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Reviews:
Good
Evening, Vertigo
by Michael Flanagan
Super
One of the most popular of
Hitchcock’s creations, Vertigo is
simply impressive.
The film’s themes of noir, love, lust,
loss, obsession, and death meld together in a
dizzying portrayal of what eventually becomes
pure Hitchcockian terror.
James Stewart, showing a little age,
plays the stoic detective perfectly, allowing
the character to keep his presence as the
detective even while enveloped in the love and
obsession that dominates the second half of the
film. Kim
Novak plays a kind of double-role; to say more
would be criminal, but she plays it with bravado
and class.
Vertigo is a
beautifully filmed work of art.
Accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s
haunting score and crystalline shots of San
Francisco, Hitchcock sets up one masquerade of
an atmosphere after another, and just when one
atmosphere becomes comfortable, he pulls out the
rug and let’s you fall (quite noisily) into
the next.
And the conclusion is
something any horror moviemakers of today should
watch and learn from—pure, untainted horror,
and in a less-is-more variety, leaves an
audience shuttering.
If you haven’t seen any of
Hitchcock’s films, this is certainly one of
the most complex to start with.
If you have, and yet haven’t seen Vertigo,
then you shouldn’t be reading this!
Get Vertigo!
DVD Update
Part of the Alfred
Hitchcock Collection, the Vertigo DVD
is near perfect.
The restoration is brought beautifully to
DVD, with great colors and crispness of film
that makes it look like a film of 2000. (Except,
of course, it’s really a good movie.)
The only problem is that it’s not an
anamorphic transfer.
The extras are fantastic!
It has a commentary by associate producer Herbert Coleman, restoration team Robert
A. Harris and James C. Katz, and Steven Smith
(III), author of "A Heart at Fire's Center:
The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann" and
Vertigo participants.
What a packed commentary it is!
Learn everything you ever wanted to know
about Vertigo but didn’t know to ask, from the
beginning to the end, all in the space of the
film. Only
commentary from Hitchcock himself could have
been better!
And the DVD contains great documentaries,
storyboards, trailers, and other random goodies. A must-have DVD for any collector. Heck, even coin collectors.
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