Blame it on the subject matter: Stage Fright, especially for postwar Hitchcock, is all elbows. Its technique is its narrative, plot, character, and motive--something that's a relative rarity in the master's oeuvre despite his notoriously stringent preparation and acumen. And though it works pretty well as an academic inquiry into how the artificiality of the stage can comment with eloquence, "Hamlet"-like, on the bigger picture, the film stumbles along in fits and starts, pulled forward by its mechanism instead of anything like momentum or logic. In truth, I wonder if the "play-within-a-play" trope doesn't work better as either microcosm (as in the final confession of I Confess) or leitmotif (as in the numerous references to performance in North by Northwest, which most likely owes its title to a line about pretending to be crazy from "Hamlet"). Of particular issue is one of Marlene Dietrich's mannered turns, which is potentially excusable (given the staginess of the piece), and a horrible score by Leighton Lucas, which isn't. Still a Hitchcock film in his middle-period, however, Stage Fright, no doubt owing to its nature, is particularly focused in on disguises, perceptions, mirrors, eyeglasses, and cigarettes--finding our hero, Eve (Jane Wyman, fantastic), taking on the guise of a Dorothy Parker-esque reporter at one moment and a maid infiltrating a fatale's lair at another, all for the cause of a suspect flashback from an unreliable narrator.

Opening with curtains drawing back from its London setting, Stage Fright's central concern is whether Eve will be able to burrow beneath the artifice and deception of the acting kind--will be able to triumph over willful deceptions, myriad shifts in sympathy, and mercurial behaviours. Scenes of double-talk and double-time backtracking--such as Eve's better object choice, Inspector "Ordinary" Smith (Michael Wilding), visiting her parents in a cloud of misdirection, or a secret shared by Eve and her father (Alastair Sim) that they have become complicit in the escape of Eve's maybe-murderous boyfriend--segue into a ridiculous musical number starring Dietrich, performing on stage in a white gown in a metaphor for the marionette's dance of the rest of the picture. It's that complexity that ultimately undermines the production, preying on Hitchcock's notable weakness: occasionally telling too much to an audience that I suspect he respected less than he did his actors, setting up a series of long talks and plot recaps in lieu of anything actually happening. Throughout, though, are bizarre moments (a monologue about a dog that hated its owner; a line from Eve delivered as she's facing "up-stage") that make the picture impossible to completely disregard. A running joke of Eve acting the Dr. Watson to Smith's Sherlock Holmes indicates a recognition of sorts that Stage Fright is something of a chamber piece--and no matter the innovation of an unreliable narrator, something of an antiquated bore, too.

The source print for Warner's DVD release of Stage Fright has seen better days. From the first frame to the last, lines mar the video along with the more usual blooming and grain epidemic to flicks of this age, but as Warner's other Signature line titles demonstrated, there exist elements from the period in finer condition, if not necessarily for this film. The excellence of the remaining transfers in the studio's Hitchcock box set of course buys Warner the benefit of doubt. Similarly, the picture's centre-channel mono audio is a little shaky--tinny and, I guess the word is "reedy," in its dialogue at the volumes you have to play it in order to catch all the rapid-fire patter. Laurent Bouzereau's standard documentary "Hitchcock and Stage Fright" (20 mins.) covers the usual ground with the usual suspects: Robert Osbourne, Peter Bogdanovich, Pat Hitchcock O'Connell, and so forth, with an archival clip featuring Wyman and various other personalities (Psycho II helmer Richard Franklin, for instance) in orbit around this picture as they recall on-set anecdotes and provide very basic analyses of certain themes. Not indispensable, but good for the neophyte. A trailer--which is essentially Wyman receiving an award from PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE clipped together with a sort of haphazard, hackneyed, bemused teaser that sounds like it's trying to crib the style of Hitchcock's own deadpan humour--rounds out the disc.-

1.33:1; 110 minutes; English Mono; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Warner

SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Alfred Hitchcock's queerest film (Rope notwithstanding) and proof positive of the director's knack for casting men of ambiguous sexual mooring in roles that cannily exploit it, Strangers on a Train, shot in vibrant contrasts by the great Robert Burks, is best read as a dark comedy--a noir in the most perverse sense of the term. Find in it the finest performance by troubled Robert Walker, tormented to his grave by David O. Selznick's infatuation with and eventual theft of wife Jennifer Jones and committed, not long after Strangers on a Train finished shooting, to a mental institution, where he was the victim of an accidentally-lethal dose of sedative. Playing a character named after the kidnapper and murderer of the Lindbergh baby, Walker is Bruno, a spatted dandy who bumps shoes with hero Guy (Farley Granger--the "girl" in the Rope dyad) on a train and ostensibly hatches a plan with the pliant tennis star to "criss-cross" murders (trade assassinations, as it were), freeing each of them from the burden of blood motive. Bruno wants his father dead; Guy, involved in a very public affair with the senator's daughter Anne (Ruth Roman) but shackled to loathsome Miriam (Kasey Rogers), would benefit from Miriam's timely demise. So when Miriam turns up dead by Bruno's hand, Guy is trapped by circumstance into either murdering Bruno's dad or going to the police and implicating himself and his lover in a conspiracy.

The murder sequence is astonishing, unfolding on an island in the middle of a carnival ground where revellers take boats to consummate their passion. Hitchcock's use of shadow in the lover's lane tunnel that introduces this passage over water suggests (as it has in Notorious and will again in The Birds) a literal sea change, a devouring of the protagonist (Bruno now) by carnal night, deepened in this film by the read that Bruno might be the homosexual-as-monster infiltrating a heterosexual orgy in a picture that sees all forms of heterosexual sex as disgusting and venal. This sympathy that we're invited to invest in Bruno's point-of-view as he stalks Miriam--who's arm-in-arm-in-arm with two paramours obviously expecting sexual favours from her after stuffing her with food ("I've never seen a girl eat like that!")--is paid off when he corners her in a dark wood, lights his lighter in her face to identify her, then throttles her in an action reflected in the convex lens of her broken glasses. Hitchcockian motifs: eyeglasses as the filmmaker's perspective (and the wearers of them either ironic or literal holders of extra-textual information); smoke and fire as evidence of infernal presences and Promethean knowledge; and the thought that film is a voyeuristic--and, as such, criminal--act. We want Bruno to kill the little slut. Later, we want him to retrieve Guy's lighter from a sewer grate so that he can frame him for the murder of the wife Guy was cheating on.

Every moment of Strangers on a Train is meticulous, constructed with a careful, metered brilliance and allowed to unfurl with an excruciating clockwork precision. Note the barred shadows of the gate across the street from Guy's apartment when Bruno stops by to tell him that Miriam sleeps with the fishes, or how Guy joins Bruno, guilty, when the police come calling. It's a film told as much with images as it is with narrative, cribbing liberally from Patricia Highsmith's debut novel while keeping intact Highsmith's emerging throughlines of protean anti-heroes at prey amongst swiftly tilting moral certitudes. By the end, only Bruno understands the bond he shares with Guy: that the love triangle of the picture hasn't been between Guy, Anne, and Miriam but between Guy, Anne, and Bruno. And after the magnificent process-and-miniatures stunt that ends the film (involving a carousel gone out of control--at the hand of an idiot policeman, natch), when Bruno whispers "oh, Guy," he's holding fast to the last remnants of a love affair jealously guarded, slipping now through his fingers. There are dozens of ways to access the text of Strangers on a Train--enough that once the initial surface thrill of it fades, the ripples it creates through the rest of the master's films of the fifties make it, along with Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious, the work most necessary for a deeper appreciation of Hitchcock's late masterpieces: Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie.

Warner reissues Strangers on a Train on DVD in a Two-Disc Special Edition that includes not only the theatrical cut of the picture but also the "British" alternative introduced to cinephiles on the now-obsolete 1997 flipper. Be advised that "British" is actually a stubborn misnomer used to characterize a discarded preview version, as clarified by the information on this new edition. The preview version ends on Ruth Roman's ecstasy at the news that Guy's been exonerated by Bruno's death (freed to love her, if you will, and quite literally by the return of the source of Guy's phallic power: his lighter), with various small differences here and again that change the tenor of the piece ever-so-slightly (the luncheon shared by Bruno and Guy is far more flirtatious, for instance)--not enough to be more than a curiosity for scholars interested in seeing how a good filmmaker uses test audiences as a test of their own suspicions rather than as the arbiter of their editing decisions. (There is delicious irony in the fact that M. Night Shyamalan, the guy who still won't cop to the fact that he reshot the ending of The Village following frankly disastrous test screenings, was invited to share his thoughts about Hitchcock for this very DVD.) The theatrical cut is the official text, as it were, and is the one discussed above and below.

Matching the virtually flawless fullscreen b&w video transfers of both incarnations is clean DD 1.0 mono audio that perfectly balances the dialogue and Dimitri Tiomkin's score. As an aside, note the love theme, which Hitchcock uses to underscore one of Guy and Bruno's initial encounters: it's something he'll experiment with again to greater resonance by placing Bernard Herrmann's romantic overture under Leonard and Van Damme on the train platform in North By Northwest. The first platter is, to the benefit of PQ, light on extras, with the release print attended only by a theatrical trailer (also remastered) and a film-length yak-track moderated by Laurent Bouzereau, featuring contemporary and archival information from a constellation of scholars, relatives, sycophants, Robert Osborne, Peter Bogdanovich, and, in two key instances, Hitchcock himself. The least involving bits are extended musings from Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith's biographer, who goes on at length about Highsmith in a general, non-scene specific way. Similarly, Patricia Hitchcock, Osborne, et al drone on and on about nothing much at random intervals. Osborne, for example, lavishes praise on the tennis sequence while, onscreen, we're watching Bruno fight with his father. The commentary is a model of how not to edit a multi-headed yakker. But the whole thing is worth it when, during the murder sequence as well as in the carousel climax, taped excerpts from an interview Bogdanovich conducted with Hitchcock in 1963 clarify themes, underscore classic obfuscations, and, in general, create the equivalent awe of the RCA dog hearing its master's voice.

Disc 2 contains a retrospective making-of documentary, "Strangers on a Train: A Hitchcock Classic" (37 mins.), wherein Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell, Richard Schickel, Osborne, Bogdanovich, Bill Krohn, and so on provide background on the picture ranging from the truly trivial to the moderately surprising. Of the former, Bogdanovich's quick and hyperbolic analysis of the opening meet-cute focused on feet--of the latter, Robert Walker Jr.'s haunted memories of his doomed father in the last months of his life coming home from work and, as had become his nightly ritual, pouring himself a highball. Walker Jr. (a dead ringer for his dad) also says that Bruno is his favourite character in the piece not because he was played by his dad, but because Bruno is so vital and interesting. William Blake is grinning somewhere ear to ear. "An Appreciation by M. Night Shyamalan" (13 mins.) sees the immodest one (how his and Bouzereau's egos fit onto one DVD is the real miracle of digital compression) seguing from an appreciation of Hitchcock's lengthy dialogue sequences into a self-serving anecdote about how he identifies with Guy in that people are always coming up to Night on the street, starting a conversation in which it's revealed that this alleged stranger knows everything about him! What a horrible burden it is to be Shyamalan--wait, what were we talking about again? Oh right, Hitchcock. Night goes on to regurgitate plot and confesses that upon watching the movie again recently, it became clear to him that Bruno was a psychopath and the film is about how he affects other people. How did this yahoo make The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, anyway?

The best docu on the disc might be "A Victim's P.O.V." (7 mins.), in which contract player Kasey Rogers (a.k.a. Laura Elliot) recalls hoping that Strangers on a Train would be her big break (and she does do fantastic work in the picture as hussy Miriam) and how Hitchcock instructed her to fall "gracefully," as though she were doing the Lindy Hop, in her death scene. Unaffected and articulate, Rogers gives insight into the plight of the contract player in a series of anecdotes that resurrect the joy cinephiles first experienced when LaserDiscs began to promise commentaries by the filmmakers themselves. Rogers appears in Disc 1's patchwork yakker as well and, true to form, delivers what are perhaps the best nuggets--not all of which, to my surprise and pleasure, are repeated here. "The Hitchcocks on Hitch" (11 mins.) shows home movies of the family at rest and play, with Patricia's daughters (Hitch's granddaughters) Mary Stone and Katie Fiala reminiscing about the kind, loving man who was their granddad. It's a warm, welcome antidote to the recent trend of making a tabloid of Hitchcock's life and obsessions. I'm not discounting the dark side--I'm seeing for one of the first times the light side. "Alfred Hitchcock's Historical Meeting" (1 min.) closes the disc on a weird note: it's a vintage newsreel, silent, of Hitch standing next to a train and shaking hands with folks at a whistle stop.-

1.33:1; 101 minutes (release version)/103 minutes (preview version); English Mono, French Mono; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; 2 DVD-9s; Warner

Just the visual beauty of Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess speaks volumes for its inclusion on the short list of the master's masterpieces. This is one of the most astonishing-looking films in all of black-and-white cinematography, its palette of greys a veritable vice press on the already-quailing Montgomery Clift. A late, breathtaking montage wherein Clift, walking the streets of Quebec (filmed on location by the great Robert Burks), crosses a silhouette of a statue of Christ on His last walk to Calvary defines by itself character and theme: Hitchcock's wrong-man obsession clarified as Catholic guilt transference. The power of Hitchcock's best films is a potent mixture of audacious cinematic genius and the suspicion that original sin makes mistaken identity merely the intrusion of cosmic judgment. (It's inevitable and you must have done something at some point to deserve it, besides.) There's something greater at work in Hitchcock's films, the presence of the director asserting itself always--and a connection is struck in I Confess between that directorial control and a sort of implacable karmic omnipresence. For Hitch, filmmaking is Old Testament stuff, and I Confess is a little of that old-time religion.

Father Logan (Clift) hears the confession of gardener Otto (O.E. Hasse), who's just donned the vestments and killed his employer. An employer, as it happens, who was blackmailing Ruth (Anne Baxter), a woman with whom Logan had an affair prior to the war and before the call of the cloth. Because of Catholic law, Logan is forbidden to act on his knowledge in any way--even if it's to protect himself once the attentions of tenacious Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden) put him, in a manner of speaking, up on the cross. The film is one of Hitchcock's least subtle works, laying aside his wryness in favour of the sort of earnestness that most often registers as pretension. In I Confess, though, this feels a lot more like tortured self-examination.

The film turns on one moment where silly, vain Ruth tells Larrue all that she knows in an attempt to exonerate Logan, only to get him deeper in trouble. Hitchcock's preoccupation with the unreliability of certain kinds of communication, then, finds explication in the theory of Catholic confession (Otto's to Logan, Ruth's to Larrue), which goes hand-in-hand with a look at the roots of his mistrust of ritual and rules and possibly offers a glimpse into Hitchcock's predilection for casting women in the role of temptress fatale. Eves (literally sometimes, as with Eva Marie Saint's "Eve Kendall" from North by Northwest) wield their sexuality by design or by accident in Hitchcock's films, affording the Hitchcock protagonist knowledge (remembering Rod Taylor's assumption of the gaze after Tippi Hedren relinquishes her power traveling across Bodega Bay in The Birds) as well as a certain, awful power that mainly succeeds in rendering his women mute, stunned, domesticated at least and often dead. In I Confess, Ruth is the dispenser of Sophocles' "terrible knowledge" ("How terrible is knowledge when it brings no profit to the wise"), and by her concession to the rules of society in "confessing" to the authorities, she exacerbates Logan's dilemma in his maniacal adherence to the letter of Catholic law. I Confess isn't a play for sainthood for Logan--just the opposite, I'd suggest: the drama here is Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise. As with Christ's Passion, it suggests that a deity (Hitchcock and his fallen perception of the Catholic godhead) more interested in sadistic, constipated testing than in actual choice preordains every great fall and every great suffering.

So the hero of I Confess is Otto's terrified, long-suffering wife Alma (Dolly Haas), her hopeful name--which she shares with Hitchcock's own wife--recalling at once the Catholic plea for charity and her function in the film as the one true martyr. Tellingly, it's neither Larrue (bound by the laws of man), nor Logan (bound by the laws of god), nor Ruth (bound by the laws of sex) who transgresses across societal boundaries, but Alma alone. She betrays Logan's vows for him outside a courtroom where Logan's just been exonerated (to the universal displeasure of a gathered, stone-throwing throng), breaking her marital vows (man, God, sex) in the same breath. Like any good Greek prophet, Alma is promptly struck down for her heroism. She's the true avatar for Hitchcock--the Roger Thornhill analog, if you will, blithely stepping through the embedded conventions of her culture to, ironically, restore order. And though I Confess is relatively unique among Hitchcock's later films as a piece almost entirely free of irony and humour, it finds a moment of exquisite black comedy at the very end when Otto climbs on a stage and exorcises the mystery MacGuffin. What we're left with is a fairly vicious excoriation of man's futile attempts to turn chaos into order, each tactic we use (law, superstition, tradition, ritual) washing out as every bit as arbitrary as the One Way signs arrayed at cross-purposes at the beginning of the film. I Confess is Hitchcock's very public confession, with his confessional the confines of the theatre and his Father confessors the audience, rooting for Logan to stop being such a silly goose.

Warner's Academy ratio DVD of I Confess is a weaker technical effort in the studio's "Signature Collection," much to my dismay. Cinematographer Burks, who shot about a dozen films with Hitchcock (most of my favourites, as it happens, including The Birds, Vertigo, Marnie, North by Northwest, The Wrong Man, Strangers on a Train), deserves as distinct a transfer as his camera's carefully contrasted eye would allow, but the images here seem overly sooty and ill-defined. While grain is minimal, the negative betrays signs of degradation, though it probably goes without saying that this presentation is a vast improvement over any of the VHS versions floating around out there. The 1.0 Dolby mono audio is similarly muddy, if clear enough to hear the dialogue with ease.

Laurent Bouzereau's "Hitchcock's Confession: A Look at I Confess" (21 mins.) assembles the usual suspects--Peter Bogdanovich, Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell, Bill Krohn, Richard Schickel--for another go-round. Production anecdotes are recounted and a good long while is spent deconstructing the much-argued "romantic" dream sequence set to Dimitri Tiomkin's trippy, exceptional score in which Baxter's romantic fantasy is projected onto the screen as a menacingly sensual staircase descent. Tales of how the film was censored by the Catholic hoi polloi are reasonably edifying, especially as how their not allowing Logan to be martyred actually lends an extraordinary amount of ambiguity to the dictums of the true faith. Praise is effusive for Clift and well deserved--I Confess is a rare Hitchcock that's nearly stolen by a single performance. (The more you know about Clift, I dare say, the better his performances become.) A "Gala Canadian Premiere for I Confess" (1 min.) shows Baxter escorted by Hitchcock in a snowy Quebec sans Clift in newsreel footage that is largely interesting for the level of discomfort Hitch exhibits posing with the assembled rabble. A misleading trailer (3 mins.) in excellent condition rounds out the disc.-

1.33:1; 94 minutes; English Mono; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Warner

1.66:1 DVD capture: Rear Window REAR WINDOW Special Edition - Universal Legacy Series Image: A-, Sound: B-, Extras: A

Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada November 14, 2008|Chronologically the first in a triptych of Hitchcock classics recently re-released on DVD under Universal's Legacy Series banner, Rear Window appears in an impressive remaster of a restoration that if nothing else proved the film to be somewhat beyond repair. This presentation is noticeably more robust (richer colours, deeper blacks, finer grain) and, with the feature and its supplements now split into two discs, unhindered by compression artifacts. It's not quite breathtaking--though Grace Kelly, looking in that black & white dress like few women ever have on film, certainly is--but it's an appreciable upgrade. The DD 2.0 mono audio is still as Bill described in his review: jagged-sounding. For the record, Franz Waxman's opening riff remains--even taking all of Bernard Herrmann's astounding work for Hitch into account--my favourite bit of razzmatazz in Hitchcock. The first platter also houses a new yakker by author John Fawell (Hitchcock's Rear Window: The Well-Made Film) that, at first, comes across as one of those dry regurgitations, but upon reflection it reveals itself to contain a wealth of wry, smart observations. I like his noting that Thelma Ritter manhandling Stewart is a work of great, ironic comic play that just might be Hitchcock's mute commentary on Jeff's rejection of Lisa's desire to wed. Packed with information and full of these quiet, humbly-made observations, Fawell's track is well worth a listen. As with the Psycho set, exhaustive photo galleries and a couple of vintage trailers round out Disc 1. The second disc recycles "Rear Window Ethics" and the conversation with John Michael Hayes--the latter reminding me of the section of Donald Spoto's The Dark Side of Genius that details the ugly way the Master handled Hayes, author of what are arguably Hitchcock's four most humane works. An informal continuation of similar extras on Psycho and Vertigo, "Pure Cinema: Through the Eyes of the Master" (25 mins.) analyzes Hitchcock from a technical point-of-view via interviews with Scorsese, Spoto, William Friedkin, Guillermo Del Toro, and so on. It's not very in-depth, though it's wonderful listening to Scorsese talk about how Hitchcock deals with "impulse" and that it's that "impulse" that has obsessed Scorsese in what he maintains is every one of his own films. I love his commentary about the way Norman cranes his neck when he's reading the ledger until all we see is the bottom of his chin as his jaws work on his candy corn. Why isn't Scorsese doing commentaries for Hitch's stuff? Craig McKay, editor of The Silence of the Lambs, dissects the montage elements of the murders in Frenzy and, in the process, says a ton about his own work on Demme's picture. It's a pretty average doc, truth be told (hence the appearance at one point of Eli Roth), but there are moments in it of real grace and true insight. "Breaking Barriers: The Sound of Hitchcock" (23 mins.) reassembles the same group of pros along with some ace sound editors to expound at length on the soundscapes in Hitch's films. It made me dizzy with glee, as much of the time is given over to a close examination of Herrmann's score for The Birds. An excerpt from the Hitchcock/Truffaut tapes (16 mins.) is here played beneath clips from the film, revealing one of the irritations of that interview as it often skirts real analysis in favour of what is, let's face it, fanboyism. An episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" called "Mr. Blanchard's Secret" provides the distaff version of Rear Window as a lady mystery writer (Mary Scott) runs an internal monologue about how she's never seen the wife of their new neighbours. Directed by Hitch, the piece includes one nice moment of gathering tension as our dotty heroine is caught snooping. Lots to dig into with that castrating laugh from Foreign Correspondent married to a fascinated obsession with female sexuality and the creative sense. Good cigarette play, too, as it happens, with that silver cigarette lighter from Strangers on a Train making a cameo appearance of sorts. Not a masterpiece, but interesting to be sure.-

With nothing except recreational voyeurism to entertain him (the room is filled with camera gear, not books), Jeff, a daredevil photographer, spies on the people across the street, interpreting their lives through open blinds and half-drawn shades. He christens them--as we're wont to do to recurring passersby--with names like Miss Lonelyheart, who gets dolled-up for solitary suppers, and Miss Torso, a humorously over-endowed ballet dancer. But he becomes most preoccupied by The Thorwalds, a married couple whose constant bickering climaxes in Mrs. Thorwald's disappearance. Did Mr. Thorwald kill her? Is he disposing of her body piece-by-piece with the help of his trusty salesman's trunk?

Most modern thrillers would be content to spread the above an hour-and-a-half thin, but what Hitchcock brings to and does with the premise is singular. There are of course the old readings about Rear Window's, well, "rear window ethics," as Jeff's provisional girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) puts it--its subtle indictment of Jeff, which implicates movie-watchers for the same. Although we look to cinema for escapism and catharsis, we also assume, as Jeff does his unaware players, moral superiority over a film's characters. (Hitchcock never more concisely described the role of dehumanization in storytelling.) Complicating matters is the fact that Jeff himself provokes our judgment, an imposition of our feelings, because he's having trouble committing to Lisa. She's too beautiful, doting, and refined, you see, and who among us wouldn't sell our souls for that midlife crisis? Jeff is an intermediary, we are the gods.

A couple of years ago a friend made a documentary for school about a painter confidante of his, and I often quote its subject on a giant piece that hangs above his mantle and overwhelms everything else in the room: "The more time I can spend looking at it and thinking about art instead of life, the better." That's Hitchcock, as is often related, planning every last frame that surrounds or encompasses Jeff. That's me writing about Jeff. That's also Stewart's sonuvabitch hero in a nutshell; Lisa, clever girl, hijacks his obsessive gaze by snooping in places that he, wheelchair-bound, can't. In essence, Lisa is every woman who ever pretended to like Monday Night Football, as epitomized by Rear Window's cheeky closing pan. Is the movie ultimately about Hitchcock and his wife and co-conspirator Alma Reville?

If 1954's Rear Window wasn't already perpetually relevant, the continual growth of television assured that it would be. Audiences used to channel-surfing and such luxuries as picture-in-picture will have no trouble adapting to Hitchcock's then-idiosyncratic visual approach (the neighbours are each shot with long lenses from the axis of Jeff's station) nor empathizing with Jeff's ever-shifting attention span, an unusual attribute for a fifties protagonist (especially someone as dégagé as Stewart). Aw, heck: see Rear Window, if you haven't already, for Kelly's sensual, slo-mo entrance, or for the film's heart-pausing showdown--which, if I'm not mistaken, makes subtle allusions to James Whale's Frankenstein.

The victim of ignorant replication practices, Rear Window's original negative took the team of preservationists Robert Harris and James Katz (Vertigo) several years to restore. According to Universal's DVD version of their efforts, the film was somewhat beyond repair, as the 1.66:1 (16x9-enhanced) widescreen image is not only lacking in fine and shadow detail but also, albeit infrequently, marred by flecking. Too, the dialogue has a jagged quality I wasn't expecting, although music and effects are distortion-free. Heavy compression compounds the issue; dense supplemental material arrives at the expense of digital artifacts.

Good dense supplemental material, mind you. My personal favourite is "A Conversation with Screenwriter John Michael Hayes," a 13-minute interview in which Hayes reveals how a botched soiree with Hitch led to their four-picture collaboration. The much-longer "Rear Window Ethics" (55 mins.) features usual commentators Peter Bogdanovich (who caps off with a priceless anecdote), Curtis Hanson (whose The Bedroom Window is one of Rear Window's many pale facsimiles), and Pat Hitchcock O'Connell (the master's jovial daughter), but is most interesting during reflections from surviving participants Herbert Coleman (the assistant director) and Georgine Darcy, Miss Torso herself. Production stills, Rear Window's original and re-release trailers, notes, bios, and the unabridged script (via DVD-ROM) fill out this must-have. But why oh why the bastardized cover art for all of the titles in Universal's Alfred Hitchcock Collection? I thought only MGM did things like that. (See The James Bond DVD Collection volumes 1, 2, and 3.)-

1.66:1 (16x9); 115 minutes; English Mono, French Mono; CC; Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Universal