Rated:

In one of the truly great movies of the 20th Century, Hitchcock directs James Stewart as a retired cop with a terror of heights who's hired by Tom Helmore to follow his suicidal wife, Kim Novak. Stewart falls in love with the enigmatic blonde but can't prevent her falling to her death.

Some months later he spots a woman (also played by Novak) who bears an uncanny resemblance to the dead woman, and is drawn into a complex web of deceit.

Novak gives her greatest performance, while the darker side of Stewart shatters his all-American Mr Nice Guy persona. Stewart's performance is all the more remarkable when you consider that he is on camera almost constantly. Supporting players are all excellent and don't get in the way of the telling of the piece, with Barbara Bel Geddes, in limited role of Stewart's down-to-earth girl friend, standout for providing early dashes of humour.

San Francisco location scenes - whether of Nob Hill, interior of Ernie's restaurant, Land's End, downtown, Muir Woods, Mission Dolores or San Juan Baustista - are absolutely authentic and breathtaking.

A hallucinatory movie, of dreamlike revelations in its glistening locations, it remains one of the most painful depictions of romantic fatalism in all of cinema.

Recommended Reading:

• Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock's San Francisco
  by J. Kraft, Aaron Leventhal

  This is a wonderful book! I wouldn't be without it. If you have ever wanted to retrace the master's steps around the Bay Area and want to learn more about the locations used in this film then this is the perfect companion. The authors' love of the director's work and the city itself is here on every page. Added bonus is that it has a foreword by Hitchcock's daughter.

• Available: amazon.co.uk

James Stewart's Vertigo:

In several ways, Vertigo summed up all the previous collaborations between Stewart and Hitchcock, then went on to add some more steps into darkness. Off-camera, the director's manic involvements with his lead actresses took some decidedly nasty turns, first with his badgering of a pregnant Vera Miles to play his heroine and then with his often crude handling of the eventually cast Kim Novak. As well, there was another conflict over writing credits. In front of the camera, Stewart went beyond Nietzschean theorists of acceptable murder, spying photographers, and manipulative physicians to play not so much a man obsessed as an obsession personified. The outcome was easily Hitchcock's most suggestive picture and Stewart's riskiest and most disciplined performance.

Vertigo was based on the French novel D'Entre les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.

Despite the success of Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much, Stewart took his time agreeing to Vertigo because of reservations about the screenplay. Only after Samuel Taylor had been called in to replace efforts by Maxwell Anderson and Alec Coppel did he say yes. For his part, Hitchcock approached the production in frustration that he hadn't gotten Vera Miles for it. During his immediately previous film, The Wrong Man, he had met strong resistance from the actress in his attempts to reshape her as another Grace Kelly; she had put him off further by using a break from the picture to marry Gordon Scott, then known for playing Tarzan. The disbelieving Hitchcock still didn't give up his pursuit of Miles until she told him she couldn't do Vertigo because she was pregnant. The director's widely quoted disdainful reply was that Miles "should have taken a jungle pill"

The director's psychodrama with Miles was hardly alien to the making of Vertigo, especially when the unwanted replacement Novak arrived for work announcing that she didn't want the clothes and make-up already prepared for Hitchcock's first choice. The closest Hitchcock came to complimenting the actress from that point on was in his assertion to a reporter that "the perfect woman of mystery is one who is blonde, subtle, and Nordic"—which gave Novak one out of the three. Even after the film had been released, and Novak had received significant praise from critics, the director refused to be gracious. He told one interviewer,

"The thing that fascinated me was the idea of Jimmy Stewart trying to turn the girl into someone she once had to play as part of a murder plot and is later trying not to be—and I'm not sure Kim Novak had the ability to put that across."

On that, Hitchcock was very much in the minority, and for reasons most clearly and concisely explained by writer Taylor:

"If we'd had a brilliant actress who really created two distinctively different people, it would not have been as good. She [Novak] seemed so naive in the part, and that was good. She was always believable. There was no 'art' about it, and that's why it worked so very well."

In addition to Novak's direct and almost iconic performance, Vertigo owed its success principally to a storytelling gamble by Hitchcock, Stewart's delineation of the haunted detective, and the musical score by Bernard Herrmann. The gamble was in the flashback, which effectively destroyed the plot mystery—sustained for almost two-thirds of the film—about what exactly was going on. But in exchange for that abrupt and somewhat perfunctory disclosure, Hitchcock succeeded in concentrating attention exclusively on the obsessive relationship between the Stewart and Novak characters, magnifying the depths of the detective's torment and, in the bargain, creating the same kind of sympathy for Judy's suddenly "helpless" villain that he had shown for Raymond Burr's wife-killer in Rear Window and Brenda de Banzie's child-kidnapper in The Man Who Knew Too Much. The choice also underlined how truly nonessential to the proceedings the director regarded all his secondary characters, including the murderer Elster, who presumably gets away with his homicide, and the girlfriend Midge, whose guarded but sincere quest for a more solid relationship with Scottie is depicted as ultimately trivial.

That Stewart was more than up to the challenge appeared to astonish him more than anybody. Even years later, he would assert that "trying to make sense out of that confused plot was hard" On another occasion, he admitted that his avenue to the character of Scottie was plain, unadulterated fear. He said of his detective s complexes:

"I myself had known a fear like that, and I'd known people paralyzed by fear. It's a very powerful thing to be engulfed almost by that kind of fear."

For the most part, Stewart exudes the fear almost politely, from fifty-year-old pores that he prefers not to notice are excreting. His long conversational scene with Novak in his apartment after he has ostensibly thwarted her suicide ebbs and flows with a simplicity that his character doesn't really possess, building fateful tensions. For the next hour of screen action, his Scottie accommodates what is bigger than he is—love, sorrow, mental breakdown, fixation—as though he is being perfectly correct (and, by the by, demonstrating to the photographer from Rear Window how disabling voyeurism can truly become). His only moment of real anger comes when Midge tries to be funny about painting herself as the mysterious Carlotta, and he finds that so unacceptable that he walks out of her loft unable even to start explaining how her humor is misplaced. The inevitable explosion comes in the final sequence, with Stewart the actor landing on one of the most powerfully delivered monologues of his career and Scottie the character disintegrating beneath its fury. Not even his director knew what to do with him afterward, so he just leaves both the actor and the character standing on the church ledge.

In a film that practically sanctifies disorientation, Hitchcock achieved his ends visually by regularly tracking back his camera at the same time that he was zooming in. Biographer Spoto called the trick "the visual equivalent for the admixture of desire and distance" that permeates the Stewart character. But even that photographic effect might have done little but draw attention to itself without the support of Hermann's music. From start to finish, the lush, sinuous score is music lost in itself, with rising panic trying to find some reasonable outlet, some culminating expression. It never quite makes it, its interwound themes leaving only the smallest suggestion of progress as the story proceeds but finally ending up as stranded as Scottie on the bell tower.

Despite good critical notices, Vertigo was nowhere near the commercial success that Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much had been. That didn't prevent Stewart from looking forward to yet another picture with Hitchcock, and specifically North by Northwest. What he didn't know was that the director had only discussed the project with him when it had looked unlikely that his first casting choice, Cary Grant, would be available to do it. For months thereafter, as he admitted later, Hitchcock dangled Stewart with a variety of excuses about the script not being ready, financing being a question mark, and other casting being up in the air.

"Then one day, he called and said he couldn't put Columbia off any longer, that he had to report with Novak for Bell, Book and Candle," the filmmaker recalled to one interviewer. "I was, of course, very relieved, and I simply said, 'Well, Jimmy, that's our loss. We'll have to look for somebody else.'"

At that point, Hitchcock went back to the newly available Grant and made a film centered around a protagonist that he would have liked to have been.