Hitchcock really cranked out films. Vertigo was maybe his fiftieth effort. We’d have to count to more than fifteen to be sure, and we’re way too lazy to try. We just know Parisians first saw the flick today in 1958. By this time Hitch was so famous his films screened in virtually every corner of the globe, which means you can find posters of his movies in Russian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and so forth. When we stumbled across this nice French art we were reminded what a cool film Vertigo is. It has Jimmy Stewart, a great plot, period fx that still work despite their clunkiness, and a Bernard Hermann score. But really the best thing about this movie is Kim Novak.

After only a year in film, her classic beauty turned heads in the 1955 heroin addiction drama The Man with the Golden Arm, in which she played opposite Frank Sinatra. About two years later, when she was arguably the most famous and desired woman on the planet, she embarked upon an affair with brat-packer Sammy Davis Jr., which set off an avalanche of events that eventually resulted in the Mafia forcing Sammy to marry a Vegas showgirl who happened to be his own race. Novak’s story is too complex to condense into a blurb—it involves gangland bosses, hush money for secret nudes, obsessive suitors, and all the best staples of pulpdom. Through it all she pretty much told the world to screw itself if it didn’t like her exactly the way she was. And she’s still with us at 75. We’ll write more about this amazing person later on.