Gorgeous Portrait Photos of Kim Novak During the Filming of ‘Vertigo’ (1958)

Vertigo is a 1958 American film noir psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. The story was based on the 1954 novel D’entre les morts (From Among the Dead) by Boileau-Narcejac. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor.

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

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

Vertigo received mixed reviews upon initial release, but is now often cited as a classic Hitchcock film and one of the defining works of his career. Attracting significant scholarly criticism, it replaced Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film ever made in the 2012 British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound critics’ poll. The film is often considered one of the greatest films ever made. It has appeared repeatedly in polls of the best films by the American Film Institute, including a 2007 ranking as the ninth-greatest American movie of all time. In 1996, the film underwent a major restoration to create a new 70 mm print and DTS soundtrack.

In 1989, Vertigo 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”.

Take a look at these vintage photos to see gorgeous portraits of Kim Novak during the filming of Vertigo in 1958.