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Dial M for Murder [VHS] Warner Home Video A suave tennis player Ray Milland plots the perfect murder the dispatching of his wealthy wife Grace Kelly who is having an affair with a writer Robert Cummings Amazingly the wife manages to stave off her attacker a twist of fate that challenges the hubbys talent for improvisation Alfred Hitchcock wisely stuck to the stage origins of Dial M for Murder ignoring the temptation to open up the material from the home of the unhappy couple The result may not be one of Hitchcocks deepest films but its a thoroughly engaging chamber movie It also features Grace Kelly at her loveliest the same year she made Rear Window with Hitchcock Dial M for Murder was filmed in the briefly trendy 3-D process and Hitchcock shot some scenes to bring out the depth of the 3-D field its especially good for the nail-biting attempted murder of Kelly and her desperate reach for a pair of scissors that seems to be just outside her grasp However the film was rarely shown with the proper 3-D projection going out flat instead a 1980 reissue restored the process for a limited theatrical release Dial M was remade in 1998 as A Perfect Murder a film that changed and expanded the material with no improvement on the clean witty original --Robert Horton 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 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 North by Northwest - Special Edition [VHS] Turner Home Ent A strong candidate for the most sheerly entertaining and enjoyable movie ever made by a Hollywood studio with Citizen Kane Only Angels Have Wings and Trouble in Paradise running neck and neck Positioned between the much heavier and more profoundly disturbing Vertigo 1958 and the stark horror of Psycho 1960 North by Northwest 1959 is Alfred Hitchcock at his most effervescent in a romantic comedy-thriller that also features one of the definitive Cary Grant performances Which is not to say that this is just Hitchcock Lite seminal Hitchcock critic Robin Wood in his book Hitchcocks Films Revisited makes an airtight case for this glossy MGM production as one of The Masters unbroken series of masterpieces from Vertigo to Marnie Its a classic Hitchcock Wrong Man scenario Grant is Roger O Thornhill initials ROT an advertising executive who is mistaken by enemy spies for a U S undercover agent named George Kaplan Convinced these sinister fellows James Mason as the boss and Martin Landau as his henchman are trying to kill him Roger flees and meets a sexy Stranger on a Train Eva Marie Saint with whom he engages in one of the longest most convolutedly choreographed kisses in screen history And of course there are the famous set pieces the stabbing at the United Nations the crop-duster plane attack in the cornfield where a pedestrian has no place to hide and the cliffhanger finale atop the stone faces of Mount Rushmore Plus a sparkling Ernest Lehman script and that pulse-quickening Bernard Herrmann score What more could a moviegoer possibly desire --Jim Emerson Also on the Blu-ray disc / r North by Northwest is a great-looking Blu-ray disc with a sharpness and colors that seem like youre watching the film for the first time New on the 50th anniversary edition are a one-hour documentary on Hitchcocks work The Masters Touch Hitchcocks Signature Style and a shorter one 25 min specifically about the film North by Northwest One for the Ages Its packaged in one of Warners Blu-ray books with trivia character profiles and stills and vintage art Older extras include screenwriter Ernest Lehmans commentary track a 90-minute profile of star Cary Grant the documentary from 2000 Destination Hitchcock The Making of North by Northwest hosted by Eva Marie-Saint Lifeboat (The Hitchcock Collection) [VHS] 20th Century Fox 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 Marnie [VHS] Universal Studios You could call this one Hoot Along with Hitch With the possible exceptions of Topaz and Family Plot this is Hitchcocks cheesiest movie visually and psychologically crass in comparison with a peak achievement like Vertigo --although it shares some of that films characteristic obsessive themes Sean Connery fresh from the second Bond picture From Russia with Love is a Philadelphia playboy who begins to fall for Tippi Hedrens blonde ice goddess only when he realizes that shes a professional thief shes come to work in his upper-crust insurance office in order to embezzle mass quantities His patient program of investigation and surveillance has a creepy voyeuristic quality thats pure Hitchcock but alls lost when it emerges that the root of Marnies problem is phobic sexual frigidity induced by a childhood trauma Luckily Sean is up to the challenge As it were Not even D H Lawrence believed as fervently as Hitchcock in the curative properties of sexual release --David Chute 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 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 most recent 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 Saboteur (1942) [VHS] Universal Studios Robert Cummings stars as Barry Kane a patriotic munitions worker who is falsely accused of sabotage in this wartime thriller from Alfred Hitchcock Plastered across the front page of every newspaper and hated by the nation Kanes only hope of clearing his name is to find the real villain If this sounds a bit like Hitchcocks later North by Northwest it is There are interesting echoes throughout including a heart-stopping sequence on top of a national monument But the most interesting thing about Saboteur is the frequency with which characters demonstrate their willingness to obstruct the police going on nothing more than the fact that Kane seems like a stand-up guy They do again and again apparently just because good people can spot other good people Saboteur was made during the thick of World War II so there are a few passages of heavy-handed jingoism to get through but theyre relatively painless The script as a whole is a clever one--Algonquin wit Dorothy Parker shares a screenwriting credit and her trademark zingers make for a terrific mix of humor and suspense Saboteur is a pleasure whether youre a die-hard Hitchcock fan or just someone who likes a good nail-biter --Ali Davis