Another one for my personal hall of shame - how I hadn't seen one of Hitch's most lauded films until now is anyone's guess. It's always difficult approaching these cinematic behemoths for the first time; with its name blazoned across the billboards of cultural history, it's impossible to go in completely blind and yet I was still blind-sided - just not for the reasons I expected.

Sure enough, it's a well-crafted thriller, Technicolor Noir almost, atmospherically scored by Bernard Herrmann and offering a masterclass in composition with many still frames that could happily share real estate with the portrait of Carlotta Valdes in the Legion of Honour (not least the exterior shots of this architectural marvel). Many of the locations in and around San Francisco are captured beautifully; low and high angle shots, ghostly dollies and that spiralling, twisting dive down into the guts of the bell tower that evokes the queasy anxiety of acrophobia in an intensely visual way. What really struck me in this first time watch though, was the film's exploration of the gaze.

In truth, the plot is secondary. It's wildly implausible on several levels - what a convoluted way to murder your wife... what blatant tailing from John "Scottie" Ferguson; hardly the M.O. of a master detective. Really, the plot comes a distant to second to fascination with the psychological wringer Hitchcock puts his characters through. The climactic twist certainly throws you for a loop - in lesser directors' hands, this would be the cue for credits, but in Vertigo, it's actually when things get really interesting. Up to this point, the film's gaze (and by extension, the viewer's) has been mainly voyeuristic, but with Scottie's discovery of Judy, it switches up to fetishistic in a way that's both repellent and hypnotically compelling.

I think it's an almighty stretch to upend the frequent accusations of misogyny levelled at Vertigo and call it a feminist deconstruction of the gaze, but it certainly invites readings against the grain, making it a fertile site for ideological reclamation. Hitch obviously thought a lot about his prospective audience, and delighted in tormenting them as much as his protagonists (particularly his female protagonists) but it's maybe worth noting that male leads rarely wriggle off the hook either. Here, final redemption eludes Scottie and his ending is ambiguous to say the least: it's quite conceivable that the very next scene would be him throwing himself into the void, all hope extinguished. That said, the female characters in this film are positively demonized - Madeleine's alleged insanity is carried through the blood of her ancestors (Madeleine, Mad Line, Madwoman in the Attic stock); female psychosis forewarned by the opening credits, where we see a close-up shot of a woman's eye, flitting feverishly from side to side. Madeleine's stand-in, Judy, is punished relentlessly for her part in the murder (whereas the instigator, Gavin Elster, gets away scot-free) and is meted out biblical justice in the chastening form of a nun. Midge is perhaps the most callously treated though - other than acting as a human sound mirror, Scottie has no real use for her and her love is sadly unrequited; his relentless, humourless pursuit of a phantom fantasy of feminity allows no time for Midge's real, down-to-earth charms and consequently her character is ruthlessly sidelined.

It could be viewed as the ultimate doomed romance but I didn't see it that way; despite being framed almost exclusively by Scottie's perspective, I never bought into the virtue of his quest or his character. Increasingly as the film progresses, he exposes himself as delusional, charmless and towards the end, downright skeevy. During the suit-buying scene, I was cringing hard as Judy is reduced to a fetish object and his intense stare flickers with naked animal lust - it's just uncomfortable to watch, and there's an unpleasant whiff of necrophilia about this fixation with a living dead woman that makes your head spin when you think of all the implications. There's a lot to dissect here; cutting through the taut thriller skin reveals an anatomy of gendered madness, obsession and control.