When I first saw Vertigo, it was after knowing Jimmy Stewart almost completely as a comedic actor, but always as a moral, upstanding figure. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It’s a Wonderful Life. Harvey. The Philadelphia Story. You Can’t Take it With You.
The only thing those performances have in common with this one is that James Stewart never looks like he quite understands what kissing looks like.
I know that sounds like a joke, but I’m very serious. He looks like a cross between a nervous lifeguard attempting CPR and Mr. Peepers. But it kind of works in this role?
It’s this strange scenario where the protagonist doesn’t seem to know what kind of story he’s in. He thinks this is a melodrama or romance, but the further he goes, the deeper he gets pulled into a noir.
It’s a neatly twisty plot. Stewart’s Scottie is a detective hired by an acquaintance to track his wife after she starts exhibiting odd behavior. There’s just one catch: The woman he’s told to track is already dead, and the person he’s following is an impersonator. Scottie falls in love with the impersonation, but then she needs to fake her death in order to cover up the actual woman’s murder.
The idea of a man being tricked into falling in love with a woman so he can form an alibi for a murder is one thing, but for him to meet the same woman again and attempt to get her to return to the performance by forcing a makeover on her is sociopathic. Like Norma Desmond, this is someone clinging to an obsession with the past and an inability to see the potential for moving on.
I took a course in undergrad about Color in Cinema and used this film as the basis of an obsessive paper on the use of color as a tool for narrative. Drawing on the writings of Natalie Kalmus from Technicolor and repeated viewings of the film, I mapped out the ways that different colors were traded between characters and played with in costuming and set design.
The professor for the class asked me to present it to the rest of the class, which was my first taste of giving a film lecture. I had a clip list and everything, and wound up giving something like a 25+ minute lecture on Vertigo.
I don’t think I would’ve even considered spending any time teaching if it hadn’t been for that experience. I felt so comfortable up there directing the class and moderating questions, even though I still had a lot of learning to do.
It was satisfying to feel that sense of approval and attention, but I think it was a time when I got the most joy out of the actual work of putting the paper together. Combing through the film again and again, trying to reverse engineer the decisions for why this color of lighting or this pattern on a dress could mean something. It gave me a real appreciation for the subtleties of craft that go into every frame of a film.
This Builds Character 
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