page_title: Alfred Hitchcock
section_title: From To Catch a Thief to Vertigo
hierarchical_section_title: Alfred Hitchcock / Biography / Peak years: 1954–1964 / From To Catch a Thief to Vertigo
caption_attribution_description: English: Screenshot from the original 1958 theatrical trailer for the film Vertigo Frame taken from MPEG2. Note: This version of the original 1958 theatrical trailer is of significantly lower quality than the 1996 restoration theatrical trailer.
context_page_description: Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE was an English film director, producer and screenwriter. He is one of the most influential and extensively studied filmmakers in the history of cinema. Known as the "Master of Suspense", he directed over 50 feature films in a career spanning six decades, becoming as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his films, and his hosting and producing of the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His films garnered a total of 46 Oscar nominations and 6 wins.
  Born in Leytonstone, London, Hitchcock entered the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer after training as a technical clerk and copy writer for a telegraph-cable company. He made his directorial debut with the British-German silent film The Pleasure Garden. His first successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, helped to shape the thriller genre, while his 1929 film, Blackmail, was the first British "talkie". Two of his 1930s thrillers, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, are ranked among the greatest British films of the 20th century.
context_section_description: In 1955 Hitchcock became a United States citizen. The same year, his third Grace Kelly film, To Catch a Thief, was released; it is set in the French Riviera, and pairs Kelly with Cary Grant. Grant plays retired thief John Robie, who becomes the prime suspect for a spate of robberies in the Riviera. A thrill-seeking American heiress played by Kelly surmises his true identity and tries to seduce him. "Despite the obvious age disparity between Grant and Kelly and a lightweight plot, the witty script (loaded with double entendres) and the good-natured acting proved a commercial success." It was Hitchcock's last film with Kelly. She married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, and ended her film career. Hitchcock then remade his own 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956. This time, the film starred James Stewart and Doris Day, who sang the theme song "Que Sera, Sera", which won the Oscar for Best Original Song and became a big hit for her. They play a couple whose son is kidnapped to prevent them from interfering with an assassination. As in the 1934 film, the climax takes place at the Royal Albert Hall, London.
  The Wrong Man (1957), Hitchcock's final film for Warner Bros., is a low-key black-and-white production based on a real-life case of mistaken identity reported in Life magazine in 1953. This was the only film of Hitchcock to star Henry Fonda, playing a Stork Club musician mistaken for a liquor store thief, who is arrested and tried for robbery while his wife (Vera Miles) emotionally collapses under the strain. Hitchcock told Truffaut that his lifelong fear of the police attracted him to the subject and was embedded in many scenes.
  Hitchcock's next film, Vertigo (1958) again starred James Stewart, this time with Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes. He had wanted Vera Miles to play the lead, but she was pregnant. He told Oriana Fallaci: "I was offering her a big part, the chance to become a beautiful sophisticated blonde, a real actress. We'd have spent a heap of dollars on it, and she has the bad taste to get pregnant. I hate pregnant women, because then they have children."
  In the film, James Stewart plays Scottie, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia, who develops an obsession with a woman he has been hired to shadow (Kim Novak). Scottie's obsession leads to tragedy, and this time Hitchcock does not opt for a happy ending. Some critics, including Donald Spoto and Roger Ebert, agree that Vertigo is the director's most personal and revealing film, dealing with the Pygmalion-like obsessions of a man who crafts a woman into the woman he desires. Vertigo explores more frankly and at greater length his interest in the relation between sex and death than any other work in his filmography.
  Vertigo contains a camera technique developed by Irmin Roberts, commonly referred to as a dolly zoom, that has been copied many times by filmmakers. The film premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, where Hitchcock won a Silver Seashell. Vertigo is considered a classic, but it attracted some negative reviews and poor box-office receipts at the time, and it was the last collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock. In the 2002 Sight & Sound polls, it ranked just behind Citizen Kane (1941); ten years later, in the same magazine, critics chose it as the best film ever made.
caption: Kim Novak by the Golden Gate Bridge in Vertigo (1958)[g]
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