Vertigo is a 1958 American psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. The story was based on the 1954 novel D'entre les morts (From Among the Dead) by Boileau-Narcejac. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor. The film stars James Stewart as former police detective John "Scottie" Ferguson, who has retired because an incident in the line of duty has caused him to develop acrophobia (an extreme fear of heights) accompanied by vertigo, a false sense of rotational movement. Scottie is hired by an acquaintance, Gavin Elster, as a private investigator to follow Gavin's wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who is behaving strangely.
The film was shot on location in the city of San Francisco, California, as well as in Mission San Juan Bautista, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive, and Paramount Studios in Hollywood. The film stock of the camera negative was Eastman 25 ASA tungsten-balanced 5248 with processing and prints by Technicolor.[5][6] It was the first film to use the dolly zoom, an in-camera effect that distorts perspective to create disorientation, to convey Scottie's acrophobia; the effect is often referred to as "the Vertigo effect." In 1996, the film underwent a major restoration to create a new 70 mm print and DTS soundtrack.
Vertigo received tepid reviews on release but has come to be considered Hitchcock's magnum opus and one of the greatest films of all time.[7] In 1989, it was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[8][9] The film appears repeatedly in polls of the best films by the American Film Institute,[10] including a 2007 ranking as the ninth-greatest American movie ever. Attracting significant scholarly attention, it replaced Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film ever made in The Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2012 poll,[11] and came in 2nd in 2022.
