Classic suspense

Hard to believe the film is this old.

clipped from chronicle.com At 50, Hitchcock's Timeless 'Vertigo' Still Offers a Dizzying Array of Gifts By DAVID STERRITT Fifty years ago, Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Vertigo had its American premiere — in San Francisco, naturally, since that's where Hitchcock had filmed it. In his eyes, the city's timeless architecture and undulating streets were the perfect backdrop for a story of murder, treachery, and love so obsessive that the main character's mind spins out of control. Today the film is widely regarded as a masterpiece of world cinema, but in 1958 its prospects didn't seem so bright. On the surface, Vertigo is a luminous, engrossing thriller. In its depths, it's a probing study of a man whose ardor for a dead woman becomes the consuming passion of his life. No wonder Samuel Taylor, one of the screenplay's co-authors, once suggested an alternate title that would never have passed the censors: "To Lay a Ghost."n