Vertigo

That ambience fits the story of Madeleine and Scottie like a glove, or maybe a gauntlet. Scottie follows her as she pays homage to a grave in Mission Dolores and relaxes in a rundown hotel at Gough and Eddy; as she buys a bouquet at Podesta Baldocchi's and stares at a portrait of a striking senorita in the Palace of the Legion of Honor. He begins to feel that Madeleine could be the latter-day incarnation of a famous beauty from S.F.'s outlaw days, Carlotta Valdez, who held sway in a grand house in the Western Addition but ended up roaming the streets wild-eyed when her millionaire lover abandoned her and took their child. Hitchcock and thus Scottie picture Madeleine as an exquisite bloom rising from volatile soil; when she's staring at Carlotta's headstone, she's framed as part of the cemetery garden. Stewart is amazing at expressing the mingled chivalry and desire of Scottie's white-knight fantasies, just as Novak is at insinuating her unique blend of carnality and intangible longing behind Madeleine's masks.

The notion that Scottie can be Madeleine's savior is a tease, even if Hitchcock does manage to get a whoosh out of the audience when their lips mesh and the waves crack. She is married to one of Scottie's college pals, and Scottie can't save her. To be euphemistic for those who haven't seen the movie, Madeleine disappears with a jolt that afflicts Scottie even worse than his acrophobia, sending him into the hospital with a case of "melancholia" and "guilt complex" that leaves him catatonic. When he emerges, he haunts Madeleine's preferred spots, including the late swank restaurant Ernie's; the sole physical trace of her he finds is her Jaguar. It's only when he's wandering the streets that he stumbles on a Madeleine look-alike -- a salesgirl named Judy Barton, also played by Kim Novak, but this time as a wised-up, earthy brunette. The film takes its weirdest and most rewarding twist when Scottie begins reshaping Judy into Madeleine's image: turning a Kansas-bred working gal who toils behind the counter at Magnin's into Nob Hill royalty.

Academics treat Vertigo as a pure tale of obsession, overflowing with metaphors for spiritual ascent and descent, sex and rot. But first-time Vertigo-ers, upon seeing the opening sequence end with Scottie clinging to a rain-gutter, don't conclude, "Ah, this is a tale of pure obsession -- that's why Hitchcock isn't showing us how he gets down." They think, "There's something fishy about this opening; it's going to connect with the rest of the story." Of course, it does connect, but in terms of affect, not plot. Hitchcock is doing something riskier than announcing that he's making a mood piece: He's setting up thriller expectations and relentlessly skewering them. Viewers know that Madeleine looks posed and artificial in or out of her Carlotta mode, especially when she dives into San Francisco Bay -- she doesn't lose her high heels in the undertow. But when the secret behind her stiltedness comes out, it isn't via detective work or tricky revelations: It simply spills from the screen. Even the movie's most celebrated special effect, the simultaneous zoom-in and track-out that makes Scottie's view of reality plummet like an elevator cab with a slashed cable, both conjures a thrill and externalizes Stewart's psychic state. (Although the Jurassic Park ride occupies the space where Hitchcock's bungalow used to be on the Universal lot, you could never imagine a Vertigo ride taking up residence there.) All through the movie Hitchcock tries to have it both ways -- to create a thriller and an anti-thriller -- and most of the time, he succeeds.

Hitchcock's most daring gamble is to endanger the audience's identification with the hero. Yes, we understand that Scottie is the victim of awful circumstance (and, we find out, something more), but when he starts acting like a movie director and remakes Judy into Madeleine, forcing her to change everything from her wardrobe to her nails and hair, his obsession becomes scary. (What you really wish is that Scottie would finally get rid of Madeleine/Judy's grotesque painted eyebrows.) When Judy decides that she's going after Scottie despite everything, we root for their love to be consummated against our better judgment, though there's bad faith on either side. The reflex-feminist reading of the movie is that it's a paradigm of a man "objectifying" a woman. Yet the movie hardly celebrates Scottie's manipulative fervor. Feminist literary critic Louise DeSalvo writes in her rough-edged new memoir, Vertigo, that at age 15 she both identified with Scottie and saw through him; what she learned is that his type of ecstatic and consuming love is dangerous.

Hitchcock transforms his and Scottie's obsessiveness into a cunning perceptual game that repays reviewing. Part of the movie's seemingly inexhaustible wealth of detail comes from the coiled action in Taylor's script; part of it comes, impure and not-so-simple, from the director's vision. Taylor built observations of a woman's form and get-up into the plot -- most supporting characters rate less attention than Madeleine's hair, which she wears in an upward swirl like her doomed ancestor in the "Portrait of Carlotta" hanging in the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Scottie thinks the image of classy Madeleine with her hair down after she jumps in San Francisco Bay is sexy. So it's ironic as well as sick that when the declasse Judy finally looks like Madeleine would with her hair down, Scottie won't accept her as his woman until she pins it up. Still, the movie's fabled hypnotic power derives from Hitchcock's ability to sharpen our vision against his, starting with the opening credits that feature a woman with a motionless face and eyes scanning the corners of the frame. Forget the zoom-in, track-out: I can't think of another movie, by Hitchcock or anyone else, that uses odd-angled close-ups to such penetrating effect. Of course, it's striking for Hitchcock to freeze Madeleine in profile when Scottie first sees her in Ernie's. But the shot that makes the sequence sting is the downward-pointing close-up on the back of Stewart's head -- the composition that conveys Scottie reacting to her presence with the hairs on his neck. It's the movie's visual exploration of sexual nuance that keeps you from wriggling at its sleepwalking pace or balking at its inconsistencies as melodrama. (Hitchcock himself felt qualms about the credibility of the story, which turns on Scottie's vertigo cropping up at a critical moment.)