Short answers, pulled from the story.
Vertigo is a 1958 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring James Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson, a retired San Francisco detective hired to follow a woman named Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). The film follows his deepening obsession with Madeleine and the elaborate murder scheme that exploits his fear of heights.
Vertigo is based on the 1954 French novel D'entre les morts (From Among the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. An English translation appeared in 1956 under the title The Living and the Dead. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor.
The Vertigo effect is a dolly zoom, an in-camera technique that moves the camera physically away from a subject while simultaneously zooming in, keeping the subject the same size while distorting the background's perspective. Vertigo (1958) was the first film to use the technique, which Hitchcock employed to visualize Scottie's acrophobia.
Vertigo topped the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll in 2012, displacing Citizen Kane, which had held first place for decades. In the 2022 edition of the poll, Vertigo placed second, behind Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
Vertigo was filmed primarily on location in San Francisco from September to December 1957, as well as at Mission San Juan Bautista, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive, and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. The bell tower at Mission San Juan Bautista did not exist at the time of filming and was created using scale models, matte paintings, and trick photography.
The score for Vertigo was composed by Bernard Herrmann, a regular collaborator of Hitchcock. It was conducted by Muir Mathieson and recorded in London and Vienna because of a musicians' strike in the United States. The score draws extensively on Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde.