After a rooftop chase in which a fellow police officer falls to his death, San Francisco detective John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) retires out of frayed nerves, fear of heights and crippling vertigo. But when an old friend approaches him about his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) and her increasingly bizarre behavior, Scottie agrees to tail her. And so begins the rare ascent into madness, as Scottie grows unhinged observing Madeleine as she appears to commit suicide then reappear as her own double, Judy. Who will get caught up in this web of manipulation and terror?

So if Rear Window is where mid-period Hitchcock really clicks, integrating his interest in the electrifying tension of horror, the cynical character study of film noir and experimental technique, Vertigo is his challenging follow-up album. It met with sour, slightly confused reviews, as critics and audiences expected more flash and shock than tragedy and psycho-sexual obsession. But it’s also considered his personally revealing film. It’s the story of a man trying to turn a woman into exactly his object of desire, without regard to the damage it does to the living person herself. Hitchcock was notoriously unkind to his actresses, frequently ditching them for new young (and blonde, always blonde) starlets. The plot of Vertigo is awful to Novak’s character, but then Hitch was sometimes awful to Novak. The film is an almost grotesque but visually kinetic and technically groundbreaking examination of what would today be called gaslighting. It reminds you why, before people described movies as Lynchian, they called them Hitchcockian. And even after 67 years, its ending will still follow you home.

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This screening is held in the Historic Duncan Auditorium. This space utilizes open seating for this event, seat selection is not required.