Vertigo (1958)

Directed by

Alfred Hitchcock

Genre

drama film, mystery film, romance film, thriller film, melodrama, psychological drama film

Country

United States

Runtime

2h 08m

Rated

PG

Rating

8.1 of 10 from 6,385 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A retired police detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a friend's wife who is acting strangely. He becomes obsessed with her as he tries to uncover the truth behind her behavior.

disorientingmelancholictenseslow-burnvisually lushunsettlinghypnoticdreamlike

What happens

Vertigo is a 1958 American psychological thriller film produced and directed 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. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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