rect the attention of the audience so they do not see what is happening any more than does the main character. In the first part of the film, James Stewart acts the part of a detective by following his friend's wife over a period of days. He is an ex-policeman who has discovered that he is afraid of heights, and now he has taken this job as a private detective would do:
As the film opened with a fast chase, there now begins the first long, slow, fluid an silent pursuit of Madeleine by Scottie around the city. His work of "detecting" has now taken on another dimension (Spoto, 1976, 308-309).
A key component in this film is the way Hitchcock makes it clear that Stewart is not a good detective. In the course of the film, this becomes more apparent as we see how he has been fooled, but in any case he has been charged with protecting a woman who apparently kills herself because he cannot climb the stairs to the top of the bell tower to save her. He suffers a breakdown and fights his way back to recovery, and in the second half of the film, the role of detective is played out once m
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