The actor will take over the role played by James Stewart in Hitchcock's film at the time. The script for the remake was written by Steven Knight, creator of the Peaky Blinders and upcoming screenwriter for a Star Wars trilogy.
Vertigo or cold sweats?
According to The Guardian, Paramount Picture has given the green light for the project. In addition to starring in the film, Robert Downey Jr will produce it. Vertigo is an adaptation of the novel Between the Dead by Boileau-Narcejac, published by Denoël in 1954. It has been reissued several times under the title Cold Suers, and when Alfred Hitchcock's film was released in 1958, the film was logically titled like the novel.
James Stewart and Kim Novak
The film tells the story of Inspector Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart, for his fourth and last film with Hitchcock), prone to vertigo and soon to be fired. One day, he meets one of his old friends who offers to investigate his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak, in her most outstanding role with The man with the golden arms of Preminger), whose mental health seems flimsy. Scottie accepts and does not take long to meet Madeleine, with whom he immediately falls in love. But the young woman feels a morbid fascination for her grandmother, Carlotta Valdez, and has a suicidal tendency. Will Scottie manage to avoid the worst?
The spiral of remakes
From the spiral credits, designed by Saul Bass, to the famous sequence of the bell tower of the Spanish mission, Cold Sweats is undoubtedly one of Hitchcock's masterpieces, a film with drawers that can be seen as a love story, an adventure story, a crime film and a psychoanalytical odyssey within oneself. A matrix film also whose traces can be found in Pulsions, Obsession and other Stendahl Syndrome. However, when it was released in 1958, the film did not achieve the expected success and disconcerted the public. In his interviews with Truffaut, Hitchcock attributed part of this failure to the age of James Stewart, 50 at the time of filming, too old to make credible the passion that united him with the icy icon that was Novak.
Besides the crazy idea of shooting such a remake, Robert Downey Jr is now 58 years old. To dive back into the filmography of the master of suspense, click on our Cinécult' Alfred Hitchcock: the dark side of the master
