Saturday, June 12, 2010

A Synopsis Of Vertigo Starring James Stewart

By Hugh Hewitt

Alfred Hitchcock is the legendary director of films such as Rear Window and Rebecca and his classic thriller Vertigo features main protagonists Kim Novak and James Stewart.

It was produced in 1958 and written by Samuel Taylor and Alec Coppel who adapted it from a novel by Narcejac.

The setting is San Francisco bay and features many classic landmarks around northern California including Coit Tower and the Golden Gate bridge. There are also scenes shot in Muir Woods and San Juan Bautista's legendary mission which has become a major tourist attraction.

The film's plot is filled with many surprises and moments that will keep you guessing and it is well worth seeing. As a result it has been classed as one of the top hundred movies of all time.

The main character detective John Ferguson aka Scottie develops vertigo after seeing a colleague plummet to his death. Unable to forget the image he retires from the police force, but is asked by an old acquaintance, Gavin Elster, to help with some private investigation work.

This is the catalyst for the driving force of the movie. Gavin asks Scottie to investigate his wife Madeleine whom he fears is losing her mind. She is obsessed with a dead woman named Carlotta Valdes and reenacts the same journey each day as a kind of pilgrimage to Carlotta.

Scottie continues to follow Madeleine and sees her jump into the bay at Fort Point. He prevents her from taking her own life, they form a rapport and she tells him that she is afraid that she is going insane. She has a recurring dream that plagues her.

The setting for this dream is San Juan Bautista and they decide that if she goes there then she may face this nightmare head on and fight it. However, when they get there, Madeleine races up the stairs as if she has seen a ghost. Scottie can not follow because of the vertigo. He can only watch as she plunges to her death from the top.

After her death, he finds it hard to recover. He searches the places they used to visit and one day he meets a Madeleine doppelganger, a young woman named Judy. He is so desperately in love and missing Madeleine that he asks Judy to dress like her. The similarity between them is uncanny.

A chilling moment is when he sees that Judy is wearing a necklace from the Carlotta Valdes portrait. Here he makes the connection that they are one and the same woman.

He revisits San Juan Bautista with Judy determined to get the truth. He finds out that they are the same woman. The whole thing was a plot to murder Gavin's first wife, the woman that actually fell from the bell tower.

As the couple argue, a nun appears and Judy is frightened by this and plummets down from the bell tower onto the tiles below. Scottie recovers from the vertigo.

This roller coaster of a film is an absolute must for Hitchcock fans and is a classic film which can be enjoyed by everyone.

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