Vertigo

San Francisco isn't just the setting of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo: It's the movie's muse. Along with composer Bernard Herrmann, who transforms convoluted psychology into resounding lyricism, and costar Kim Novak, whose pheromones and otherworldliness give body and soul to tortured romance, S.F. enables Hitchcock to conjure a netherworld of amorous yearning. Of course, James Stewart is wonderful in the role of a retired police detective drawn into an apparent case of demonic possession; but he's not the movie's muse, he's its Orpheus. In this movie S.F. isn't the City That Knows How, or Baghdad by the Bay, or the Best Place on Earth (thank god). It's a fantasia made into flesh and blood and bricks and mortar. Cutthroat street history and cushy mid-'50s chic, theology, and murder rub up against each other -- and then, improbably, merge in a seductive trance.

The movie breaks into two big chunks, as Stewart pursues Novak first when she appears in the guise of a socialite named Madeleine, and then when she reappears as a shopgirl, Judy. San Francisco seals the cracks. The story of the movie's current re-release also breaks into two big chunks: It's a tale of one city and two obsessions -- that of a preternaturally gifted image-maker, and that of a couple of zealous film restorers, Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz, who want to bring his vision back in glory.

Let's take Hitchcock's obsession first. The script's key writer, Samuel Taylor (who shares screen credit with Alec Coppel), is a San Francisco native; that may explain why locations from the Palace of Fine Arts and the Golden Gate Bridge to Novak's Nob Hill apartment and Stewart's flat near the base of Lombard Street (in sight of phallic Coit Tower) both inform and heighten the action. It was Hitchcock, though, who took the suggestiveness of the locations and ran with them creatively.

Long before Taylor finished the script, the director deputized his production designer, Henry Bumstead, to scout Bay Area shooting sites. One scholar has taken that as proof of Hitchcock's need to fold a "travelogue" into his movies as a selling point -- after all, in 1957, wide-screen runaway productions in colorful, far-flung locations were winning audiences back from television, and directors were looking for ways to pop their audiences' eyes.

But the precipitous urban hills with their unexpected perspectives and blind spots, the wind-swept trees of the Northern California coastline and the misty pockets of the sequoias, inspired Hitchcock to do what only a great director can do. He melded hyper-controlled studio artifice, as specific as a building plan, to spontaneous physical beauty. In Vertigo, Hitchcock's combination of natural and unnatural flirts with the supernatural.

This directorial wizard's brew was crucial for the far-out plot to work: Stewart plays John "Scottie" Ferguson, who discovers that he has acrophobia while hanging from a rooftop. After he quits the San Francisco police department, a college pal, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), now a shipping magnate, hires him for an odd job: following his wife, Madeleine (Novak) -- who acts as if she's seized by the spirit of a suicidal ancestor. Scottie's best friend is Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), his one-time fiancee, a commercial artist who's too much of a maternal force to be a lover. Madeleine has problems, but being maternal isn't one of them. The vertigo of the title refers to Scottie's acrophobia and to his vertiginous drop into amour.

When Novak and Stewart emote by a picturesque stretch of shore, Hitchcock goes from the pair's anguished parlay in front of a studio-built tree to a shot of them navigating an actual rocky hill, and then on to a process shot of the two stars avowing their love and tempestuously kissing just as a big wave tumbles and froths behind them. (A process shot is a visual sandwich whose ingredients usually include live actors and a canned background.) Hitchcock turns studio trickery into the highest of high styles -- the shifting grade of the shoreline actually tweaks the emotions. Even as a movie-mad Eastern kid watching Vertigo on Saturday Night at the Movies 35 years ago, I recognized that the crisp outlines around Hitchcock's human figures related to the whirling geometric forms in the opening credits -- and that the surface action had a subterranean pull that didn't connect with conventional thrillers. These images of a magic Golden State had more impact on me than the million pop-music knockoffs of "the California Sound."