VERTIGO   VERTIGO RESTORED VERSION SATURDAY MONDAY and THURSDAY CHARLES THEATRE 1958 Alfred Hitchcock. James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore. 129m Technicolor. WATCH TRAILER SATURDAY, JULY 3 - NOON; MONDAY, JULY 5 - 7PM; THURSDAY, JULY 8 - 9PM. "If you haven't seen 'Vertigo' in the last dozen years, see it Saturday at noon, Monday at 7 or Thursday at 9 at the Charles. First released in 1958, 'Vertigo' reopened in 1996 under the care of restoration wizards Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz. Partly because they tried to follow Hitchcock's instructions to the letter, many of us felt as if we'd never seen it before -- or heard it before. Their deluxe revival of Hitchcock's foray into l'amour feu presented the original musical tracks in state-of-the-art sound that extracted previously-hidden undertones and highlights from Bernard Herrmann's complex, brilliant score. Herrmann deployed everything from a habanera to a waltz macabre in order to illuminate the morbid romanticism of a retired San Francisco police detective (James Stewart), who falls in love with the object of a private investigation - - an old acquaintance's wife (Kim Novak) who may be spiritually possessed. The score now seems as central to the movie's success as Stewart's brave depiction of tortured amorous arousal, Novak's exhilarating physicality, and the dirt-flecked glamour of San Francisco itself. Of course, 'Vertigo', with its misshapen narrative and languor, is no conventional masterpiece. It is an odd auteurist classic -- Hitchcock's operatic emotionality and hypnotic power seal the cracks in his storytelling and transform even the slowest scenes into aching erotic set pieces. He links Stewart's acrophobia and vertigo to his sexual vulnerability, and the result is dizzying; once you've crawled inside Stewart's mindset, you don't care that he crosses a hotel room in the time it took him to race across all of London in 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'...." – Michael Sragow, MIKE SRAGOW GETS REEL "One of the landmarks – not merely of the movies, but of 20th-century art....(An) extraordinarily dense and commanding film, perhaps the most intensely personal movie to emerge from the Hollywood cinema." – Dave Kehr "Over time, 'Vertigo', the greatest sexual suspense drama ever made, has come to be regarded by many Hitchcock admirers as his most accomplished film. It is certainly his most forlorn, and easily his most mesmerizing." – San Francisco Chronicle NEXT WEEK: Arthur Penn's long unavailable MICKEY ONE (1965) REVIVAL SERIES CLASSIC REPERTORY 35 MM FILM