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Vertigo (Widescreen Edition) [VHS] Universal Studios Although it wasnt a box-office success when originally released in 1958 Vertigo has since taken its deserved place as Alfred Hitchcocks greatest most spellbinding most deeply personal achievement In fact it consistently ranks among the top 10 movies ever made in the once-a-decade Sight Sound international critics poll placing at number 4 in the 1992 survey Universal Pictures spectacularly gorgeous 1996 restoration and rerelease of this 1958 Paramount production was a tremendous success with the public too James Stewart plays a retired police detective who is hired by an old friend to follow his wife a superb Kim Novak in what becomes a double role whom he suspects of being possessed by the spirit of a dead madwoman The detective and the disturbed woman fall fall is indeed the operative word in love and well to give away any more of the story would be criminal Shot around San Francisco the Golden Gate Bridge and the Palace of the Legion of Honor are significant locations and elsewhere in Northern California the redwoods Mission San Juan Batista in rapturous Technicolor Vertigo is as lovely as it is haunting --Jim Emerson Rebecca [VHS] KEY VIDEO Anchor Bay Rebecca is an ageless timeless adult movie about a woman who marries a widower but fears she lives in the shadow of her predecessor This was Hitchcocks first American feature and it garnered the Best Picture statue at the 1941 Academy Awards In todays films most twists and surprises are ridiculous or just gratuitous so its sobering to look back on this film where every revelation not only shocks but makes organic sense with the story line Laurence Olivier is dashing and weak fierce and cowed Joan Fontaine is strong yet submissive defiant yet accommodating There isnt a false moment or misstep but the film must have killed the employment outlook of any women named Danvers for about 20 years Brilliant stuff --Keith Simanton The Birds (The Alfred Hitchcock Collection) [VHS] Universal Studios Vacationing in northern California Alfred Hitchcock was struck by a story in a Santa Cruz newspaper Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes From this peculiar incident and his memory of a short story by Daphne du Maurier the master of suspense created one of his strangest and most terrifying films The Birds follows a chic blonde Melanie Daniels Tippi Hedren as she travels to the coastal town of Bodega Bay to hook up with a rugged fellow Rod Taylor shes only just met Before long the town is attacked by marauding birds and Hitchcocks skill at staging action is brought to the fore Beyond the superb effects however The Birds is also one of Hitchcocks most psychologically complicated scenarios a tense study of violence loneliness and complacency What really gets under your skin are not the bird skirmishes but the anxiety and the eerie quiet between attacks The director elevated an unknown model Tippi Hedren mother of Melanie Griffith to being his latest cool blond leading lady an experience that was not always easy on the much-pecked Ms Hedren Still she returned for the next Hitchcock picture the underrated Marnie Treated with scant attention by serious critics in 1963 The Birds has grown into a classic and--despite the sci-fi trappings--one of Hitchcocks most serious films --Robert Horton Suspicion (1941) [VHS] Turner Home Ent Repeated viewings cant dispel the shock of the final scene in this classic 1941 romantic mystery--a brief but disorienting confrontation that suddenly inverts the heroines mounting conviction that shes married a murderer forcing us to reconsider virtually every scene and line of dialogue thats preceded it Its a masterful coup de grace for director Alfred Hitchcock who has built a puzzle around the corrosive power of suspicion threaded with deft ambiguities that toy with dramatic conventions and character archetypes in nearly every frame As embodied by Joan Fontaine who nabbed an Oscar in this second outing with the director Lina McLaidlaw is a buttoned-up bookish heiress whose prim exterior conceals longings for a more engaged emotional life Her solution materializes in the darkly handsome Johnnie Aysgarth a gambler womanizer and spendthrift who flirts then pursues and soon marries her As Aysgarth Cary Grant is both irresistible and sinister capable of deceit and petty theft as well as grander designs on his brides impending fortune Linas passion for Johnnie is clouded by each new revelation about his apparent dishonesty from clandestine gambling to real estate development schemes more troubling are clues implicating him in the death of his best friend and the prospect that Johnnie may be slowly poisoning Lina herself By the time we see him ascending a darkened staircase with a suspicious glass of milk an image made all the more indelible through the spectral glow the director captures in the glass the evidence seems damning indeed In fact even as Hitchcock stacks the deck against Johnnie and takes full advantage of Grants skill at conveying such menace the director also dots his landscape with visual clues to Linas own neurotic and erotic obsessions The final scene forces us to reevaluate her behavior while leaving enough of a cloud over Johnnie to rob him and us of a complete exoneration Its a wicked unsettling payoff to a brilliantly executed thriller --Sam Sutherland Rope (1948) [VHS] Universal Studios An experimental film masquerading as a standard Hollywood thriller The plot of Rope is simple and based on a successful stage play two young men John Dall and Farley Granger commit murder more or less as an intellectual exercise They hide the body in their large apartment then throw a dinner party Will the body be discovered Director Alfred Hitchcock fascinated by the possibilities of the long-take style decided to shoot this story as though it were happening in one long uninterrupted shot Since the camera can only hold one 10-minute reel at a time Hitchcock had to be creative when it came time to change reels disguising the switches as the camera passed behind someones back or moved behind a lamp In later years Hitchcock wrote off the approach as misguided and Rope may not be one of Hitchcocks top movies but its still a nail-biter They dont call him the Master of Suspense for nothing James Stewart as a suspicious professor marks his first starring role for Hitchcock a collaboration that would lead to the masterpieces Rear Window and Vertigo --Robert Horton To Catch a Thief [VHS] Paramount This minor 1955 work by Alfred Hitchcock one of the lighter entries of his creative peak in the 1950s is still imbued with the masters stock themes of shared guilt and romantic ambivalence It is also hardly lacking in Hitchcockian cinematic inventiveness such as a famous often-imitated sequence in which some smooching between stars Cary Grant and Grace Kelly is intercut with a fireworks show that just happens to be going on outside in a Riviera setting Grant plays a reformed cat burglar who is suspected of reviving his trade though he knows someone else is using his old methods A very enjoyable experience but dont get this confused with Hitchcocks other Cary Grant film of that decade which was a masterpiece North by Northwest --Tom Keogh The Man Who Knew Too Much [VHS] Universal Studios Alfred Hitchcocks 1956 remake of his own 1934 spy thriller is an exciting event in its own right with several justifiably famous sequences James Stewart and Doris Day play American tourists who discover more than they wanted to know about an assassination plot When their son is kidnapped to keep them quiet they are caught between concern for him and the terrible secret they hold When asked about the difference between this version of the story and the one he made 22 years earlier Hitchcock always said the first was the work of a talented amateur while the second was the act of a seasoned professional Indeed several extraordinary moments in this update represent consummate filmmaking particularly a relentlessly exciting Albert Hall scene with a blaring symphony an assassins gun and Doris Days scream Along with Hitchcocks other films from the mid-1950s to 1960 including Vertigo Rear Window and Psycho The Man Who Knew Too Much is the work of a master in his prime --Tom Keogh Topaz (1969) [VHS] Universal Studios Alfred Hitchcock hadnt made a spy thriller since the 1930s so his 1969 adaptation of Leon Uriss bestseller seemed like a curious choice for the director But Hitchcock makes Uriss story of the Wests investigation into the Soviet Unions dealings with Cuba his own Frederick Stafford plays a French intelligence agent who works with his American counterpart John Forsythe to break up a Soviet spy ring The film is a bit flat dramatically and visually and there are sequences that seem to occupy Hitchcocks attention more than others A minor work all around with at least two alternative endings shot by Hitchcock --Tom Keogh Lifeboat (The Hitchcock Collection) [VHS] 20th Century Fox Lifeboat The Hitchcock Collection VHS Part mystery part wartime polemic Lifeboat finds director Alfred Hitchcock tackling a cinematic challenge that foreshadows the self-imposed handicaps of Rope and Rear Window As with those subsequent features Hitchcock confines his action and characters to a single set in this instance the lone surviving lifeboat from an Allied freighter sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic A less confident ingenious filmmaker might have opened up John Steinbecks dialogue-driven character study beyond the battered boat and its cargo of survivors but Hitchcock instead revels in his predicament to exploit the enforced intimacy between his characters Indeed we never actually see the doomed freighter--the smoking ships funnel beneath the credits simply sinks beneath the waves and were plunged into the escalating tensions between those who gradually find their way to the boat a band of eight English and American passengers and crew plus a German sailor Walter Slezak rescued from the U-boat itself destroyed by the freighters deck gun Heading the cast and inevitably commanding their and our attention is the cello-voiced Tallulah Bankhead as Connie Porter a cynical sophisticated writer whose priorities seem to be hanging onto her mink and keeping her lipstick fresh Gradually the others find Porter and her lifeboat forming a temporary community that inevitably suggests a careful cross section of archetypes from wealthy industrialist Henry Hull to ships boiler men John Hodiak and William Bendix Hitchcock juggles the interpersonal skirmishes between the boats occupants with the mystery of their German prisoner which itself becomes a meditation on the fine line between nationalism and morality a line that Slezak walks delicately until his identity is resolved Visually Hitchcock transforms his back-lot set and its rear-projected cloudbanks into a desolate stretch of ocean while capturing the horror of an amputation through an economical set of images culminating in an empty boot --Sam Sutherland Rear Window [VHS] Paramount Pictures Like the Greenwich Village courtyard view from its titular portal Alfred Hitchcocks classic Rear Window is both confined and multileveled both its story and visual perspective are dictated by its protagonists imprisonment in his apartment convalescing in a wheelchair from which both he and the audience observe the lives of his neighbors Cheerful voyeurism as well as the behavior glimpsed among the various tenants affords a droll comic atmosphere that gradually darkens when he sees clues to what may be a murder Photographer L B Jeff Jeffries James Stewart is in fact a voyeur by trade a professional photographer sidelined by an accident while on assignment His immersion in the human drama and comedy visible from his window is a by-product of boredom underlined by the disapproval of his girlfriend Lisa Grace Kelly and a wisecracking visiting nurse Thelma Ritter Yet when the invalid wife of Lars Thorwald Raymond Burr disappears Jeff enlists the two women to help him to determine whether shes really left town as Thorwald insists or been murdered Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto convincingly argues that the crime at the center of this mystery is the MacGuffin--a mere pretext--in a film thats more interested in the implications of Jeffs sentinel perspective We actually learn more about the lives of the other neighbors given generic names by Jeff even as hes drawn into their lives he and we watch undetected than we do the putative murderer and his victim Jeffs evident fear of intimacy and commitment with the elegant adoring Lisa provides the other vital thread to the script one woven not only into the couples own relationship but reflected and even commented upon through the various neighbors lives At minimum Hitchcocks skill at making us accomplices to Jeffs spying coupled with an ingenious escalation of suspense as the teasingly vague evidence coalesces into ominous proof deliver a superb thriller spiked with droll humor right up to its nail-biting nightmarish climax At deeper levels however Rear Window plumbs issues of moral responsibility and emotional honesty while offering further proof were any needed of the directors brilliance as a visual storyteller --Sam Sutherland