Amazon.com Essentials:
Although it wasn't a box-office success when originally
released in 1958, Vertigo has since taken its deserved place as
Alfred Hitchcock's greatest, most spellbinding, most deeply personal
achievement. In fact, it consistently ranks among the top 10 movies
ever made in the once-a-decade Sight & Sound international
critics poll, placing at number 4 in the most recent
survey. (Universal Pictures' spectacularly gorgeous 1996 restoration
and rerelease of this 1958 Paramount production was a tremendous
success with the public, too.) James Stewart plays a retired police
detective who is hired by an old friend to follow his wife (a superb
Kim Novak, in what becomes a double role), whom he suspects of being
possessed by the spirit of a dead madwoman. The detective and the
disturbed woman fall ("fall" is indeed the operative word) in love
and...well, to give away any more of the story would be criminal. Shot
around San Francisco (the Golden Gate Bridge and the Palace of the
Legion of Honor are significant locations) and elsewhere in Northern
California (the redwoods, Mission San Juan Batista) in rapturous
Technicolor, Vertigo is as lovely as it is haunting. --Jim
Emerson
