Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic

Like the protagonist of Hitchcock’s flawed yet indelible masterpiece, Auiler is A Man Obsessed. His mission: to unravel the sinuous helix—a French novel, botched early screenplays, a disgruntled little knot of blonds—that swirled beneath the director’s highly buffed Paramount surfaces. And he does an admirable job, especially considering that this is a rabbit hole down which so many (Donald Spoto, François Truffaut, and countless academics) have tumbled before. The storyboards he found are eerie; so, too, is how narrowly the film escaped being called, urp, Face in the Shadow.