Vertigo Official Movie Poster
Designed by Saul Bass, this is the classic movie poster
to Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece: Vertigo.
Starring James Stewart & Kim Novak.
It measures 27 x 40 inches.
This One-sheet poster is the same size of the original movie poster. It is orange with a cream-colored boarder with the credits at the bottom. (It is not the red or the light orange versions which appear almost yellow.)
Vertigo is a 1958 psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock based on the 1954 novel D'entreles morts by Boileau-Narcejac. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor.
The film stars James Stewart as former police detective John “Scottie” Ferguson, who has been forced into early retirement due to disabilities (vertigo and clinical depression) incurred in the line of duty. Scottie is hired as a private investigator to follow a woman, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) who is behaving peculiarly.
The film was shot on location in San Francisco, California, and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. It popularized the dolly zoom, an in-camera effect that distorts perspective to create disorientation, to convey Scottie's acrophobia. As a result of its use here, the effect is often referred to as “the Vertigo effect".
The film received mixed reviews upon initial release, but has garnered acclaim since and is now often cited as a classic Hitchcock film and one of the defining works of his career.
Graphic designer Saul Bass extracted Hitchcock's spiral motif as an image that appears during the film to convey, what the documentary Obsessed with Vertigo labels, "Vertigo's psychological vortex”. The images featured in the title sequence and on the poster.