Kim Novak lashes out at 'The Artist,' score

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    Actress Kim Novak says she feels violated because music from the Alfred Hitchcock film is used in "The Artist."
  associated press file photo

LOS ANGELES -- "Vertigo" leading lady Kim Novak isn't keeping quiet about her disdain for "The Artist."

The 78-year-old actress said in a statement released by her manager Monday that she feels violated because music from the Alfred Hitchcock film is used in the French black-and-white homage to the silent-film era. Novak said "The Artist" filmmakers had no reason "to depend on Bernard Herrmann's score from 'Vertigo' to provide more drama."

"My body of work has been violated by 'The Artist,"' Novak said. "This film took the love theme music from 'Vertigo' and used the emotions it engenders as its own. Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart can't speak for themselves, but I can. It was our work that unconsciously or consciously evoked the memories and feelings to the audience that were used for the climax of 'The Artist."'

Novak, who played the dual role of both a suicidal trophy wife of a rich San Franciscan and a morose working girl opposite Stewart in the 1958 thriller directed by Hitchcock, said that even though Herrmann was given "a small credit at the end," she believed "this kind of filmmaking trick to be cheating."

"The Artist," which was written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius and stars Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo as silent film actors, leads Sunday's Golden Globes ceremony with six nominations. The wordless film combines a mostly original score, sound effects and old-fashioned title cards which display dialogue.

"'The Artist' was made as a love letter to cinema, and grew out of my (and all of my cast and crew's) admiration and respect for movies throughout history," Hazanavicius responded in a statement. "It was inspired by the work of Hitchcock, (Fritz) Lang, (John) Ford, (Ernst) Lubitsch, (F.W.) Murnau and (Billy) Wilder. I love Bernard Herrmann and his music has been used in many different films and I'm very pleased to have it in mine. I respect Kim Novak greatly, and I'm sorry to hear she disagrees."

Getting Picked On at the Oscars at Age 81

"​Kim Novak's Face Is the Talk of Twitter" says an E! headline the morning after the Oscars. The talk seems to be a bunch of people arriving at the same joke about the 81-year-old Vertigo star thinking she'd arrived to present an award for "Frozen," because of the way her face looked. Donald Trump, speaking as he does for civilization's baser instincts, tweeted that "Kim should sue her plastic surgeon!’"

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In her celebrity heyday, Novak was a Hollywood sex symbol who followed in the wake of, and often was compared to, Marilyn Monroe. Film critic Farran Nehme writes in a short but powerful blog post this morning that her fame came after she modified herself for Hollywood: new name, new hair, new teeth, and the like.
Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn engineered much of this transformation, and part of his management style was to feed her insecurities. "Where there was an especially cruel phrase in an article, Cohn would read it to Kim an extra time or two, for emphasis," Nehme relates, before going on to talk about last night's Oscars:

So let’s say — just as a hypothetical for-instance — you are an 81-year-old star whose last movie was in 1991 and who hasn’t been to the Oscars in many a long year. Not that you were ever nominated for one in the first place; you were, after all, a sex symbol for most of your career. As the evening approaches, the anxiety sets in. Harsh lights, you think. High-definition cameras. And a public that remembers you chiefly as the ice goddess whose beauty once drove James Stewart to the brink of madness.

And even back then, when you were 25 years old, you worried constantly that no matter how you looked, it wasn’t good enough.

So a few weeks before the ceremony, you go to a doctor, and he says, “Relax honey. I have just the thing to make you fresh and dewy for the cameras.”

And you go to the Oscars, so nervous you clutch your fellow presenter’s hand. And the next day, you wake up to a bunch of cheap goddamn shots about your face.

It's no secret that society both encourages and stigmatizes cosmetic surgery for women. People have a lot of different opinions on this—maybe we should stop encouraging; maybe we should stop stigmatizing. Either way, perhaps we can agree that laughing at Novak in this case is particularly awful.