Before turning their attention to Rear Window, which is now being re-released in a beautifully restored version, the team of Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz had performed miracles by assembling an almost perfect version of Alfred Hitchcock’s other undisputed masterpiece of the 1950s. Painstakingly treating the original camera negatives for Vertigo frame by frame, the restorers managed to recreate the colours and image quality that Hitchcock achieved with his cinematographer Robert Burks. Using modern technology, the sound was enhanced to a quality that even surpassed the original, so that Bernard Herrmann’s great score was more effective than ever.

One of the director’s supreme achievements, Vertigo is a haunting exploration of romantic obsession in which the solution to a murder mystery is disclosed halfway through the drama so that our attention is concentrated on the increasingly dream-like world occupied by the chief protagonist. James Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a retired San Francisco cop who suffers from a fear of heights. He is hired by an old school friend to watch the man’s unstable wife, Madeline (Kim Novak). Scottie falls madly in love with this vision of femininity and is devastated when his vertigo prevents him from saving her when she makes
a suicidal jump from a church bell tower. Later, when he meets a woman who looks like Madeline, the haunted Scottie obsessively begins to make her over in the image of his beloved.

To put it bluntly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman who’s dead; he’s indulging in a form of necrophilia, Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut in a famous interview. Yet the film itself is anything but blunt as it leads the audience into a dizzying vortex of infinite complexity. It’s a film that rewards countless viewings, and the restoration work has ensured that it can continue to be seen in all its glory for decades to come.

U.S.A., 1958.
Restored version, 1996.
Colour.
VistaVision.
DTS digital sound.
128 min.