Alfred Hitchcock - The Masterpiece Collection
October 23, 2005
What a good month it’s been to be an Alfred Hitchcock fan. Along with the release of “Lifeboat” on DVD, and a month long retrospective on TCM, going back to his early British silents, as well as his more famous American features, Universal has recently released a handsome box set of 14 previously available titles, in new special editions, called “Alfred Hitchcock – The Masterpiece Collection”, and it’s a treasure to behold. The presentation of the set is pretty, with a velvet casing, 15 disks packaged in cases of four, designed with poster art from the respective films, and a beautiful booklet to go along with the bountiful mini-documentaries and extra bonus disk featured with the films themselves. Of the all-time great directors, few have been as well handled in this DVD era as Hitchcock, with respectful treatments from the cream of the DVD crop, Warner Brothers and The Criterion Collection, and now Universal has stepped up big time with this glorious collection, priced cheapest online for around $90, with films ranging from 1942 to 1976, coving most of his famous 1950’s color spectacles, and the entire stretch of his late life features. It’s an amazing body of work in itself, but taken in the grand scope of the master’s entire canon, it’s remarkably just a third of his enormously entertaining, obsessively deconstructed output, most of which are available on some format of DVD, from the top notch Criterion editions of “Rebecca” and “Spellbound”, to bargain basement cheapo editions of “The Farmer’s Wife” and “Number 17”, Hitchcock must be studied, and this set is as good a place to start as any.
The title to the box set is appropriate to the presentation, but false in that only six of the 14 films are true masterpieces, with most of Hitch’s later films failing to equal the brilliance of his 50’s works. We’ll get to the six essentials in a minute, but of the eight other films represented here, the best is the oldest, “Saboteur”, from 1942, Hitchcock’s fifth American film, starring Robert Cummings as Barry Kane, wrongfully accused as a saboteur by the real culprit, who he chases across America, all the way to the Statue of Liberty, for one of the director’s most famous climaxes. The wrong man motif was a favorite of Hitchcock, and worked better in the later “North by Northwest”, but this film is thrilling and filled with WWII paranoia and fear, and that Statue of Liberty sequence is justly famous, a real eye opener. Other notables of the non-masterpieces in the set are 1948’s “Rope”, a bold attempt to film a murder mystery in continuous long takes, an interesting, if unsuccessful, trick; 1955’s “The Trouble With Harry”, a black dead body comedy notable for the first time collaboration with composer Bernard Herrmann; and 1956’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, a remake of his superior 1934 British thriller, this time featuring Doris Day singing “Que Sera, Sera”, and a much studied editing spectacle finale at the Albert Hall. The rest, “Marnie”, “Torn Curtain”, “Topaz”, and “Family Plot”, four of his final five films, represent a decline in focus, and each only has a few notable sequences, but still, if you’re going to seriously study Hitchcock’s career, the final decade is as important as the first, just not as prolific.
Now to the premiere six disks of the set, six films that showcase the director’s diverse understanding of fear, psychosis, suspense, and a genuine mastery of the cinematic form. With 1943’s “Shadow of a Doubt”, Hitchcock examined a favored state of duality, with Teresa Wright suspecting uncle Joseph Cotton of being a mass murderer (they’re both named Charlie, tipping you off to the symbolism of The Double), with a spectacular climax aboard a speeding train, a Hitchcock staple. When people ask me my opinion of Hitchcock’s best film, I usually split it into two categories, black and white, with “Notorious” barely beating out “Shadow of a Doubt” and “Psycho”, and color, which I think is, in the end, “Rear Window”, the 1954 masterwork starring James Stewart as a wheelchair bound photographer spying on his courtyard neighbors from his apartment, where he thinks he witnesses Raymond Burr’s Lars Thorwald very carefully disposing of his wife. Not only a study in voyeurism and the morality of watching (movies, of course, is the subtext), “Rear Window”, co-starring the all-time beauty Grace Kelly as Stewart’s high glamour girlfriend, is an examination of male romantic anxiety, each window representing a different stage in the arduous progression of a love relationship. Some critics debate whether 1958’s “Vertigo”, also represented here in a new wide-screen transfer, is Hitchcock’s greatest achievement, what with it’s complex study of obsession and, yet again, duality, but for my money, “Rear Window” has it all, from Stewart’s best non-Capra performance, to an oddly orgasmic flash photography climax that’s unlike anything else in the director’s oeuvre, it’s one of those films that gets better every time you see it, which should be many, many times.
Of the final three masterpieces in the set, 1972’s “Frenzy” is the least famous, but highly regarded; a darkly comic London set serial killer film about wrongfully accused Jon Finch (Richard Blaney) trying to prove he’s not the “necktie murderer”, while Scotland Yard tries to prove he is. Scripted by “Sleuth” author Anthony Shaffer, “Frenzy” was Hitchcock’s penultimate film, and a rare home run in the uneven final ten years of his life. The other two films of the box set, 1960’s “Psycho”, and 1963’s “The Birds” are so famous, and have been written about so much, that I hardly need to mention them, but in closing, I’ll just say that any set that has such brilliant creep fests as “Psycho” and “The Birds” as second thoughts to “Rear Window”, “Vertigo” and “Shadow of a Doubt” must be something special, and this gift-worthy collection from Universal is a must own for any serious film buff, or casual fan of one of our very best directors, the irreplaceable Sir Alfred Hitchcock. If I’m wrong I’ll take the blame, but at the risk of sounding stuck up and conceited, I know my Hitchcock, and there’s no way I’m wrong on this one, this is a great set of films, and a wonderful compilation.
“Alfred Hitchcock – The Masterpiece Collection” is available on Amazon.com for $90 and Deep Discount DVD.com for $87. That comes out to under six dollars per disk; need I say more?
by Adam Suraf