John Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), the protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), is a police detective who discovers at the worst possible time that he has acrophobia. He and another cop chase a criminal across rooftops of San Francisco, but Scottie slips and nearly falls to his death before grabbing onto a gutter. The other policeman attempts to help Scottie, but his once-latent fear of heights paralyzes him. He can't move when the cop offers his hand to pull him up and he is helpless when the man slips himself and falls to his death.Scottie's troubles are just beginning. A devious old college chum, the dapper Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), learns of Scottie's affliction from the newspapers and exploits it in a plot to murder his wife and make it look like an accident. But Scottie knows nothing of this. He falls in love with the woman (Kim Novak) he believes to be Madeleine Elster, Gavin's wife. After Madeleine seems to die in suicidal leap that his acrophobia prevents him from stopping, Scottie has a nervous breakdown.He recovers, only to find Madeleine's look-alike, Judy (also Kim Novak), with whom he begins a romance. He remakes Judy into a perfect duplicate of Madeleine--forcing her to wear the same clothes, makeup and hair. But he soon learns that Madeleine and Judy are the same person. The woman he knew as Madeleine was a fake; and the real Madeleine, whom he had never met, was a victim of murder, not suicide. The murderer was Gavin Elster; his accomplice was Judy.To exorcise his demons, Scottie brings Judy back to the church tower, the scene of the crime. Scottie had tried to follow Judy, not Madeleine, up those steps; but it was the real Madeleine who had fallen after Gavin had broken her neck and thrown her from the top of the tower. Scottie re-enacts the crime, but an accident sends Judy hurtling to her death, an ironic fate for a woman who had once posed as the luckless victim of the same fall. We see Scottie looking down at the broken Judy, spreading out his arms as if he were about to leap himself and join his dead lover.The movie ends at this point, and we never learn what happens to Scottie, the half-responsible witness to three deadly falls. A deleted scene, available as a bonus feature on the movie's DVD, shows us Scottie and his friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) sitting in her apartment, listening to the radio on which a newscaster is describing the fate of Gavin Elster. Hitchcock wanted this scene removed for a reason: it's better for us to wonder about Scottie's fate. We're free to consider this scene as irrelevant to this story as are the very different set of events in the original novel, D'entre les mort by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Show less «