By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
A few years ago, my wife Vicki and I decided to visit all the historic Spanish missions in California. Our already interesting pilgrimage grew more intriguing when I learned that famed director Alfred Hitchcock filmed Vertigo—often considered his best film—at two of them.
I am a Hitchcock fan, perhaps since my favorite childhood cartoon—The Flintstones—spoofed him in a episode that, for some unknown reason, I’ve always remembered. I never saw Psycho, but I did like The Birds (filmed in California’s Bodega Bay), Rear Window, and North by Northwest.
When my fellow book club members recently suggested we watch and discuss Vertigo, I jumped at the chance. Hitchcock released the classic psychological thriller in 1958, three years before I was born.
Starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Barbara Bel Geddes, the movie is about a retired detective (Stewart) hired by a college friend to unravel the mysterious behavior of the friend’s wife (Novak). Novak seems haunted by Carlotta Valdes, a woman who died a century earlier.
Stewart starts his investigation by following Novak to Mission Dolores (Misión San Francisco de Asís), the oldest building in San Francisco. In the adjacent cemetery, he sees her entranced by Carlotta’s aging headstone.
Franciscan priest (and now saint) Junipero Serra established the San Francisco mission 250 years ago, in 1776, as the sixth of California’s landmark Catholic foundations. Perhaps Hitchcock set his rather sad film there because the mission’s nickname came from a nearby creek called Arroyo de los Dolores, or “Creek of Sorrows.”
The adobe church built in 1791 survived the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. We toured the buildings and adjacent cemetery during the semiquincentennial year of 2026, and attended Saturday evening Mass there.
The cemetery is known not just for Hitchcock’s film. It’s also the final resting place of some 5,000 Ohlone, Miwok, and other First Californians who helped build the place. Others buried there include the first Mexican governor and the first Presidio commandant.
When we visited, I recognized a few nooks and crannies from the movie, but Hitchcock added other elements too. Some of those interesting filming details are outlined here.
One addition was Carlotta’s headstone, a prop which Hitchcock behind after filming. The mission later removed the fictitious monument, considering it disrespectful to the actual dead.
In Vertigo, with the help of his ex-fiancée (Bel Geddes), Stewart figures out that Carlotta’s ghost is calling his friend’s wife back to the village where Carlotta grew up, so they go there. This turns out to be ninety miles south at the Mission San Juan Bautista.
Founded on June 24, 1797, San Juan Bautista was the fifteenth of the California Spanish missions. The foundation lent its name to the surrounding small town of San Juan Bautista.
The mission grew quickly, and its workers finished a new church by 1812. Situated adjacent to the San Andreas Fault, several earthquakes have damaged the structure over the years, including as many as six quakes a day during a three week period in 1800.
At its peak, over 1,000 Native Americans lived there, but often in slave-like conditions. On a happier note, one Franciscan who loved music taught singing to the Native Americans and soon the mission had a famous choir.
The old church features a barrel organ donated in 1829 by English sea captain George Vancouver (and probably used at least once or twice for choir practice). Restored several times, it is the only mission building still located on an original Spanish plaza, which today is known as the San Juan Bautista State Historic Park.
Hitchcock used special effects to give the San Juan mission a different look (described further here) in Vertigo. He added a tall bell tower using scale models, matte paintings, and trick studio photography.
The impressive but fake bell tower is the venue for not one, but two tragic events involving Stewart and Novak in the movie. Both center on Stewart’s fear of heights and his related…you guessed it…vertigo.
Why did Hitchcock use these Catholic missions in his classic film? I am not sure, but I have some theories.
There are at least two practical reasons. Mission Dolores is the only cemetery in San Francisco City limits and San Juan Bautista really does look like the sort of place where a haunting spirit like Carlotta Valdes would grow up.
Having now visited both missions, I can confirm they are perfect places to hear the whispers of the past, which is a key plot point in Vertigo. There also may be more nuanced reasons, however, for Hitchcock’s venue choices.
Hitchcock was a lifelong Roman Catholic. He once told the journalist Charlotte Chandler that his birth date was “one of the only Sundays in my mother’s life that she missed church.”
“I don’t think I can be labeled a Catholic artist,” Hitchcock told French filmmaker Francois Truffaut, “but it may be that one’s early upbringing influences a man’s life and guides his instinct.”
Hitchcock attended Jesuit schools but had a complicated relationship with the Church. He feared authority but had a keen sense of good and evil.
He was infected with large doses of both Catholic guilt but also with the Catholic yearning for redemption. All these themes appear in his half-century-long cinematic exploration of the darker sides of life.
And just like the Catholic Church, Hitchcock had a complicated relationship with women. Although married only once—a union that lasted for 53 years—women were almost always the victims in his movies.
Hitchcock seemed obsessed with women—especially blonde women—and sought to control them.Both of those themes animate Vertigo and, arguably, the Catholic Church.
It also is possible, of course, that Hitchcock just thought the beautiful and mysterious old church buildings helped articulate the aesthetic of his film.
We may never know for sure. Although Hitchcock often talked to the press about Vertigo, I have not found any explanation about why he anchored his famous film on two historic Catholic missions.
The man known as the master of suspense always did like to keep his audience guessing.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for a future Christmas.
