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Widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time and the magnum opus of controversial director Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo is a 1958 American psychological thriller that stars James Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson, a former detective who resigns after witnessing a fellow police officer fall to his death
. Now suffering from an extreme fear of heights, Scottie finds work as a private detective, agreeing to tail the wife of a former acquaintance in order to discover why she has been behaving erratically. Blending aspects of thriller and mystery fiction with a surreal, often dream-like style, the movie explores the deceptive nature of appearances and the difficulty of ascertaining truth. Notably, Vertigo was the first film to use a dolly zoom, a camera effect that plays with perspective to disorient the viewer.