On This Day – 9th May

Released on May 9th 1958, Vertigo is an American film-noir psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. The story was based on the 1954 novel D'entre les morts (From Among the Dead) 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. Scottie is forced into early retirement because an incident in the line of duty has caused him to develop acrophobia (an extreme fear of heights) and vertigo (a false sense of rotational movement). Scottie is hired by an acquaintance, Gavin Elster, as a private investigator to follow Gavin's wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who is behaving strangely.

Filmed in San Francisco, the locations used have become celebrated amongst the film's fans, with organised tours across the area. In March 1997, the cultural French magazine Les Inrockuptibles published a special issue titled Vertigo's about the film locations in San Francisco, Dans le décor, which lists and describes all actual locations.

Vertigo received mixed reviews upon initial release, but is now often cited as a classic Hitchcock film and one of the defining works of his career. Attracting significant scholarly criticism, it replaced Citizen Kane (1941) as the best film ever made in the 2012 British Film Institute's Sight & Sound critics' poll.

Director Martin Scorsese has named Vertigo as one of his favorite films of all time

Today's question

Vertigo is notable in many ways, there's one specific element in particular, though, that it can claim as a first, having gone on to be used widely in the film industry as we know it today; what was that first?

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