A policeman with dizzy spells thinks he is tracking a woman possessed by a suicidal dead spirit and he gets more than he bargained for.

Rating: 10/10 (4 January 2017)

Let's hearken back to a time when you couldn't have seen this movie unless you had seen it on its first run. Can you even imagine such a thing? Movies have reputations and legends spring up around them. In 1966, this movie was not one of those.
I first saw it about a decade after its release. I saw it in the auditorium of my all-girls Catholic high school with 400 screaming girls who, like me, were surprised and overwhelmed by what we saw.
The suspense and shock was increased greatly for me and all my friends because of the difference between what we expected to see and what we got to experience.
This was a very conservative Catholic school and seeing a movie was a rare treat. The movie we had been subjected to the year before was a real stinker with a moral (Your parents are doing their best so you should obey them in everything even if they are wrongheaded and negligent.)
So how did it happen that the nuns this year allowed us to see a tense wild tale of obsession and unpunished murder? The only explanation is that somebody goofed.
The Sisters of the Holy Name who ran our school had roots in the Bay Area. Some of them were homesick for Marin and San Francisco. So the way Vertigo was selected as our annual movie, I imagine, was this. One of them read a synopsis and ignoring the parts about sexual obsession and wife killing only noticed that there were scenes shot in Old San Francisco and San Juan Baptista. Add in a scenic drive through Monterey and it was practically a travelogue with the Presidio and Coit Tower.
My friend Patti and I were so engrossed in this viewing of Vertigo that we never forgot it and can instantly crack each other up by bringing it up. It was wonderful. We had come in late after lunch because we spent the end of the lunch hour dumpster diving for Patti's retainer which she had carefully wrapped in her napkin and thrown away for the third time that year. We had to sit on folding chairs in the back so we could clutch each other (not that way) and pinch each other to make sure this was really happening. This means that I wasn't paying attention to whether the nuns were in attendance. Something tells me that they were there because they didn't want to miss out. I hope they were there and I hope that they were as gratified as we were. I doubt it but I hope they were. And I hope that the homesick goofball who recommended it didn't get into too much trouble. The plot is kind of hard to understand on the first viewing so I doubt that any of them realized what a treasure they had dumped in our laps.