In the 1992 Sight and Sound poll critics and filmmakers voted Vertigo the fourth greatest film of all time. Released in 1958, Hitchcock's masterpiece is a pinnacle of the cinema. Yet in it Hitchcock abandoned his trademark suspense, allowing the central mystery to be solved halfway through. What remained was a study in sexual obsession, as James Stewart's Scottie pursues Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak) to her death in a remote Californian mission. Novak is ice-cool but vulnerable; Stewart--in the darkest role of his career--genial on the surface but damaged within. Though it seems to many to be Hitchcock's most personal film, Charles Barr argues that, like Citizen Kane, Vertigo is a triumph not so much of individual authorship as of creative collaboration. Barr documents the crucial role of screenwriters Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor and by a combination of textual and contextual analysis explores the reasons why Vertigo has come to exert such a continuing fascination both on general audiences and on a wide range of critics and theorists.