Vertigo (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Vertigo, the 1958 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, opens with a rooftop chase gone fatally wrong. A San Francisco detective named John Ferguson slips and dangles from a gutter while a colleague falls to his death trying to save him. That single moment of failure plants a fear of heights so severe that it will shape every choice Ferguson makes for the rest of the film. What follows is not simply a murder mystery. It is a story about a man rebuilt from the outside in by someone else's obsession, and then broken apart by his own. How did a film that baffled critics on release eventually displace Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made? And what does a mechanical anti-aircraft computer from World War II have to do with one of cinema's most iconic visual effects?

• 2. A Novel Made for Hitchcock

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  Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac wrote the 1954 French novel D'entre les morts, which translates as From Among the Dead. Hitchcock had previously tried to buy the rights to the same duo's earlier novel Celle qui n'était plus, only to lose it to Henri-Georges Clouzot, who turned it into Les Diaboliques. Paramount Pictures responded to Hitchcock's interest by commissioning a synopsis of D'entre les morts in 1954, before the book had even been translated into English; an English translation did not appear until 1956, under the title The Living and the Dead. François Truffaut once suggested the novel had been written specifically for Hitchcock, but Narcejac later denied this. The production went through three screenwriters before reaching its final form. Maxwell Anderson, then 68 years old, submitted a treatment in September 1956 under the title Darkling, I Listen, drawn from John Keats's 1819 poem "Ode to a Nightingale," but Hitchcock rejected it. Alec Coppel tried next, with similarly unsatisfying results. Samuel A. Taylor, recommended because of his deep knowledge of San Francisco, completed the final script. Taylor invented the character of Midge. He also attempted to claim sole credit, but Coppel disputed this before the Screen Writers Guild, which ruled that both men deserved credit, while Anderson did not.

• 3. San Francisco as a Character

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  Principal photography began on location in San Francisco in September 1957 under the working title From Among the Dead, running through December of that year. The production spent 16 days shooting on location before moving to Paramount's studios in Hollywood for two months. Hitchcock chose the city's steeply inclined streets deliberately; the main characters' cars are almost always shown heading downhill, reinforcing the film's persistent pull toward the ground. The mission used for Madeleine's apparent fall, Mission San Juan Bautista, posed an unexpected problem. A bell tower that had once stood there had been demolished after a fire, and Hitchcock had reportedly first visited the mission when the tower was still standing. He was displeased to find it gone when filming began. The production solved this by constructing a much larger replacement tower using scale models, matte paintings, and trick photography at Paramount Studios. The original tower had been considerably smaller than the one seen in the finished film. Even Muir Woods National Monument was a substitution: the redwood sequences were actually filmed at Big Basin Redwoods State Park, though a cutaway of a redwood cross-section showing its age was copied from an actual specimen still on view at Muir Woods.

• 4. The Dolly Zoom and the Title Sequence

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  Vertigo was the first film to use what became known as the dolly zoom, an in-camera technique that moves the camera physically away from its subject while simultaneously zooming in, keeping the subject's size constant while the background's perspective stretches or compresses. Hitchcock used the effect to look down a tower shaft and convey Scottie's disorientation; after difficulties filming the shot on a full-sized set, a scale model of the shaft was constructed and the shot was filmed horizontally. The technique has been called "the Vertigo effect" ever since. The rotating spiral patterns in the title sequence came from a different and unexpected source. Animator John Whitney created them using a Kerrison Predictor, a mechanical computer originally designed during World War II to aim anti-aircraft cannons at moving targets. Whitney adapted it to generate animated Lissajous curves. Graphic designer Saul Bass extended the spiral motif to the film's poster and used an unconventional framing of actress Audrey Lowell's facial features in the opening titles, an approach indebted to Bauhaus photography. Kim Novak wanted to appear in the opening sequence herself, but Harry Cohn insisted Hitchcock pay full rate for a single day's shooting, and another face was chosen instead.

• 5. Bernard Herrmann's Score

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  Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock's regular composing collaborator, wrote the film's score. A musicians' strike in the United States made recording in America impossible, so the score was conducted by Muir Mathieson and recorded in London and Vienna. Herrmann wove extensive references to Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde through the music. Critic Alex Ross described this as deliberate and subtle, writing that Herrmann was "jogging the memory of those who know 'Tristan' and the subconscious of those who don't," and that the score functioned not as an illustration of the film but as a metaphor for it. Director Martin Scorsese, writing in a 2004 special issue of Sight and Sound magazine, observed that the film is built around the repetition central to obsession, and that Herrmann's music mirrors this structure: "built around spirals and circles, fulfillment and despair." The score's preoccupation with circular return made it an unusually precise match for the film's psychological architecture.

• 6. Mixed Reception, Long Shadow

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  Vertigo premiered in San Francisco on the 9th of May 1958, at the Stage Door Theater. Variety acknowledged Hitchcock's mastery but found the film too slow. Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times admired the scenery while complaining the plot took too long to unfold. The New Yorker's John McCarten dismissed it as farfetched nonsense. Even Orson Welles disliked it, telling Henry Jaglom it was worse than Rear Window, which he had also disliked. Hitchcock himself told François Truffaut it was one of his favourite films, though he blamed its limited commercial performance on the 49-year-old James Stewart looking too old opposite the 24-year-old Kim Novak. The film did break even, earning $3.2 million in North American distributor rentals against a production cost of $2,479,000, but it earned significantly less than other Hitchcock films. French critics were kinder from the start: Éric Rohmer wrote in Cahiers du Cinéma that Americans had been repelled while French critics gave it a warm welcome. A young Martin Scorsese saw the film during its original theatrical run and later recalled that he and his friends responded to it strongly without being able to say why. Hitchcock withdrew Vertigo from distribution in 1973, along with four other films he owned, keeping it out of circulation for a decade. When it returned to theaters in October 1983, it was met with laudatory reviews.

• 7. Ascent to the Top

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  Every ten years since 1952, Sight and Sound magazine has polled the world's leading film critics to rank the greatest films ever made. Vertigo did not appear in the top ten in 1962 or 1972. It entered the list in seventh place in 1982, after Hitchcock's death. By 1992 it had climbed to fourth. By 2002 it had reached second. In 2012 it displaced Citizen Kane to take first place in both the critics' poll and the overall ranking; in the 2022 edition it placed second, behind Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Sight and Sound's editor Nick James described Vertigo in 2012 as "the ultimate critics' film," calling it "a dream-like film about people who are not sure who they are but who are busy reconstructing themselves and each other to fit a kind of cinema ideal of the ideal soul-mate." The American Film Institute's 2007 list placed the film ninth among all American films, a rise of 52 positions from its ranking of 61st in the AFI's original 1998 list. In 1989, the United States Library of Congress selected Vertigo as one of the first 25 films ever placed in the National Film Registry, recognizing it as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. A potential remake was reported in March 2023, with Paramount Pictures acquiring the rights, Steven Knight set to write the script, and Robert Downey Jr. attached to star.