Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) is a clammy, psychoanalyst's dream of a movie. The scene in which James Stewart's character refashions Kim Novak into the exact likeness of the dead woman with whom he is obsessed erotically is not easily forgotten, and the then-innovative camera effect evoking Stewart's character's fear of heights is now an established device in cinema's bag of tricks. Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo manages to be both dreamy and menacing, with its use of shivery strings and circling motif. As Martin Scorsese observed in a 2004 edition of Sight & Sound magazine:
"Hitchcock's film is about obsession, which means that it's about circling back to the same moment, again and again ... And the music is also built around spirals and circles, fulfilment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for — he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession."
Prelude/The Rooftop
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