Like many of Hitchcock’s films, 1958’s Vertigo has elements of a thriller.  But what the director is really interested in is the psychology of its troubled stars.  James Stewart has an uncharacteristically dark role as a detective hired by an old college chum to follow said chum’s wife around.  She, Kim Novak, is prone to wandering off in a trance, and seems to believe that she may be the reincarnation of her grandmother.  Hubby is concerned about this, so wants Stewart to provide the sort of information that will help her get suitable psychiatric treatment.

So far, straightforward enough.  But why does the husband knowingly hire Stewart, who’s been retired from the police force owing to his vertigo?  Especially since the action takes place in San Francisco, which is made out of steep surfaces: Stewart’s going to come a cropper sooner or later.  And that’s precisely what happens, when Novak falls from a belltower and he’s unable to come to her aid.  Oops.

By this time, Stewart is gaga over Novak and understandably upset by her death.  But that’s just the start of the story…

Novak’s wealthy husband set the whole situation up using a lookalike for his wife, also played by Novak, to plant the idea that she was already suicidal as well as doolally (technical term).  And Stewart comes across the lookalike and decides she’s going to replace the dead woman in his affections.

As you might imagine, there’s a good dose of old school psychoanalytical guff going on around all this.  Stewart’s attraction to Novak #1 is based in part on her flimsy attachment to reality: she is a flighty thing obsessed by her resemblance to an ancestor in a painting, and hardly seems to be a creature of this earth at all, needing a man’s shoulders and lips to ground her.  Novak #2 is very much grounded, complicit as she is in duping Stewart, and surprised to find that he’s obessesed with making her into Novak #1 after the latter’s death.

It’s this kind of business, full of projection in other words, that makes the film tick.  And it’s very good on the mechanisms of attraction, getting into the headspace where love is all around: Novak is first encountered in pulsating reds after an opening that mainly features drab washed out tones.  No wonder she makes such an impact on Stewart, and all seems well enough at first.  But his obsessiveness in turning Novak #2 into Novak #1 is majorly creepy, as he sits in on her dress fittings, commands her to get her hair done just so, and otherwise turns her into what Cliff Richard called in his similarly distressing fashion a living doll.

As a look at Hitchcock’s own obsessions with women it’s a fine piece of work, brave and honest about the way men and women can be with each other when at least one party is not as stable as they could be.  It can’t help but bring up the notion of the man or woman who has a particular ‘type’ and seems to go for them time and again, and which we’ll have seen friends do if we’re not guilty of it ourselves.  How much of this is in the novel that Vertigo began life as, D’Entre Les Morts by Perre Bouleau and Thomas Narcijac, and how much Hitchcock goaded out of adaptors Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, I couldn’t tell you.

Personally though, I’d have liked a few more thriller beats, and the genius filmmaking that Hitchcock brings to the genre.  Only, on this occasion he was wanting to do something more grown-up (in his eyes at least), which accounts for Vertigo being overlooked on its initial release, and it taking a while to unveil its pleasures to later audiences, who’ve gone on to feature it in cinema Top Ten lists pretty regularly.  For me, no way does it rate that highly, but it’s without doubt a fascinating film that will leave your head swimming with questions afterwards.