A radical meditation on man’s obsession with illusion, Vertigo reflects back on itself as cinema and as a sadly ironic view of romantic love in the fifties. James Stewart was never less “romantic” than in this film; his urgency is frightening and compelling. Formally, and in its deeply felt expression of the ultimate love triangle—man, woman, and death—this is Hitchcock’s most poetic film. As Marilyn Fabe wrote, “The hero’s simultaneous desire and dread are given brilliant and haunting visual expression through the ambivalent camera movements—especially the combination of forward zooms and reverse tracking shots.”