None of Hitchcock’s movies are as viscerally unsettling as Vertigo, and no scene in that greatest of all his films is more deeply, eerily moving than the “green neon” one that unfolds in a cheap San Francisco hotel. When the obsessed and heartsick Scottie (James Stewart) sees Judy (Kim Novak) emerge, ghostlike, from another room — lit by an awful, green neon light outside the window and dressed and coiffed exactly like another woman, Madeleine, with whom Scottie fell in love — the palpable jolt of passion that passes between the two is unlike anything else that Hitchcock ever filmed. The raw sexual hunger in Scottie’s eyes when he sees Judy/Madeleine standing before him, in the flesh, is … well, it’s vertiginous.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tesqTwX7cpc]