Vertigo

In the 1992Sight and Soundpoll, critics and film-makers voted Vertigo the fourth greatest film of all time. Yet in it Hitchcock abandoned his trademark suspense, allowing the central mystery to be solved well before the end. What remained was a study in sexual obsession, as James Stewart's Scottie pursues Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak) to her death in a remote Californian mission. Novak is ice-cool but vulnerable, Stewart in the darkest role of his career genial on the surface but damaged within. Although seen as Hitchcock's most personal film, Charles Barr argues that, like Citizen Kane, Vertigo is a triumph not so much of individual authorship as of creative collaboration. Barr documents the crucial role of screenwriters Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor and, by a combination of textual and contextual analysis, explores the reasons why Vertigo has come to inspire such continuing fascination. Barr's introduction to this new edition looks at the film alongside works that have influenced, and been influenced by, Hitchcock. He discusses a hypothetical 'director's cut', where the central mystery remains hidden until the end, but posits that such a change may run contrary to the Hitchcock tradition of 'suspense over surprise'.

CHARLES BARR was formerly Professor of Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is Adjunct Professor at the John Huston Centre for Film and Digital Media, part of the National University of Ireland in Galway, and is active on the editorial boards of the online Movie: a Journal of Film Criticism and the US-based scholarly journal The Hitchcock Annual. His pioneering work on British cinema includes Ealing Studios (rev. edn, 1999) and English Hitchcock (1999), and, as editor, All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (1986). He was the researcher and co-writer of Stephen Frears' film Typically British: A Personal History of British Cinema (1995).

Foreword 

Acknowledgments

1 Obsession

2 Construction

3 Illusion

4 Revelation

Notes

Credits

Bibliography