Vertigo (film)

Vertigo is a 1958 American psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. The story was based on the 1954 novel D'entre les morts (From Among the Dead) by Boileau-Narcejac, with a screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor. The film stars James Stewart as a former San Francisco police detective who has retired after an incident in the line of duty caused him to develop an extreme fear of heights, accompanied by vertigo. He is hired as a private investigator to report on the strange behavior of an acquaintance's wife (Kim Novak).

The film was shot on location in San Francisco, as well as in Mission San Juan Bautista, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive, and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. The film stock of the camera negative was Eastman 25 ASA tungsten-balanced 5248 with processing and prints by Technicolor. It was the first film to use the dolly zoom, an in-camera effect that distorts perspective to create disorientation, to convey Scottie's acrophobia; the technique is often referred to as "the Vertigo effect" in reference to its use in the film. In 1996, the film underwent a major restoration to create a new 70 mm print and DTS soundtrack.

Vertigo received mixed reviews on release, but it has since come to be considered Hitchcock's magnum opus and one of the greatest films of all time. In 1989, it was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film appears repeatedly in polls of the best films by the American Film Institute, including a 2007 ranking as the ninth-greatest American film ever. Attracting significant scholarly attention, it replaced Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made in the 2012 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll, and came in second place in the 2022 edition of the poll.

After a rooftop chase in which a fellow policeman falls to his death, San Francisco detective John "Scottie" Ferguson retires due to acrophobia and accompanying vertigo caused by the incident. Midge, his ex-fiancée, says that another severe emotional shock may be the only cure. Midge retains feelings for Scottie, but he is not receptive to her intimations.

Gavin Elster, an acquaintance from college, asks Scottie to follow his wife, Madeleine, claiming that she has been behaving strangely. Scottie follows Madeleine to the grave of Carlotta Valdes (1831–1857) at the Mission San Francisco de Asís and to the Legion of Honor art museum, where she gazes at the Portrait of Carlotta.

A local historian explains that Carlotta Valdes committed suicide: She had been the mistress of a wealthy married man and borne his child, and the otherwise childless man kept the child and cast Carlotta aside. Carlotta, who Gavin fears is possessing Madeleine, was Madeleine's great-grandmother. However, Madeleine does not know this or remember the places she has visited while ostensibly possessed. Scottie trails her to Fort Point and rescues her after she jumps into San Francisco Bay.

The next day, Madeleine stops to deliver a letter of gratitude to Scottie, and they spend the day together. They travel to Muir Woods and Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive, where they embrace. The next day, Madeleine recounts a nightmare, and Scottie identifies its setting as Mission San Juan Bautista, Carlotta's childhood home. He drives her there, and they express their love for each other. Madeleine suddenly runs into the church and up the bell tower, asking Scottie not to follow her. Scottie runs after her, but is halted on the steps by his fear of heights and sees her plunge to her death.

An inquest into Madeleine's death declares it a suicide, though the coroner rebukes Scottie for not doing more to save her. Gavin also does not fault Scottie, but Scottie becomes clinically depressed and is sent to a sanatorium in an almost catatonic state. Following his release, he frequents the places that Madeleine visited, often imagining that he sees her. One day, he notices a woman on the street who, although superficially very different, reminds him of Madeleine. He follows her into her apartment, where she identifies herself as Judy Barton, from Salina, Kansas.

A flashback reveals that Judy was the person Scottie knew as "Madeleine Elster"; she had been impersonating Gavin's wife in an elaborate murder scheme. Gavin took advantage of Scottie's fear of heights to substitute his wife's freshly killed body in the apparent "suicide jump". Judy writes a note to Scottie, confessing her involvement in the plot, but tears it up and decides to continue the charade, because she loves him.

The two begin seeing each other, but Scottie remains obsessed with "Madeleine" and asks Judy to change her clothes and dye her hair to resemble her. After she complies, he notices her wearing the necklace portrayed in Carlotta's painting. Realizing the truth, he drives Judy back to the mission.

There, he tells her that he must re-enact the event that led to his madness, and that he now knows that "Madeleine" and Judy are the same person, with Judy having been Gavin's mistress before being cast aside, just as Carlotta had been. He forces her up the bell tower and makes her admit her deceit. He reaches the top, conquering his fear of heights. Judy confesses that Gavin paid her to impersonate a "possessed" Madeleine and begs Scottie to forgive her. He embraces Judy, but a shadowy figure—a nun investigating the noise—rises from the tower's trapdoor, startling her. Judy lunges backward off the tower to her death; Scottie, bereaved once again, but cured of his fear of heights, stands on the ledge in shock while the nun rings the mission bell.

Alfred Hitchcock makes his customary cameo appearance walking in front of Gavin Elster's shipyard, carrying a trumpet case.

In his monograph dedicated to the study of Vertigo, Charles Barr has stated that the central theme of the film is psychological obsession, concentrating in particular on Scottie as obsessed with the women in his life. Barr notes, "This story of a man who develops a romantic obsession with the image of an enigmatic woman has commonly been seen, by his colleagues as well as by critics and biographers, as one that engaged Hitchcock in an especially profound way; and it has exerted a comparable fascination on many of its viewers. After first seeing it as a teenager in 1958, Donald Spoto had gone back for 26 more viewings by the time he wrote The Art of Alfred Hitchcock in 1976. In a 1996 magazine article, Geoffrey O'Brien cites other cases of 'permanent fascination' with Vertigo, and then casually reveals that he himself, starting at age 15, has seen it 'at least thirty times'."

Critics have interpreted Vertigo variously as "a tale of male aggression and visual control; as a map of female Oedipal trajectory; as a deconstruction of the male construction of femininity and of masculinity itself; as a stripping bare of the mechanisms of directorial, Hollywood studio and colonial oppression; and as a place where textual meanings play out in an infinite regress of self-reflexivity." Critic James F. Maxfield has suggested that Vertigo can be interpreted as a variation on Ambrose Bierce's 1890 short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", in which the main narrative of the film is actually imagined by Scottie as he dangles from a building at the end of the opening rooftop chase.

The screenplay of Vertigo is an adaptation of the 1954 French novel D'entre les morts (From Among the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock had attempted to buy the rights to the previous novel by the same authors, Celle qui n'était plus (She Who Was No More), but failed, and it was instead adapted by Henri-Georges Clouzot as Les Diaboliques. Although François Truffaut once suggested that D'entre les morts was specifically written for Hitchcock by Boileau and Narcejac, Narcejac subsequently denied that this was their intention. However, Hitchcock's interest in their work meant that Paramount Pictures commissioned a synopsis of D'entre les morts in 1954, before it had even been translated into English (it appeared in translation as The Living and the Dead in 1956).

In the book, Judy's involvement in Madeleine's death was not revealed until the denouement; at the scriptwriting stage, Hitchcock suggested revealing the secret two-thirds of the way through the film so that the audience would understand Judy's dilemma. After the first preview, Hitchcock was unsure whether or not to keep the "letter writing scene", though he subsequently decided to remove it. Herbert Coleman, Vertigo's associate producer and a frequent collaborator with Hitchcock, felt the removal was a mistake; however, Hitchcock said to "Release it just like that." James Stewart, acting as mediator, said to Coleman: "Herbie, you shouldn't get so upset with Hitch. The picture's not that important." Hitchcock's decision was supported by screenwriter Joan Harrison, another member of his circle, who felt that the film had been improved. Coleman reluctantly made the necessary edits. When Paramount head Barney Balaban received news of this, he ordered Hitchcock to "Put the picture back the way it was," ensuring that the scene remained in the final cut.

Three screenwriters were involved in the writing of Vertigo. Hitchcock originally hired playwright Maxwell Anderson to write a screenplay, but rejected his work, which was titled Darkling, I Listen (a quotation from John Keats's 1819 poem "Ode to a Nightingale"). According to Charles Barr in his monograph dedicated to Vertigo, "Anderson was the oldest (at 68) [of the three writers involved], the most celebrated for his stage work, and the least committed to cinema, though he had a joint script credit for Hitchcock's preceding film The Wrong Man. He worked on adapting the novel during Hitchcock's absence abroad, and submitted a treatment in September 1956."