What is there left to say about the film that was recently voted the greatest movie ever made in Sight and Sound magazine’s prestigious decennial poll? A film student’s dream project, Hitchcock’s haunting study of love and loss juggles with profound ideas about recapturing and escaping the past, the nature of identity, history being doomed to repeat itself, and the destruction that follows in the wake of obsession.

Hitch lulls the audience in to a false sense of the familiar with his opening shot, as we follow James Stewart’s police detective give chase across the rooftops of San Francisco, setting a pace the rest of the film deliberately eschews. After that it’s a slow but steady descent in to murky waters as Scottie (Stewart) is hired by an old friend to see what his wife (Kim Novak) gets up to all day, having apparently become possessed by one of her ancestors. A disbelieving Scottie does so and ends up falling in love with her. Then tragedy strikes and Scottie is bereft, until he happens across a girl who looks strikingly similar.

In some ways [Scottie]’s more terrifying than Norman Bates, because we know he was a good guy at heart before being driven by despair to acts of callousness…

Scottie is one of the most memorable of all Hitchcock’s lead characters, with Stewart slowly evolving through the course of the film from his familiar nice-guy to that of a man so desperate to replace his lost love he’s willing to effectively eradicate the girl he latches on to as a fix. In some ways he’s more terrifying than Norman Bates, because we know he was a good guy at heart before being driven by despair to acts of callousness, unlike Norman who is a killer hiding behind a veneer of charm. It’s not difficult to see why audiences may have walked away disappointed from a film that, instead of offering a happy ending, gave them yet another circle of fated doom.

But as we see Stewart trying to relive the past, just as Novak appeared to be doing, so too are we the audience watching the same story being retold, not just within the film itself but also in the act of revisiting it; hoping to tease out a greater understanding of its complexities. Such a thought would surely tickle the Master of Suspense.

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