The Cinematheque

Hitchcock’s dreamlike chef d’oeuvre, adapted from a 1954 crime novel by the French writing duo Boileau-Narcejac, is the current reigning ​“best film of all time”—at least according to prominent film journal Sight & Sound​’s most recent (2012) decennial poll of international critics! Scottie (James Stewart), a former San Francisco policeman suffering from vertigo, is sucked into a vortex of romantic obsession after he is hired to tail blonde, coolly beautiful Madeleine (Kim Novak), wife of an old pal. Many unhappy months later, Scottie meets a Madeleine look-alike, and obsessively, shamelessly attempts to make her over in Madeleine’s image. The director’s own unhappy obsessions with his cool-blonde leading ladies are well documented; this perverse, poetic, moodily muted psychological thriller, with its stunningly cynical view of male-female relations, is Hitchcock’s most nakedly honest film.