Customer Reviews

Vertigo (Collector's Edition)

5 star:		(294)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(26)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Vertigo is one of those films that is so good, no one at the time of release is able to appreciate it. It was dismissed by critics, ignored by audiences and, to my knowledge, didn't win a single Academy Award (this last part isn't shocking -- Citizen Kane didn't win Best Picture). It's interesting that the reputation of this film seems to have grown substantially since the public found out more about Alfred Hitchcock's private life. For example, Scottie Ferguson's obsession with Kim Novak mirrors Hitch's own obsession with beautiful blondes, most notably Grace Kelly. Actors often bare their souls to the world, but very rarely are we aware when a director bares his/her soul. Those who dismiss Hitchcock as just a taskmaster director of suspense films should study Vertigo. He is essentially dealing with his own weaknesses and inner demons on film.

Vertigo also contains two great performances -- those of James Stewart and Kim Novak. Stewart reveals a dark side that might shock those who just know him from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life. He is completely believeable as a man (Hitchcock's alter ego) who is consumed by obsession. Likewise Kim Novak is wonderful and totally convincing as Madeline/Judy. Vera Miles (Lila Crane in Psycho) was originally cast, but it's hard to see anyone else but Kim Novak in the role. She is utterly convincing as the distant, aristocratic Madeline AND as the earthy working class girl Judy. I can't think of many actresses who could be so effective in both roles. Grace Kelly, for example, might have been able to pull off Madeline, but probably would have been laughable as Judy. It's too bad more directors couldn't see past Novak's sex kitten image and cast her in more substantial roles.

In case you couldn't guess, I highly recommend this DVD. The documentary about the restoration of the film is very interesting and makes you realize what a job it is to restore a film. The DVD edition also includes an ending that was only on the foreign release prints. This edition does Hitchcock's masterpiece all the justice it deserves and then some.

(An additional note: I live in the San Francisco Area and have visited many of the locations featured in the film, including Madeline's apartment, Muir Woods, Mission Delores, The Palace of the Legion of Honor and Fort Point. Just to clarify for those of you who might be wondering: (1) there is no portrait of Carlotta at the Palace of the Legion of Honor and (2) there are no stairs leading down to the water at Fort Point -- the stairs were an in-studio shot that enabled James Stewart to more easily fish Kim Novak out of San Francisco Bay.)

It is unusual to see a director produce his best work after the age of 50, but that is exactly what Alfred Hitchcock did. Starting in 1948 with "Rope" and ending with "The Birds" in 1963, this was the era of his most inspired films. "Vertigo", in my opinion, is the best film of his entire body of work.

It is funny to note that when this film was first released in 1957 that it was not that popular in theaters and was pretty much universally panned by critics. In 1992, when the British Film Institute performed a survey of the world film critics to compile an all-time ten-best list that comes out every decade, Vertigo came in at fourth place. It didn't even make that list in 1962 or 1972. Part of the reason for the delayed popularity of the film could be that it requires repeated viewings to really gain an appreciation of it. Such repeated viewings were not possible for most viewers until the advent of home video systems and cable around 1980.

As for the film itself, it is a brilliantly twisted movie infused with touches of genius and madness that focuses on the interconnected nature of love and obsession. Interwoven with this main theme is a crime mystery that is revealed to and solved for the audience but not the protagonist, James Stewart's character, for the last 45 minutes of the film.

Alongside these themes is the issue of lost opportunities - how we grieve over them, and whether or not what we perceive as lost opportunities were ever "real" opportunities in the first place. This issue is raised not only for Scotty (James Stewart) - if only he could have gotten to Madeleine (Kim Novak) in time, if only he could have rescued the policeman from falling to his death at the beginning of the film, if only he could have seen through the scheme that manipulated him so perfectly and ultimately drove him temporarily mad - but for just about everybody else in the cast too. This includes Scotty's college girlfriend (Barbara Bel Geddes) who has remained his friend through the years and obviously still harbors thoughts of what might have been if only she had accepted Scotty's marriage proposal years before.

Besides the excellent acting and superb plot, the score is outstanding as is the cinematography, especially the visual darkness of the mission San Juan Bautista versus the angelic beauty of Madeleine which belies what is really going on. I highly recommend this film to anyone who has the time to watch it more than once. Just one viewing won't do it justice.

As an aside, this film is so contagious that I am sure that it has influenced other filmmakers over the years to the point of plagiarism, the most obvious example being Tim Burton's 1989 film, "Batman". The Joker dragging Vicki Vale to the top of Gotham cathedral's stairway and the confrontation and revelations of the past once at the top of the tower sure look like the closing 15 minutes of this movie. The following are the extra features:

Disc 1: Main Feature
1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
English DD5.1 Surround and DD2.0 Mono
English SDH, French and Spanish subtitles
Feature Commentary with Associate Producer Herbert Coleman, Restoration Team Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz and Other Vertigo Participants
Feature Commentary with Director William Friedkin
Foreign Ending
The Vertigo Archives
Production Notes
Original Theatrical Trailer
Restoration Theatrical Trailer

Disc 2: Extra Features
Obsessed with Vertigo: New Life for Hitchcock's Masterpiece
Partners in Crime: Hitchcock's Collaborators
Hitchcock / Truffaut Interview Excerpts
Alfred Hitchcock Presents "The Case of Mr. Pelham"

Vertigo is a tremendous film; if rating the film alone, I would give it the maximum rating. Vertigo deserves to have been carefully restored and preserved for posterity. The reason for my low rating for this DVD is that the restorers have seriously overstepped the bounds of conservation, actually changing the film for the worse. They have eliminated many original sound effects and created many new ones, to jarring effect. Evidently, their discovery of a stereo recording of the musical score so excited the restoration team that they felt they had to incorporate it into the restored print. As the original mono mix included effects with the score, this means that the restorers went into a Foley studio and cooked up replacement sounds--newpaper's rattling, footsteps, doors closing, cars driving past, etc. The result is VERY noticable: the modern, digitally recorded sounds have a sharply different quality from the analog originals, and the two are mixed together uneasily. The film was mixed, presumably under Hitchcock's careful supervision, with a mono soundtrack, which has survived in good condition. (Although the individual elements were scandalously destroyed in the 1970s as the result of a tussle over distribution rights to the film.) The soundtrack may have benefitted from some "cleaning up," but there was no good reason to create a new soundtrack. Please, Universal: include the original soundtrack as an option, at least, on future editions of this DVD. (The stereo recording of Herriman's musical score would make a nice DVD bonus track, too.) And please be more circumspect in future restoration projects. (There are problems with the color restoration, too, but at least there the restorers were addressing a real problem--the existing prints and film elements had seriously deteriorated. With the soundtrack, the restorers actively created problems where none existed.)

VERTIGO is one of my personal favorite film of all time, and if I write to praise this emotinally- filled obsessive love story, I just won't be able to stop. But following the lesson from the great Hitchcock himself, less is more.

What I'd rather like to critisise is the "restoration" that was the basis of this DVD. Now it's true that VERTIGO has never looked as beautiful as this for the last doezen years or so before Harris and Katz restored and re-release it. The re-release print of the mid eighties was so poor in quality. So in that sense, you should buy this DVD because it is the best version available so far--for most of the audience.

But this so-called "restoration" is controversial, and has a lot of problems. I must say that the best available version of the film is still the TECHNICOLOR-IB prints from the 50's and 60's, because IB prints don't fade in colors and there are still some prints available.

Harris and Katz did the best they could to capture the colors, the visual beauty of the film, using the original negative, and their version basically looks fine, except for the very dark scene (such as the tower of San Juan Batista at the end). Now, as they and the film's associate producer Herbie Coleman points out on the commentary track, they restored the correct darkness, but not the contrast, which they should have enhanced to simulate the original TECHNICOLOR look in which the shadows are really black but at the same time keeping the details. On an IB-TECHNICOLOR prints, the faces of Jimmy Stuart and Kim Novak really pop out of the darkness, allowing the audience to understand the incridible dramatic conflict of the scene....but on the "restoration", you see vertually nothing except the darkness.

The biggest problem is the sound. In order to create a digital DTS sound track, they removed all the original sound effects, and replaced with new effects created on folleys. They must have done the best they could, but still those new sound effects are so annoying, and it destroys the atmosphere and emotions of the film. They just sound noisy. The original version of the film had a soundtrack which is much more subtle, which creates a beautiful dreamy, moody atmosphere totally in the spirit of the film. Bernard Herrmann's beautiful music (probably the best music ever written for a film) suffers a lot because of that, which is a real pitty.

Since the DVD format allows to have many different sound tracks, it would have been nice if they could keep the original monaural sound as an additional track. Then those who are in favor of the more "modern" digital sound can have their fun, while those who has a deeper, true understanding of the film could fully enjoy Hitchcock's masterpiece, truly in its original form (Hitchcock had never intended to make this film in stereo anyway).

I am very afraid that from now on, people will missunderstand that this is the standard version of VERTIGO. It simply is not. It is a much much much more beautiful film

There's a film critic, David Thompson, who claims that Hitchcock's movies are "shallow." Although unfair, irrelevant, and short-sighted, it's an argument one could make about the Master's oeuvre-with the exception of "Vertigo," a film that exceeds the control of its director, a movie that bears the stamp of the auteur yet must be judged a deeply resonant, collaborative triumph by three of the screen's indisputable geniuses: Hitch, Bernard Herrmann, and James Stewart.

On my third screening of this film, the story of obsession became my own, producing a reeling sensation that has yet to lift. Compared to "Vertigo," the other films of the so-called Hitchcock great trilogy--"Rear Window" and "Psycho"--indeed do seem shallow. Prior to this viewing I had listened to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" with its thrilling "liebestod"-the moment when the consummation of passion must also be its end because it is a love of love rather than of a person. Then I began to reflect back on similar stories-Morte Darthur, Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Wuthering Heights, The English Patient. "Vertigo" belongs to the same narrative pattern, perhaps realizing it more compellingly than any other representation.

In the moment when Scottie forces Judy to become Madeleine, Herrmann's score recalls Wagner's liebestod, crescendoing to an unforgettable emotional peak, at once riveting and disturbing. In the same moment that Madeleine has been exhumed from the dead by the obsessive man-child, we see that Judy's desperate attempt to draw Scottie's attention to the "real" Judy is doomed and that Scottie's fixation is beyond cure. The lost child that won't release Madeleine/Carlotta, the compulsive boy who can not be "taught" to love by either Judy or Midge, the frustrated and pathetic "mother" Midge--all remain forever disfigured by the fantasy constructed by Stewart's obsessive, stubbornly regressive, character.

In the film's last scene, Scottie overcomes his vertigo but not the need to avenge himself on the figure who has betrayed him and his boyish fixation. Here Stewart's voice takes on the same feminine register, breaking and cracking, changing timbre, speaking in irregular, breathless meter, that we see in George Bailey's conflicted moment between strangling and loving Mary before giving up his dream in favor of marriage and the savings and loan. "Vertigo" is the George Bailey who left Bedford Falls, determined to pursue his magnificent obsession and the elusive grail. It may not be a wonderful life, but it's a life that haunts the moviegoer's consciousness like no other film I've seen.

This review is for the DVD version itself. The restoration and color is beautiful. Breath-taking. The wide-screen is almost a full-screen. It is not as irratating as the DVD version of "Cleopatra". Of all versions I have seen, this DVD version made me give "Vertigo" a second look. Colors are important in this restored version because the color of say a door or the clothes that Kim Novak wears explains the psychological state of the character. One of the bonuses is a fine documentary, originally seen on American Movie Classics cable network, about the films' restoration and includes new interviews with Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes.

There are not enough words in the English language - or any other - that can accurately describe the PERFECT film. This is one of those pictures that only improves after each viewing. James Stewart and Kim Novack are stellar in this true masterpiece of filmdom. Bernard Herrmann's score complements the movie immensely and is an integral part of the story. Only Alfred Hitchcock, a man who epitomizes the movie-making art could have made this film. No one can touch the master, Sir Alfred, and the film is evidence of that very fact. To show genius at work, the viewer needs to check out the backgrounds or the beautifully photographed scenes of San Francisco and surrounding areas; they are as meticulously done as any of the works of such painters as Degas or da Vinci. Hitchcock may not have invented the motion picture camera, but he certainly understood it! It's too bad that the rating only limits me to five stars. THIS ONE RATES A 10!

I am always trying to convince my friends to watch what I consider my favorite movies. Often they see them and I can tell they become bored or not entirely impressed. At first I usually got mad and could not understand why someone would not love a movie like Vertigo. Then I realized something very important. I have seen the movie numerous times and have also read many critical insights about it. The first time I saw Vertigo I thought it was good. The second time I saw it I knew that it would become one of my favorite films. I recommend watching this movie once. Then going back several weeks later and watching it again. It works on so many subtle levels that it actually is better to see it when you already know the basic outline. Fully enjoying this film takes time and knowledge. It is like classical music that may sound good as a melody, but becomes an obsession when you know a little about the history of the composer and the historical context it was written in. Vertigo belongs to that short list of films that actually becomes better with each viewing

I was only 10 years old when I saw Vertigo in 1958 at St. Cloud, Minnesota's wonderful picture-palace Paramount Theater. Young as I was, the movie instantly grabbed my emotions in a haunting way I could not understand. Well, the movie still does and I still can't quite explain it. You could be blind and still love this movie: the great score, Barbara Bel Geddes great cameo and the way she says, "Now, Johnny." Novak's forlorn voice, Stewart's obsessive love-desperate voice. It's just incredible: those hazy San Francisco scenes, the prowling car, the glimpses into groves and museums, the scene in the redwood forest. It's really about the evanescence of life itself, about how you can only glimpse its deep, rich beauty and its terror in blinks, in things half-seen, half-remembered and in emotions blurring into one another, shifting in that haunting kaleidoscope, impossible to pin down or grasp. Anyway, as I said, Vertigo is hard to explain. It is without a doubt my all-time favorite movie.

So much has been written about "Vertigo" itself that a buyer of the "Legacy Series" DVD of the film is probably most interested in whether or not this is a better or worse DVD of the film than has been available before.

The "Legacy Series" edition of "Vertigo" is a significant upgrade from prior DVD issues of the film. Nevertheless, it is unclear if this edition is a higher resolution re-telecine of the restored film elements produced during the film's restoration several years ago, and released on prior DVD versions, or if it is merely a reprocessed and tweaked version of the same telecine source from that time. Color is better, luminance is much improved, perhaps increased too much for those fond of the film's more subdued look in past editions.

It all looks much better. All of which leads one to ask: where's the Blu-Ray edition of this film? Unfortunately, strong as this DVD edition is, it still suffers from excessive edge sharpening, the shortcomings of the MPEG2 codec used for DVD video, and a light sizzle around finely detailed objects. Even played back on an OPPO BDP-83, which some might argue has the best DVD up scaling technology currently available for home users, the image still stumbles badly on edge sharpening and codec issues.

A great upgraded DVD edition, but: where's the Blu-Ray edition of this film?