Vertigo (1958): The Flop That Became the Greatest Film Ever Made

For sixty years, one movie topped the Sight and Sound critics' poll, the closest thing film has to an official "greatest of all time" list: Citizen Kane. Then, in 2012, it was knocked off by a Hitchcock picture that had been a commercial disappointment on release, picked up mixed reviews, and lost Hitchcock fans who expected another breezy thriller.

That film was Vertigo. If you put it on expecting a twisty mystery, it may seem slow and odd at first. Give it time. It's one of the strangest, saddest, and most personal films a major Hollywood director ever made, and it works on you in ways you won't notice until days later.

James Stewart plays John "Scottie" Ferguson, a San Francisco detective who quits the force after a rooftop chase leaves him with a crippling fear of heights. An old college friend, Gavin Elster, hires him to follow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who seems to be possessed by a woman who died a century ago. Scottie follows her through the city, to a flower shop, a mission graveyard, an art museum, and the edge of the Bay, and falls hopelessly in love with her.

Why It's a Masterpiece

Thomas Leitch, writing the Library of Congress essay on the film, explains that Vertigo is about possession, layered several times over. The first two-thirds, he argues, work as an analogy for both falling in love and watching a movie: in each case we surrender to a figure built expressly to win our devotion. The title becomes the central metaphor, a fear of falling mixed with a secret wish to fall.

Then the film turns that idea on its head. Ebert called it Hitchcock's most confessional film, a movie "about how Hitchcock used, feared and tried to control women." In the last third, Scottie stops being a sympathetic victim and becomes a controller himself. He tries to remake another woman into the one he lost, down to her clothes and her hair.

The film's climb is famous. It wasn't in the Sight and Sound top ten in 1962 or 1972. It entered in 1982, two years after Hitchcock died, at No. 7, rose to fourth in 1992, second in 2002, and first in 2012. (In 2022 it came second, behind Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman.) The magazine's editor, Nick James, called it "the ultimate critics' film," a dreamlike story about people rebuilding themselves and each other to fit an ideal. One reason for the slow burn: Vertigo was one of five Hitchcock-owned films pulled from circulation in 1973. When it came back in 1983, a new generation found it.

Behind the Scenes

Hitchcock had wanted to adapt an earlier novel by the French writing duo Boileau-Narcejac, but lost the rights. That book became Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques. He got their next one, D'entre les morts (From Among the Dead), and moved the story from France to San Francisco. The screenplay went through drafts by Maxwell Anderson and Alec Coppel before Samuel Taylor, chosen partly because he knew San Francisco, finished it. Taylor invented Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), Scottie's sharp, kind ex-fiancée.

The lead role was meant for Vera Miles, who even modeled for an early version of the portrait of Carlotta Valdes. Production was delayed, Miles became pregnant, and Hitchcock would not wait. He cast Kim Novak, then, as Leitch notes, the top female box-office star in America.

Hitchcock made one big change to the book. In the novel, the truth about Madeleine isn't revealed until the very end. Hitchcock decided to reveal it about two-thirds of the way through, so the audience would understand what the woman at the center was going through. It was a risky choice. Many viewers in 1958 were not happy that the mystery was solved so early. But that choice is what turns a whodunit into a tragedy.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

The bell tower is mostly fake. Mission San Juan Bautista is a real place, but its steeple had been demolished years earlier. Hitchcock added a much taller bell tower with scale models, matte paintings, and trick photography at Paramount.

Watch for Hitchcock. His usual cameo comes early. He walks past Elster's shipyard carrying a trumpet case.

Madeleine's gray suit is meant to feel wrong. Hitchcock and costume designer Edith Head chose gray for Madeleine because it is not a typical color for a blonde. They wanted it to be subtly jarring. When she turns up at Scottie's apartment in a white coat, she looks warmer and more natural.

The green glow is borrowed from a real sign. Judy lives in the "Empire Hotel" at 940 Sutter Street. Her room was built on a set, but the green neon outside the window was modeled on the actual hotel's sign.

San Francisco only goes downhill. Ebert noticed that when Scottie drives through the city, he heads down the hills and never up. Even the street plan is falling.

Some locations are cheats. The redwood grove labeled Muir Woods was shot at Big Basin Redwoods State Park. The grave of Carlotta Valdes was a prop left at Mission Dolores, which later removed it as disrespectful to the dead.

Listen for Wagner. Bernard Herrmann's score, recorded in London and Vienna during a U.S. musicians' strike, keeps nudging toward Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the great opera of doomed, deathly love. Martin Scorsese has said the music is "built around spirals and circles," like the obsession at the heart of the film.

The Director's Genius Moment

Spoiler warning: this section and the next discuss the film's major twist.

There are two famous candidates. The first is the "Vertigo effect." To show Scottie looking down the tower stairwell, Hitchcock zoomed the lens in while physically pulling the camera back. The stairs seem to stretch and plunge at the same time. Shooting it on a full-size set proved too hard, so the crew built a model of the shaft and filmed it lying on its side. Filmmakers have borrowed the trick ever since.

But Ebert pointed to a different moment as "the greatest single shot in all of Hitchcock." Scottie has found Judy, a shopgirl who looks like Madeleine, and has pushed her to dye her hair and wear the same gray suit. She goes into the bathroom of her hotel room to finish the transformation, then walks out toward him through a haze of green light from the neon sign. It looks like a ghost stepping out of fog. As they kiss, the camera circles them. Ebert noticed that even the background shifts, from the real hotel room to Scottie's memories, while Herrmann's music swells. We know by now that Judy is Madeleine, that she was hired to play her in a murder plot, and that she has agreed to the makeover because she loves him. Two people are embracing, and both are in love with someone who doesn't exist.

Another Way to See It

Ebert believed the film is just as much Judy's story as Scottie's, and that she is one of the most sympathetic women in all of Hitchcock. Novak was criticized at the time for seeming stiff. Ebert's answer was to imagine how you would move and speak if you were in unbearable pain, then look at Judy again.

Leitch puts it even more sharply. Most viewers, he says, remember Vertigo as a love story between Scottie and Madeleine, "a woman he never actually meets." The real woman, Judy, gets pushed to the margins, by Scottie, by Elster, and by us. Seen this way, the movie isn't romantic at all. It's a warning about loving an image more than a person, and about the men (including, perhaps, a certain director) who try to sculpt women into fantasies.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, but watch it right. Turn off your phone, watch it in the evening, and let the long, wordless stretches of Scottie following Madeleine through the city work on you. Leitch admits it's a film "you love if you love films like that." Not everyone does. Orson Welles reportedly disliked it. But even its skeptics tend to remember it. If you know only the twist, see it anyway. Vertigo is less about the secret than about what Scottie does once he learns it.