Alfred Hitchcock Archives

Review: Rear Window

review | Rear Window

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The 4K transfer exposes both the good and the bad of Hitchcock’s best-known film, but ultimately offers a satisfying way to re-engage with a classic

by Michael Gaughn
September 19, 2020

As I mentioned in my Psycho review, more has been written about Hitchcock than any other filmmaker—and more has probably been written about Rear Window (1954) than any other film. It and Vertigo (1958) are often considered his most accomplished efforts—a conclusion I would vigorously dispute, but not here. Rear Window has gotten the most attention because, between the two, it’s the squeakier wheel.

It’s undeniable that this hubristic exercise in artifice, or stagecraft as cinema, would have completely unravelled in the hands of a lesser filmmaker. And it remains impressive how much Hitchcock is able to make the pure contrivance of his elaborate set a big part of what makes the film so engaging. You almost don’t care that it’s the epitome of mid-’50s Broadway set design. There’s something about its sheer physicality that makes everything that’s presented on it feel convincing.

Because Hitchcock was relentlessly ambitious, his reach constantly exceeded his grasp, so Rear Window has more than its share of shots that don’t quite work, storyboard concepts that had to be triaged in post, characters that could have used a little more development. Thelma Ritter’s part is ridiculously overwritten, and you can feel her pausing for laughs that faded it into the void more than five decades ago. Grace Kelly is just a little too Grace Kelly, with a patrician accent that can’t help but grate on modern ears.

The film works mainly because of the ingenious way Hitchcock makes the set, with its vignettes, convincing as projections of Jimmy Stewart’s various states of mind, making the film from early on feel dreamlike. And it works because of Stewart’s performance. He, pre-World War II, was a good, even great, actor—his work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is jawdropping, even today. But he was also kind of lightweight, sometimes clownish. After the war, there’s an undeniable sense of experience behind his eyes that he was able to employ deftly in his best roles—like in the Anthony Mann westerns, in Vertigo, and here.

Not that his performance is flawless. As always with Hitchcock, there are weak moments in the script and in the direction that cause Stewart, adrift, to lapse into his patented Stewartisms. But in the hands of a more traditional Hollywood pretty boy type, L. B. Jeffries snooping out of the back of his apartment could have seemed just comic, or even diseased. Stewart creates a perfect tension between making it all seem justified and also the dangerous preoccupations of a troubled soul.

The 4K HDR presentation is a must-have for anybody who even thinks they care about movies—not because it smooths over the flaws but because it presents everything honestly, the good and the bad. Seeing Rear Window in any other format inevitably puts you at a distance from the film, which inevitably places you at too great of a distance from what’s going on in the apartments across the way. You need to see it at this resolution to get pulled back into the film, so it stops feeling quaint and again becomes relevant and compelling.

The flaws are pretty egregious. Hitchcock, of course, endlessly obsessed over how to present Kelly, but there’s a shot at 29:51, during a sequence meant to scream “beguiling beauty,” where she looks like a walking corpse. Even more jarring is a closeup at 1:50:29 of the hapless Wendell Corey that looks like it was originally part of a wider shot that was ruthlessly enlarged on an optical printer.

For whatever reason, cinematographer Robert Burks didn’t do as good a job here as he would on Vertigo, but for everything that takes you out of the film, there’s plenty to keep you engaged. Probably no other movie has better conveyed the feel of New York at sunset, or especially at three in the morning. And, while the HDR makes its presence felt just here and there, it is an absolute revelation during the climax. Anyone who knows Rear Window will know exactly where I’m going with this, but Raymond Burr being blinded by Stewart’s flashbulbs fell solidly into the “suspension of disbelief” camp until now. Presented in HDR, those white flashes become searing, making you feel Burr’s disorientation and sense of absolute loss. Rear Window is worth seeing in this form just for that moment alone.

The audio is “only” DTS-HD Master Audio stereo. I used quotes because the thought of somebody mucking around with Hitchcock’s innovative and masterful sound mix to take it into the land of Atmos is both terrifying and nauseating. In the right hands, it could definitely enhance the experience—but who’s got the right hands? And I think there’s a good chance an enhanced sense of spaciousness could actually end up emphasizing the one-dimensionality of a lot of the stagecraft.

The mix here does a great job of allowing you to savor what Hitchcock originally wrought, where he used mainly volume, timing, and reverb to convey the sense of voices and other sounds heard in various spaces and from various distances away. The soundtrack, as is, is so strong it could almost stand on its own as a radio play.

But allow me just a brief swipe at Franz Waxman’s score, which is the weakest link in the film. It’s not that I don’t like Waxman—his work on Sunset Boulevard represents the pinnacle of the film-scoring art—but he’s just not in sync with this film at all. The opening theme—if you can call it that—is a hackneyed pastiche of Gershwin clichés—42nd Street meets The Naked City. But what makes it really fall flat is the sense of complete disconnection from the evocative use of source cues that makes up the rest of the soundtrack. I know Hitchcock was aiming for a kind of overture as the curtains literally went up, but he missed the mark.

And then there’s that song. Another of Hitchcock’s offerings placed on the altar of Grace Kelly, it was a great idea in concept—show a composer struggling to write a song to parallel Jimmy Stewart’s conflicted feelings about Kelly and then have it all come together as an example of songwriting perfection. Problem is, the song sounds fully worked out—and not very good—from the start. Had it been great, it could have really enhanced the film—and not made the salvation of Miss Lonelyhearts look like the worst kind of Victorian contrivance. But “Lisa” is a real stinker.

I’m not a big fan of Top 10 or Top 100 or whatever lists—they’re almost all laughable when they’re not outright dangerous. So let’s just say that Rear Window, for too many reasons to ignore, is an essential. Not only does it stand on its own as entertainment for all but the most jaded contemporary audiences, but its reverberations can still be strongly felt in filmmaking in the present. In 4K HDR, it becomes not just another movie, but a glimpse of the very wellspring of cinema.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | This 4K HDR presentation is a must-have for anybody who even thinks they care about movies—not because it smooths over the flaws but because it presents everything honestly, the good and the bad

SOUND | The stereo mix does a great job of allowing you to savor what Hitchcock originally wrought, where he used mainly volume, timing, and reverb to convey the sense of voices and other sounds heard in various spaces and from various distances away

Review: Shadow of a Doubt

review | Shadow of a Doubt

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One of Hitchcock’s very best films almost flawlessly presented in 4K HDR

by Michael Gaughn
May 9, 2022

I suspect it’s a rights thing, but the latest round of Hitchcock in 4K is a surprisingly weak lot. There can’t be more than a handful of people clamoring for The Trouble with Harry and Family Plot, and yet there they are. No Strangers on a Train anywhere to be seen. But there is one standout in the pack—Shadow of a Doubt, which, along with Strangers, may be Hitchcock’s best work.

I realize that last bit is an arguable, if not controversial, statement, but both of those films rank at the top for me exactly because they don’t exhibit the kind of bravura showmanship, bordering on P.T. Barnum, that’s generated such mass affection for his mid to late ‘50s concoctions from Rear Window through Vertigo to North by Northwest. Both Shadow and Strangers stay focused on the material, with the film technique always in proportion, never overwhelming it. As a result, you have a sense throughout both of completely developed characters in believable environments instead of specters drifting through stage-managed dreamworlds.

And let’s cut right to it: Shadow of a Doubt is the best 4K HDR Hitchcock release to date. It’s a still compelling, even riveting, work presented in a way that couldn’t be more true to how the film was made, without any jolts triggered by bad elements or overzealous hands at the knobs. If you want to see a Hitchcock film from the period when he was in full control of his artistry presented pretty much as he intended, this is it.

And it isn’t a museum piece. Not only was Shadow about 30 years ahead of its time with the treatment of its protagonist, but in not only subject matter but technique feels surprisingly contemporary. Hitchcock sensed, in the midst of World War II, before the A bomb and before the horrors of the concentration camps became known, how that conflict would yield a more cynical world and used the Joseph Cotten character to develop a take on society that wouldn’t even begin to scratch at the door of pop culture until more than 10 years later in works like Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. You can also sense the influence on the anti-hero films of the ‘70s, and on the far more adolescent and superficial take on dark that seems to have permeated the whole of current culture.

But there’s no raging madman here, no cocksure vigilante. Cotten’s Uncle Charlie is a sophisticated but damaged man in a smug and content society that can only survive sheltered from the realities of the larger world. It’s clear that Hitchcock’s sympathies lie with him, one of the many troubling aspects of a deeply troubling work. Hitchcock creates an idyllic microcosm and then gets you to pierce it by adopting the viewpoint of a misanthropic murderer. That’s old hat now, but he has such a firm command of his material that it still works, and, by contrast, shows just how shallow and silly the current efforts are.

This is probably Cotten’s best performance, here able to craft a role without being upstaged by Welles’ endless scenery chewing in Citizen Kane or baroque expressions of technique in Magnificent Ambersons. His Uncle Charlie is a compelling human being, the most rounded of the film’s characters, not some convenient bogeyman. That doesn’t mean, though, that Hitchcock denies he’s essentially evil. In fact, he underlines that brilliantly in the famous shot of the train bearing Uncle Charlie arriving in Santa Rosa vigorously belching a massive cloud of thick black smoke, like it’s in transit from the mouth of Hell, the noxious plume then settling over the town like a shroud. That shot is particularly striking in this transfer—especially the depth of the black cloud against the highlights of the sun-drenched All-American town. And it’s done while maintaining the balance of the overall visual fabric of the film.

But here’s why Shadow of a Doubt is a great movie: While Uncle Charlie is fully developed, all of the other characters are fleshed out to nearly the same degree. And although Hitchcock’s disdain, if not contempt, for their small-town world is clear, he realizes he needs to honor that world in order to make Cotten’s troubling of it compelling. And he stays so true to its conventions that those other characters’ emotions are convincing throughout and are actually, at times, moving. You’d be hardpressed to find anything like that in any other Hitchcock film. You can sense he feels drawn to their sheltered society—or at least to the reasons why the characters find it so attractive—while knowing it’s a kind of Potemkin village that can never stand. (Lynch tried to adopt that same stance in Blue Velvet, deliberately exploiting parallels with Shadow along the way, but didn’t pull it off half as well.)

And then there are the seemingly endless grace notes, the kind of thing a master artist does when he has an overabundance of energy and ideas but is so in sync with his material that he knows how to make every touch apt. Those accents, ornaments, and inflections are so abundant, there’s little point in citing many, and it would take a lot of the fun out of watching the movie to anticipate them here, but to highlight a couple: Hitchcock, feeding from his roots in German Expressionism, uses some angles and lighting (like looking down on Teresa Wright through the staircase balusters) that would seem gratuitous in any other film or in lesser hands but, because they’re acute extensions of the character’s frame of mind, ring true. Or the various startling ways he reveals Cotten’s character by having him engage directly with the camera, striding toward it when he goes to grab the newspaper from Wright’s hands or the slow track in on his profile as he makes his “silly wives” speech only to have him turn and look straight into the lens after the camera has come uncomfortably close.

There’s not a lot to say about the transfer exactly because it so well serves the material. There doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to “improve” the look of the original film (a frequent sin in 4K HDR transfers) but instead a deliberate effort to honor its visual fabric and keep the look consistent throughout. For the first time in a while, there was nothing here that at any point pulled me out of the movie, and someone deserves kudos for that alone. I didn’t realize until this viewing how extraordinarily well photographed this film is, and the transfer can take a lot of the credit for that.

What can I really say about the sound? It’s a stereo mix of the original mono that never draws too much attention to its stereo-ness—which, until it occurs to someone to make the original mono part of 4K presentations, is probably the best we can hope for. My only complaint is that the Dimitri Tiomkin cues can come on a little strong, especially during the otherwise low-key “chase” scene near the beginning. This disparity was probably in the original mix, but the presentation here is so dynamic it only heightens it.

To sum up: Shadow of a Doubt is one of Hitchcock’s very best films presented in the best 4K HDR transfer to date of any of his work. Yes, watch it to savor the transfer, but also watch it to savor the film, which is one of those classics that’s so strong at the core that it feels untouched by time.

PICTURE | There doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to “improve” the look of the original film but instead a deliberate effort to honor its visual fabric and keep the look consistent throughout

SOUND | The stereo mix of the original mono never draws too much attention to its stereo-ness, although the music cues can come on a little strong at times

Review: The Birds

review | The Birds

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The 4K HDR transfer tends to emphasize the film’s many flaws, technical and otherwise

by Michael Gaughn
October 16, 2020

Without The Birds, there would be no Jaws—and, arguably, no Spielberg, since he lifted so many of his filmic mannerisms from this brutal and detached end-of-the-world tale. The really ironic thing is, while this is far from Hitchcock’s best film, it’s still better than Jaws. I realize that conclusion is heresy to the popularity = quality crowd but it underlines the vast difference between what an adult with adolescent tendencies and a perpetual adolescent with no interest in growing up can do.

As I mentioned in my Psycho review, Hitchcock, in that film, managed to intuit the entire course of the movies from that point on. But for whatever reason he wasn’t able to assimilate and exploit what he had achieved there and spent the rest of his career sputtering, trying to remain relevant while leaning on his past glories from the Studio Era. But, increasingly consumed by bitterness, he just couldn’t make any of those old conventions hold.

The Birds was his next film after Psycho, and seems meant to function as a kind of companion piece, but because he had lost so much confidence in himself and in the very nature of the movies, his attempt to make a shocker with studio polish resulted in a very uneven affair. This is especially obvious on the technical level, where the heavy reliance on process shots and matte paintings means things rarely sync up visually for large [swathes] of the film. That’s not to fault Robert Burks’ cinematography, which is beautiful and effective when it just gets to record things without having to allow for any trickery. And it’s not really to fault the heavy reliance on Albert Whitlock’s matte work, which almost succeeds in giving the film a warped pastoral quality, like the action is playing out on a vast theater stage. But it’s kind of sad to see Hitchcock’s reach constantly exceed his grasp and sense his slipping ability to maintain a proper sense of proportion.

The things in the film that go well go very well and more than justify the time spent watching it. Since it really doesn’t have any stars, just the semi-talented Robert Taylor and Tippi Hedren as the leads, Jessica Tandy gets to steal the show with her rock-solid performance as a deeply needy yet domineering mother. The scene where she discovers Dan Fawcett’s body still plays—and is one of the things Spielberg lifted pretty much straight for Jaws. And he didn’t just pilfer The Birds for that reveal of a mangled corpse. The subsequent low-angle shot where Tandy stagers out of the house to stand gape-mouthed next to the farm hand would also become a Spielberg staple.

As would the low-angle track-back late in the film where Tandy, then Hedren, then Taylor are revealed, with the ceiling looming low above them, as they listen for signs that the bird attack has subsided. Not only would Spielberg get an absurd amount of mileage out of this, ’80s filmmakers leaned on it so heavily that they eventually broke it.

What really doesn’t work at all is the famous attack on the school children—which I would have to shift into the “infamous” category, and not just for its technical blunders. The animation at the beginning of the crows welling up from behind the school house is crudely done and all out of proportion. And the pacing of the rear-projection shots creates the weird sense of everyone running in place. A cineaste would argue Hitchcock was trying to evoke a nightmare sense of frantic effort with no progress. He wasn’t—he just couldn’t pull it off.

The equally famous attack on the town almost works, creating a borderline apocalyptic feel larger than what’s being shown on the screen. But it’s marred by that hokey series of shots of Hedren reacting to the stream of flaming gasoline and especially by all of the heavily processed rear-projection stuff while she’s trapped in the phone booth.

But it wasn’t ultimately the technical miscalculations and gaffes that undermined Hitchcock—they were just the symptoms, not the disease. There’s something really disturbing, but not in any entertaining way, about how he obviously relishes showing children being attacked and witnessing atrocities. Even more foul is how he sets up the doll-like Hedren just to have her brutally taken down—especially during the elaborate bird-rape in the attic at the end. It’s as if his faith n cinema to protect him from the outside world had been shattered and he felt he had to lash out at the audience in his fear and rage.

All of that said, Hitchcock deserves tremendous credit for doing a horror/thriller film without a score. Yes, the absence of music tends to lay bare a lot the movie’s flaws, but it also makes many of the scenes—like the discovery of Fawcett’s body, the later discovery of Annie Hayworth’s body, and the final attack on the Brenner home—tremendously more effective. There’s no John Williams here to Mickey Mouse everything by dragging you through the film by the nose, clobbering you with cues, telling you what to think and feel. You’re thrown into each of the scenes without any ersatz late-Romantic bluster to act as a buffer, which is not just bracing but kind of liberating.

The 4K HDR transfer is for the most part faithful—which means it gets the good moments absolutely right, but also tends to emphasize all that frequent mismatching between shots. Probably the worst shot of the film is the very first one, done on location in San Francisco, which looks like it was grabbed surreptitiously on a 16mm camera. (It wasn’t—it just looks that way.) Get beyond that, and you’ll be able to experience some patches of Burks’ best work.

The one shot I can fault the transfer for—although its problems lie in the original image—is the very last one in the film, an elaborate high-contrast matte shot that borders on monochrome. The HDR crushes the blacks and punches up the whites so much that it becomes not just too blatantly artificial but visually chaotic.

If ever a film cried out for a surround mix, this one would seem to be it. So much of it hinges on things happening from just out of frame and on characters being engulfed that it’s a natural for the 5.1 or Atmos treatment. And yet the original soundtrack is so well designed that the DTS-HD Master Audio stereo mix here is surprisingly effective. The staccato bird cries followed by the sudden, muted crescendo of fluttering wings that signals the beginning of the final attack is so chilling that it’s hard to say whether a surround reworking would be an improvement. But I’d be curious to know.

I’m not going to resort to one of those “You can tell I had problems with this film but it still makes for a great night at the movies” conclusions. But I will say this: With very few exceptions, time spent with a Hitchcock film is time well spent. Even if you just watch The Birds to pick up on all the Jaws/Spielberg parallels, you’ll have, in a way, improved your life. The Birds is a suitably disturbing thriller; it’s just not quite the film Hitchcock intended to make.

PICTURE | The 4K HDR transfer is for the most part faithful to the original film—which means it gets the good moments absolutely right but also tends to emphasize all the frequent mismatching between shots.

SOUND | The Birds is a natural for a 5.1 or Atmos treatment. And yet the original soundtrack is so well designed that the DTS-HD Master Audio stereo mix here is surprisingly effective.

Review: Psycho

review | Psycho

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Seeing this film in 4K not only underlines how much Hitchcock reinvented himself here but how much he changed filmmaking forever

by Michael Gaughn
September 11, 2020

This was supposed to be a review of Rear Window. But I had such a strong reaction to watching Psycho in 4K that Hitchcock’s lurid horror classic quickly pushed its way to the front of the reviewing queue.

More has probably been written about Hitchcock than any other filmmaker, most of it boxing him in so tightly that he’s ended up as badly embalmed as Norman Bates’ mother. So I’m going to try to avoid retreading any of that ground here. My comments will be mainly about why you should care about Psycho in 2020—and why you should care about it in 4K.

First off, there’s Anthony Perkins. Sure, people have praised his performance before but I didn’t realize until this most recent viewing exactly how groundbreaking it was and how much it still reverberates today. Hitchcock was notorious for putting blinders on his performers, so while there are some exceptional breakout performances in his films (I’m thinking of Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train in particular), they’re rare, and tend to happen not because the actor was given extraordinary latitude but because he figured out how to roll within Hitchcock’s often stifling restrictions.

Perkins turns that straitjacket into a virtue, offering the most direct, nuanced, and startling performance in any Hitchcock film. (His bursting in on Vera Miles at the end always seems so comical because he has kept Norman on a such a believably tight leash until then.) There are many things in Psycho that are unique for a Hitchcock film (I’ll get to that in a minute) but this is the most unusual. As soon as Perkins says his first lines to Janet Leigh, Psycho pivots from a traditional studio-era production into the cinematic unknown.

And then there’s the enduring influence of his performance, which has become the standard for any actor attempting to explore the extreme edges of dissociation. It’s hard to watch his Norman Bates and not see De Niro’s Travis Bickle—or even Rupert Pupkin. To watch Perkins in this film is to watch him actively and radically reinvent film acting—all while under his director’s unblinking gaze.

But Hitchcock ventured into all kinds of new territory in Psycho, and it’s fascinating to watch him try to reinvent himself as he grapples with the collapse of the studio system and the realization of how tightly he was bound to it. The tragic thing about Psycho was that he found it impossible to build on his many innovations here, instead retreating to what he already knew, which is why all of his later films feel half-baked and carry the fetid reek of nostalgia.

A lot has been made about Hitchcock using a TV crew to shoot the film but that kind of misses the point. Psycho, on the moviemaking level, is mainly about Hitchcock grappling with his increasing bitterness, cynicism, disorientation, and misogyny in a world where he could feel his influence as a filmmaker and a personality waning, and figuring out what the hell to make of his unmistakable attraction to La Nouvelle Vague, a movement that worshipped his work but couldn’t have been further removed from his Hollywood-machine style of filmmaking.

Any talk of Hitchcock’s misogyny in the age of the New Puritanism is guaranteed to fall on deaf ears—but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be said. His take on women was far more deft and complex than he’s usually given credit for (consider, for instance, that the two most assertive and courageous characters in Rear Window are Thelma Ritter and Grace Kelly, and how Eva Marie Saint makes Cary Grant look like a dope in North by Northwest). Yes, the sense of personal aggression in his handling of the Marion Crane character is troubling, but the film hinges on being able to see her through Norman’s eyes from the second he first encounters her in the rain at the Bates motel.

That’s one of the more New Wave elements in this very New Wave-y film, that not only is Marion not very likable—nobody in this film is, which is what forces you to gravitate toward Norman and feel some uncomfortably complex emotions about him as it all plays out.

As for the shock factor—it’s there, but not in the broad strokes that enticed and repelled audiences at the time. Probably the two most disturbing images now are Janet Leigh staring out at the audience with her face flattened against the bathroom floor and Perkins mounting Martin Balsam, butcher knife aloft, while Balsam lies on his back squealing like a stuck pig.

What’s more disturbing are the droller, more perverse touches, like forcing the audience to suffer John Gavin through the whole second half of the film, and the justly infamous penultimate scene where the smug psychiatrist explains all. But it’s worth enduring that to get to the brilliant Godardian shot of Norman in confinement, leading to him giving the camera what would become the patented Kubrick crazy stare, with that almost subliminal superimposition of Mother’s rotting face.

What 4K brings to all this is distressing—as in, you can see all the little nicks and scuff marks and tears and stains that evoke the shabby decay of the Bates Motel. It’s hard to emphasize how much this heightens the experience of the film. Given Hitchcock’s horror of any kind of filth, the idea of a place—and a mind—than rundown was probably truly terrifying for him, and it takes all the clarity of UHD resolution to faithfully convey that.

Strangely, capturing the full impact of 35mm film makes the subtle verbal duel between Perkins and Balsam that begins in the motel office and continues out on the walkway far more intense than it felt in earlier home video incarnations. This is another scene where Hitchcock went well outside his comfort zone, not only in the way he allowed the actors to fence, but in the way he turned it into a duel of acting styles that had until then had been foreign to his work. This scene had always felt kind of flat seen anywhere other than in a movie theater, until now.

But 4K both giveth and taketh away. This transfer does its best with some occasionally bad elements, the worst instance probably being a POV shot through Marion’s windshield at the 24:11 mark where the resolution and image enhancement create a giant swarm of digital gnats that make it feel like you’re watching the opening to Men in Black.

Also, without getting pulled into any sweeping generalizations, it needs to be pointed out that while the HDR version bests the UHD version, the differences are so subtle they’ll probably only register with hyper-critical viewers. Spot-checking scenes with a lot of gradation, like Marion and Norman in the lobby parlor (Chapter 8) or Norman burying evidence in the swamp (Chapter 12), showed only the slightest difference between versions.

But it’s hard to emphasize how much 4K does to revive Psycho and make it feel vital, instead of like some vaguely appreciated but permanently filed-away relic. And experiencing it in either UHD or HDR brings a new respect for its mostly restrained black & white cinematography. Color would have been too distracting, visually drowning out the impact of the film’s brutally pared-down main elements. And we can only shudder at the thought of 4K colorization.

As for the sound, you’re probably best off experiencing Psycho with the DTS HD Master Audio stereo track. The Master Audio 5.1 mix doesn’t make the film more engaging, just different. That’s not to say someone someday couldn’t do a compelling Dolby Atmos remix but they would have to be an absolute virtuoso to make their efforts dovetail with Hitchcock’s aesthetic.

And let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge Bernard Herrmann’s groundbreaking score, which is well served by both mixes. I had never really appreciated until I heard it here just how much Herrmann relied on the primal physicality of the bows scraping across the strings and the rough resonance of the string instruments’ body cavities—the cellos and basses in particular. Sure, that impression had always been there, on the verge of recognition, but this time that naked musical aggression seemed far more crucial to the impact of the music than the notes themselves.

Anybody who cares about movies beyond junk-food event flicks needs to make the pilgrimage to Hitchcock at some point in their lives, and there are far worse places to start than Psycho (like, say, Family Plot). Whether it gets under your skin on your first viewing is a matter of blind luck, but it will stick with you. If you haven’t seen it in a while, your best chance beyond the local revival house will be these UHD and HDR releases. And if you’re a rabid fan of the film, you should have already hit the download button by now.

PICTURE | What 4K brings to this film is distressing—as in, you can see all the little nicks and scuff marks and tears and stains that evoke the shabby decay of the Bates Motel.

SOUND | You’re probably best off experiencing Psycho with the DTS HD Master Audio stereo track. The 5.1 mix doesn’t make the film more engaging, just different.

Review: Vertigo

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The Robert Harris restoration of one of Hitchcock’s best translates beautifully into 4K HDR

by Michael Gaughn
October 29, 2020

Lazy commentators on Hitchcock will tell you Vertigo is his best film like that’s the beginning and end of the discussion. I’ll allow that it’s one of his best—it’s definitely his most psychologically probing and, in its strange way, intimate—but I would also argue that both Strangers on a Train and Shadow of a Doubt deserve to be placed on that same top tier.

What is inarguable is that this is by far the best of the first round of Hitchcock films to receive the 4K HDR treatment. Whereas the releases of Rear Window and The Birds are merciless in exposing the flaws in both the original productions and the current state of the film elements, Vertigo is practically seamless in its presentation, gliding from image to image without any jarring technical distractions (with one exception, which I’ll discuss below). If you’re a Hitchcock fan, this is the 4K title to start with.

But it’s not necessarily the best place to start if you’re new to Hitchcock. Vertigo lacks most of the puckish little gimmicks he used to lure in the masses and, if you take it on its own terms, it’s a pretty disturbing tale of a damaged and fundamentally weak man completely gutted by his belief in the cultural tropes of the saint and the whore. And it can get especially unnerving when you realize that that man isn’t really Jimmy Stewart—who delivers an amazingly fearless portrayal of a pathologically vulnerable ex-detective—but Hitchcock himself.

Also, Hitchcock takes his time with the pacing, which won’t sit well with the jolt-a-minute immediate-gratification crowd. It’s a cliché to say Vertigo feels like a dream, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And there’s something about the tactile crispness of the images and the sumptuousness of the colors in this release that just enhances that impression. (But, ironically, given how nightmarish Hitchcock’s imagery can be, Vertigo notoriously contains one of the worst dream sequences ever.)

Seriously aiding that sense of being seduced into and then trapped within a dreamworld is Bernard Herrmann’s masterful score, probably his best. It’s something to be savored, and is especially well presented here, sounding both epic and intimate in its Wagnerian longing, with the orchestra not just some indiscriminate wash of sound but an assembly of individuals where you can feel the bows being drawn across the strings, the metallic resonance of the French horns, and the reedy, wooden resonance of the clarinets. For just one example among too many to name, watch the scenes of Stewart’s car drifting up and down the hills of San Francisco where the muted strings, like a siren’s call, subtly limn his character’s loosening grip on the objective world.

This is undoubtedly Robert Burks’ most accomplished work for Hitchcock, with one subtly, and sometimes strikingly, stunning image after another. Given that this is Hitchcock, there is some occasional overreaching, but you can’t really fault Burks for not being able to rise to an impossible challenge.

There’s one borderline moment where 4K HDR really comes through. The pivotal scene where Madeleine reborn emerges from the green mist in Judy’s shabby hotel room had always looked corny on previous home video releases, like she was stepping out of a time transporter in a ‘50s sci-fi film. But here, by hitting just the right note with the green tone—not just in this shot, but in the ones leading up to it—and by now being able to just see through the haze, you can experience for the first time outside of a movie theater exactly what Hitchcock was aiming for—and it works. It’s not just a clever effects shot but a deeply subjective portrayal of a man using another person to purge his demons and sensing himself on the verge of redemption.

Of course, a lot of the credit for the beauty of this 4K release goes to the 1996 restoration by Robert Harris and James Katz, who refurbished the film on 70mm to mimic its original VistaVision presentation. (I’m usually wary of extras, but it would have been useful if the Kaleidescape download had included something that put this somewhat controversial restoration in context since it’s so crucial to the film’s impact here.)

There is one glaring flaw, which I feel obliged to point out because I can see it’s going to be an issue with 4K releases of older films until someone finds a fix. The photo-backdrop cityscapes out Barbara Bel Geddes’, and to a lesser degree, Stewart’s apartment windows are unconvincing, and look so flat and static that they run the risk of pulling you out of the film. But that’s just not how they looked when Vertigo was shown in theaters.

This is the subject of an ongoing conversation between Gerard Alessandrini and me, and something he broached in his “When Restorations Go Wrong, Pt. 1.” These backdrops don’t stick out now not because people were more gullible back in the day. (In some ways, Studio Era audiences were far more sophisticated than today’s adrenalin junkies.) The cinematographers and production designers knew what they were doing and factored in the impact of images projected on a movie theater screen when they created these sets. But they couldn’t have anticipated what modern technology would do to their efforts. It’s kind of like seeing La Gioconda for the first time and only noticing the cracks in the paint.

Vertigo ranks up with The Shining as the best 4K HDR release of a catalog title I’ve seen to date. You not only get the benefit of experiencing Hitchcock at his best—you get to experience what greater resolution and a wider color gamut can do to restore the impact of an older film.

PICTURE | Ranks up with The Shining as one of the best 4K HDR releases of a catalog title to date.

SOUND | Bernard Herrmann’s masterful score is something to be savored, and is especially well presented here.

Alfred Hitchcock

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