I remember the conductor shouting and it comes to mind with news that the vanity scheme of the dishevelled blond mayor is finally delivering the smoothly rounded lines of a rereleased routemaster. Ma qui, è molto caldo . . . in so many ways . . . Out there in the piazza with the sun beating down or even in the shade: men in the hot water of what they’ve got coming to them. See them struggling to swim their way out. Or in, come to that. Naked, exposed to the ribald remarks, the sniggers, the whispers, the arrests, the warrants, the cautions. Can’t you take a joke! Is that what Saatchi said to his domestic goddess of a wife . . . Except somebody or other saw it all and captured it on a camera.
Strangely, we went to the Odeon in Firenze (where original language movies are shown) and after a Prosecco and a cocktail and nibbles (the usual apperativo we went to see Vertigo, Hitchcock’s 1958 movie. It was as though I had never seen it before. I thought I would recognise it as the film unrolled, but no, though I did remember the tower of the Spanish style church and Jimmy Stewart struggling with curl upon curl of vertigo. Did you know that vertigo was divided into curls. No I didn’t either but apparently it is. The curls come thick and fast like an eighteenth century wig. Jimmy was playing the part of a would be psychoanalytically orientated detective retired from the force because of a panic attack whilst hanging from a gutter fifty feet (or whatever) above the street. Picked for a Patsy by an old so-called friend he falls for the cool and sultry Kim Novak. Well who wouldn’t? But surely it is the misogynistic old sadist Hitch himself plastering himself all over the screen. A bit like Saatchi really.
I think I must have grown up thinking of Jimmy Stewart as some sort of ideal man. Kind and tough or kind of tough. A loser who wins, eventually, courtesy of Hitch the puppet master. The thing is, the secret which I can now divulge, is that I found the whole thing revolting. It’s as though I was seeing the whole horror of US anti-communist hysteria, its explicit racism and sexism through the threadbare curtain of Hitch’s film. Does goodness exist? Vertigo is part of a Tuesday evening “cult” series at the Odeon. There was a learned presentation by an academic movie enthusiast before the film. He articulated the ways in which Hitchcock used the notion of vertigo throughout the film. It was a fairground ride of a movie; clanking up and rushing down with a scream. I have no memory of Brit movie houses having an academic to introduce a film but hey this is Italy. And because it’s so warm, still nearly 30 I would guess at midnight, so off we wandered along the banks of the Arno tearing the movie to pieces as though we were still 20 with a great untested hunger to test out against the world.