Vertigo Movie

Widely considered to be Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, Vertigo is a suspense thriller film starring his frequent collaborators Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak. This mid-career entry represented the most potent command of "Hitch"'s craft and reflected his dark, lifelong obsession with women and the fluidity of identity.

The film received mixed critical reviews upon its release in 1958 and was only nominated for technical achievements at that year's Academy Awards. Box office results were unimpressive for a Hitchcock film. Since that time, however, the film has been restored and reevaluated, and in 1989, ten years after its initial release, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

The film revolves around retired police officer John "Scottie" Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) as he falls in love with the woman he is hired to follow. The screenplay is an adaptation of the French novel Cold Sweat: From Among the Dead by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.

The film opens with John "Scottie" Ferguson (played by Stewart) chasing a suspect across the rooftops of San Francisco. He slips and nearly falls off of the roof, forced to hang on to only the gutter. As the Gutter strips away, his partner tries to help him u and falls off of the roof to his death several stories below.

Several weeks later, Scottie sits in his old college chum Midge's (Barbara Bel Geddes) drawing room and discusses the incident. He explains that the doctors told him he has acrophobia, which leads to vertigo, a condition of extreme dizziness. This has led him to leave his job at the the police force.

The next day, Scottie meets with an old friend from College, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), who wants him to perform one last piece of detective work: the shadowing of his wife (Kim Novak). Elster explains that his wife has been acting strangely and he believes she is possessed by the ghost of her ancestor, Carlotta Valdes.

Scotty reluctantly agrees and begins his operation the next morning, when he witnesses Mrs. Elster doing several strange things. She picks up a bouquet of flowers identical to that in a portrait of Carlotta Valdes and sits in front of the portrait mirroring it for hours. She goes to Carlotta's gravestone and sits in a hotel room, where she seems to disapear out of thin air.

He continues to follow her until she attempts to kill herself by jumping into the San Francisco bay. He rescues her and brings her back to his place, where they have an awkward conversation. He learns that Carlotta Valdes killed herself at Madeline (Mrs. Elster)'s age.