Hitchcock’s arguable finest and most perverse thriller. See it in a theater if you get the chance. Seriously. I insist. I’ll be very upset if I find out you missed it. This film’s grand VistaVision photography, booming Bernard Herrmann score and harrowing emotions fill up a big, dark room mightily. Every shot brings heft and presence. Even the playful scenes in Barbara Bel Geddes’s bohemian apartment/art studio are packed with intriguing imagery. Then there are the dangerous reds of Ernie’s fancy restaurant. The dizzyingly steep streets of San Francisco. That day-glo dream sequence. Some heavy neon. The proto-psychedelic opening titles by Saul Bass. It’s beyond noir, crossing over into a kind of opera of pain and mental breakdown.
The story starts with a police detective’s debilitating fear of heights and then finds its way from there to total madness. How does a level-headed, ultra-rational guy made of solid granite turn into a crazy-eyed loon? According to Alfred Hitchcock, all it takes is some loneliness, a dab of guilt, a dash of inadequacy, a beautiful woman who needs his help and love gone so wrong that there’s not even a song about it. Next thing you know, he’s coming apart in a church bell tower.
James Stewart as the lead is just about the best casting decision of the century. Nobody starts out so likable and then breaks into a thousand suffering pieces like him. Frank Capra understood Stewart’s genius. So did Anthony Mann. Hitchcock got it, too. He pushes it far into the red here. Stewart goes to skin-crawling places as a man caught up in a web of betrayal, death, lies and what is, underneath, essentially one of cinema’s strangest love stories.