Half Moon Bay Odd Fellows invite you to watch “Vertigo” which is a 1958 American psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock with a haunting score by Bernard Herrmann.

The film stars James Stewart as former police detective John “Scottie” Ferguson, who has retired because an incident in the line of duty has caused him to develop acrophobia (an extreme fear of heights) and vertigo, a false sense of rotational movement. Scottie is hired by an acquaintance, Gavin Elster, as a private investigator to follow Gavin’s wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who is behaving strangely.

The film was shot on location in the city of San Francisco, as well as in Mission San Juan Bautista, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive, and Paramount Studios in Hollywood.

Since its release, Vertigo has been considered Hitchcock’s magnum opus, and one of the greatest films of all time. In 1989, it was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. It replaced Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film ever made in The Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2012 poll, and moved to second place in 2022.

It was the first film to use the dolly zoom, an in-camera effect that distorts perspective to create disorientation, to convey Scottie’s acrophobia. As a result of its use in this film, the effect is often referred to as “the Vertigo effect.”