie tells Judy about his time in the service during World War II. And she hears from Scottie that Gavin wasn't able to join in the war efforts due to health issues, which contradicts what Gavin told her. And she know's Scottie is telling the truth because the first part of the book, which covers her childhood and early 20s in Salinas, there was an army base there and she had been dating a pilot there and was familiar with the plane Scottie stated he piloted during the war). Gavin also reminds her that he's paying her to do her job as playing Madeleine (again as stated above, she was doing it to get money to open her own jewelry store after the one she was working at closed due to the owner having a stroke and ending up in the hospital). During the drive to the mission, she was concerned about "the immediate physical threat of Gavin Elster." And had spotted him from the top of the Bell Tower during the livery stable scene and spots a blonde in a gray suit in his arms, but she isn't aware that Madeleine was dead at that point and had planned on meeting and telling her not to trust her husband (it wasn't until Judy got up to the top of the tower she realized that the real Madeleine was already dead, being able to see her neck was broken when she came up through the trap door), reflecting Judy's answer to "I wanted to stop it" during the finale. I don't know if there was any moment after that where she looked back and had a "yeah, I should have seen that coming" hindsight reflection, but in regards to the moment when Gavin tells her about going up the tower, there wasn't much thought about what would happen when she got up there at that moment (I think mostly because of the fact Gavin was scaring her in that moment). But then again, in the book, she doesn't seem to notice that Scottie was hurt by her participation in events. Yes, she was a tool for Gavin's plan in her POV, but she doesn't acknowledge the harm she's caused nor acknowledge Scottie's pain from what he thought was the suicide of someone he loved). - CB2001.
  • I imagine she wanted to abandon the plan but reckoned that it was too late to do that without getting herself into trouble. And yes, it is implied that she cared for Elster at least on some level, and she could figure that whereas Scottie, though unquestionably going to be hurt badly, would eventually cope with the tragedy and move on, Gavin would face at least a lengthy term in prison if she just chickened out.
    • It's also possible that Gavin lied to her about the plan. It could be possible that he pitched to her that he needed her to play Madeleine to make her appear to be insane so that he could get her committed to psychiatric care so they could be together, and wasn't aware of that the real plan was for Gavin to kill Madeleine until she got up to the belfry in the tower, finding a dead Madeleine in Gavin's arm.
• So how did Gavin and Judy escape unnoticed from the bell tower after the fall?
  • The same way Scottie was able to after what happened: everyone was so focused on the body on the roof of the church that it afforded them the chance to sneak down unnoticed. They had to wait a few moments for Scottie to leave the tower after witnessing Madeleine's "suicide" before they could get out of there, and probably left just before the police arrived at the scene.