THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK CLASSICS COLLECTION VOL. 2: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Frank Lloyd, David O. Selznick, Skirball Universal, 1942-76) Universal Home Video

I must point out, when Universal announced early in the new year its second set of Hitchcock ‘classics’ to slate in 4K, I was more than a little underwhelmed. For although there are some good, solid pictures in this second volume to reconsider, the one, virtually every collector was rather hoping to see – a completely restored 4K edition of 1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much remains MIA, leaving only horrendously awful looking video masters – even on Blu-ray - to collect and review. With the release of Volume 2, only 5 titles in Hitchcock’s canon currently owned by Universal remain left to be mined in UHD – and arguably, all that, for one reason or another, have never looked stellar on home video: 1948’s Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1966’s Torn Curtain, 1969’s Topaz, and, 1972’s Frenzy. So, is Universal Home Video planning a big surprise for collector’s later this year or early in the next with ground-up restorations of all of the aforementioned? We’ll see. As for Hitchcock – he remains one of the most – if not the most – revered directors in Hollywood history, even if he occasionally gets slammed for making the same movie over and over again. When pressed by a reporter, regarding his affinity for thrillers, Hitchcock once quipped, “If I made Cinderella, they’d be looking for the body in the coach.”

Indeed, by the mid-1940’s, Hitchcock’s name was synonymous with suspense. And Hitch’s forays into straight comedy, 1941’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, was widely considered ‘a lesser effort’. So, Hitchcock stuck with what he knew, refining techniques to make our skin crawl with delightful anticipation for a really good fright. Droll, sophisticated, uber-witty, and exacting, Hitchcock was undeniably in a class apart. Consider his reply to a camera set-up man, candidly informing him that his star, Tallulah Bankhead was not wearing any underwear on the set of Lifeboat (1944) – “I don't know if this is a matter for the costume department, make-up, or hairdressing.” Apart from being a genius in his medium, Hitch’ was also not above a bit of shameless self-promotion, with a minor streak of masochism, bent on always making his audience ‘suffer’ his nail-biting tension as much as possible.  “Give them pleasure,” Hitchcock once explained, “…the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”  Hitchcock’s ‘where’s Waldo-esque’ cameos (originally born out of necessity to fill-in crowd scenes on his more stringently budgeted British films, where money for hiring extras was tight) inadvertently led to his own popularity and became a much-anticipated trademark during his American tenure. Yet, it was those reoccurring cameos, as well as his amusing introductions to his weekly TV show ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ that made his visage and wry humor instantly recognizable.

Hitchcock’s affinity for the ‘wrong man’ scenario and ‘MacGuffins’ (tangible commodities within the story that are of only superficial importance to the actual plot) was to become passé by the mid-1960s; a particularly difficult period for Hitch’ who saw his own popularity steadily plummet after the release of Marnie in 1964. Did audiences turn against Hitchcock or did his movies simply become less proficient? The jury is still out on that one. Diehard fans insist the master never made a bad film, but troubled productions like Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) suggest otherwise. There is little to deny that by the end of his career, Hitchcock’s critical reputation had slipped. But his legacy in totem never fell entirely out of fashion. Endlessly revived on late night television, and later, in various formats on home video, Hitchcock remains indestructible. He is probably the only director who can still command a viewing audience on name recognition alone – enough to sell out tickets virtually in minutes whenever his films are revived on the big screen. That alone is impressive. But more so is his body of work, that while dated in its star power, has arguably never aged in its ability to shock and delight us with Hitchcock’s uncanny sense of ‘pure cinema’. Any one of Hitchcock’s many movies would be enough to sustain another director’s reputation as an auteur. That Hitchcock repeatedly gave us such iconic and superior movies (hitting the bull’s eye dead on) is beyond reproach. He is the undisputed master of suspense and every film maker since his time – even a few during it – owe him an eternal debt for providing them with the templates on how to make the successful thriller.

Universal Home Video has decided to regurgitate 5 more Hitchcock movies in 4K UHD. The first of these is Saboteur (1942), a variation on war-time espionage themes more fully fleshed out in Hitch’s own Foreign Correspondent made the same year. Produced independently for Walter Wanger, the story is that of Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) an aircraft factory worker who is suspected of being a Nazi saboteur after a mysterious fire destroyed the munitions plant he worked in, killing his best friend. On the lam, Barry meets kindly blind man, Phillip Martin (Vaughan Glasser) and his niece Pat (Priscilla Lane), who is too quick to believe the worst about this mysterious man hiding in her uncle’s cabin – even going so far as to make several failed attempts to return Barry to the authorities. Eventually winning Pat’s trust, Barry embarks on a cross country chase after Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd); the real saboteur. Despite some clever and engaging set pieces, Saboteur is something of a patchwork; its screenplay by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison and Dorothy Parker, becoming extremely episodic. The final race through New York City is thrilling. But the early tensions are often interrupted with glib repartee between Cummings and Lane - occasionally veering dangerously into screwball comedy. As such, Saboteur is edgy, but not brilliant. It is second-tier Hitchcock.

There are several reasons why Hitchcock considered Shadow of a Doubt (1943) – the second movie in this set – his personal favorite. First, it was his chance to break away from the authoritarian rule of David O. Selznick, the producer whom Hitch’ regarded as an oppressive force of nature at best. The production also realized Hitchcock’s dream to direct films he also produced; this being made for his very own company, Skirball Productions – peripherally aided by Walter Wanger. The film was also something of a throwback to Hitch’s early days as a filmmaker in Britain in that most of the action takes place within a single setting – in this case, the unassuming family home, nestled in the small town of Santa Rosa.  Here, we meet young Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright), a teenager wilting from boredom. She is stirred from her doldrums with the unexpected arrival of her mother’s brother; Uncle Charles (Joseph Cotten) – for whom she has been named. There’s just one problem: Uncle Charles is also The Merry Widow Strangler, responsible for a string of heinous murders of rich dowagers back east. Charles presents the Newtons with lavish gifts - token souvenirs from his brutal slayings. Yet, the motive for his killings has not been money.

In one of the film's most chilling moments, Uncle Charlie illustrates his indelible contempt for “rich, fat, greedy women”, equating their useless lives to slovenly animals, fit for the slaughter. His declaration raises more than a few curious eyebrows around the dinner table, particularly young Charlie – who has begun to have her suspicions. With a bit of amateur sleuthing, Charlie learns the truth about her beloved uncle. But she is initially reluctant to share her findings with the rest of the family, particularly her emotionally fragile mother, Emma (Patricia Collinge) for whom Charles’ sudden reappearance in town has meant everything. Shadow of a Doubt is a beautifully crafted drawing room murder mystery – methodically paced and quite stylish in its deconstruction of that idyllic portrait of midtown America; a place where nothing bad is ever supposed to happen. Hitchcock shoots the Newton home – an actual house in Santa Rosa – with appreciation for its cloistered sense of home and hearth, as though it were the epitome of small-town gracious living. He furthers this idealism by populating the home with a solid cast of stellar supporting performers, including Henry Travers as Mr. Newton, Hume Cronyn, as a humorously meddlesome neighbor, Herbie Hawkins, and Macdonald Carey (a Fox favorite) in probably his best role, as the sympathetic police detective, Jack Graham with whom Charlie has begun an adolescent infatuation.

Next up: The Trouble with Harry (1955). Herein, Hitchcock dapples in murder played strictly for laughs – turning the gruesome into farce. Jack Trevor Story's novel approaches the subject matter with an irreverent disregard for taking anything too serious. Perhaps, this was the appeal for Hitchcock - as he had long been an adroit raconteur. Of course, the ‘real’ trouble with Harry (Philip Truex) is he is quite dead – assassinated in the pastoral woods of Vermont, or so it would seem. The body is discovered by a precocious tyke, Arnie Rogers (Jerry Mathers of Leave It to Beaver fame) who believes that his mother, Jenny (Shirley MacLaine) might have murdered Harry in cold blood with a milk bottle. Everyone living in this small hamlet seems to have an alternative theory of the crime. Town scatterbrain and amateur sleuth, Miss Ivy Gravely (Mildred Natwick) thinks Harry died from a blow to the head inflicted by her hiking boot, while Capt. Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) is certain a wayward shot from his hunting rifle is responsible. Enter Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) - a congenial local artist who takes an active interest in solving the crime - not necessarily to get to the bottom of things - but simply to occupy his free time. Besides, he is rather fond of Jenny and her son, and is just as interested as the rest in keeping the town's stoic sheriff (Royal Dano) from discovering the body. The Trouble with Harry was a costly misfire for Hitchcock. John Michael Hayes screenplay meanders, vacillating in the interplay between characters, yet giving them precious little to do except spark off each other's droll dialogue while relocating and re-relocating the corpse. Jennifer Rogers nonchalant reaction to her husband's death seems not so much playfully obtuse as downright cold-hearted and uncaring. Ditto for Sam's unrepentant lusting after her a mere few hours after Harry's death.

And then of course there is Miss Gravely's clinical approach to the crime that seems to set the whole curious affair completely off balance. Is this a fractured love story or a ‘whodunit?’ Digging up Harry repeatedly without addressing the body as a person - and more to the point – someone that everyone knew but never quite liked – is a fairly morbid premise to begin with, and, not at all the sort of comedy - dark or otherwise - that audiences were anticipating.  Even when viewed through today's more laissez faire morality, there remains something genuinely aberrant, rather than silly, about this exercise. Worse, the burgeoning romantic chemistry between Harry’s widow and Sam is antiseptic at best.

At the time of its release, Marnie (1964) was billed as a Freudian sex mystery. Hitchcock, who had earmarked the project for Grace Kelly’s splashy return to the movies, settled on Tippi Hedren instead after Kelly declined the part, citing royal commitments. Again, Joseph Stephano was brought in to write a preliminary draft. But Evan Hunter was then given the assignment to complete the finished script. Regrettably, Hunter ran into a brick wall with Hitchcock over the ‘rape scene’ depicted in the original Winston Graham novel. In Graham's novel, Marnie is forced to have sex with her husband, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) after a particularly nasty spat. Hunter tried unsuccessfully to argue the irredeemable quality of rape for which no one in the audience would have any sympathy for the man who had committed it – even out of his own sexual frustration. But Hitchcock disagreed and promptly fired Hunter, hiring Jay Presson Allen (a relative novice in the medium of film with only two professional stage-writing credits). After rewriting the rape scene, Hitchcock also had Allen alter key sequences in Stephano’s original treatment; changing the office lover’s triangle between two men, Mark and another rival for Marnie’s affections – Terry – to the more subversive pseudo-lesbian fascination, finally realized by the character of Lil,’ Mainwaring (Diane Baker).

Allen's rewrites also removed a key sequence where Marnie seeks professional treatment for her compulsive thievery from a psychoanalyst. Henceforth, the responsibility of getting at the crux of Marnie’s sexual repressions fell to the character of Mark – possibly as a way of redeeming his character after the rape. Clearly, an attempt on Hitchcock’s part to revisit themes superficially explored in Spellbound, upon its release, Marnie received almost unanimous negative reviews. At any rate, Marnie is not a ‘sex mystery’. Even if one chooses to regard Marnie as a straight forward thriller, there is something off-putting about the way Hitchcock ‘borrows’ from his past successes to fill the picture’s running time. His camera descending down a grand staircase during a party at Mark’s home, as example, is a shameless rip-off of a virtually identical shot in 1946’s uber-elegant, Notorious. Hence, there is an overall ennui to the piece, particularly distracting for those who remember Hitchcock thrillers in their prime. In hindsight, Marnie also marked the unofficial finale to Hitchcock’s American tenure. Although Hitchcock continued to make movies for Universal, for perhaps the very first time in his career, he had mislaid his fingers on the pulse of the average movie goer with Marnie, something he arguably never reclaimed.

This set, and indeed, Hitchcock’s movie career was rounded out by Family Plot (1976), an abysmal tongue-in-cheek mystery with few chills and fewer reasons to be remembered. The story concerns a fake medium, Madam Blanche (Barbara Harris) and her taxi driver boyfriend George (Bruce Dern) - con artists, who cleverly scam naïve rich people out of their life savings. At present, their sitting duck is Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbit), a widow who is certain the ghost of her dead sister has come back to haunt her. George and Blanche accidentally cross paths with a pair of ruthless diamond smugglers, Arthur Adamson (William Devine) and his femme fatale girlfriend, Fran (Karen Black): the pair, behind a series of VIP kidnappings in the San Francisco Bay area. Based on Victor Canning’s novel, the plot as reconstituted in Ernest Lehman’s screenplay remains inconsequential, tired and meandering. In the original story – set in England - Blanche is a legitimate psychic whose clairvoyance is cause for much of the novel’s suspense. In transforming her into a clever opportunist who cannot even predict the contents of a ham sandwich, Lehman regrettably diffuses her importance in the film. As for the cast; everyone seems to be going through the motions – particularly Barbara Harris, who plays up the camp elements of the story as though the entire production were a sort of Freaky Friday Part Two instead of a Hitchcock thriller.

In point of fact, Hitchcock had long admired Harris as an actress. However, his ailing health may have contributed to his need to basically just get the job done. Viewed today, Family Plot is unworthy of Hitchcock’s name above the title; utterly bland, with Hitchcock’s usual strict adherence to script becoming so relaxed on the set he even allowed Harris to improvise the final scene. Having discovered the much sought-after diamond hidden within the dangling crystals of a chandelier, Madame Blanche addresses the camera – and therefore the audience – with a sly wink. Hitchcock was also rather lax about re-shooting scenes with actor, Roy Thinnes, whom he fired after his first choice for the role of Arthur Adamson - William Devanes - suddenly became available. Although Hitchcock was forced to re-shoot close-ups and medium shots already made with Thinnes for continuity sake, the long shots of Arthur walking away from the camera are not Devanes, but Thinnes. Given its’ leaden script, overflowing with contrivances aplenty, and its ‘strictly by the numbers’ structure, with few twists or turns to ignite our interest, in hindsight one sincerely wonders why Hitchcock chose to shoot Family Plot at all.

The movies in The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection: Volume 2 are each housed on a separate disc. One would have imagined that, owing to some fairly glaring flaws in the masters Universal struck for their previously issued, then re-issued, then re-re-issued gift sets on Blu-ray, a concerted effort would have been made to strike new 4K UHD transfers from remastered elements. Alas, it’s Universal. So, the short answer here is – not so. To be sure, there are subtle improvements to be had between these UHD offerings and their Blu-ray counterparts. As example, all of the B&W movies sport transfers with amplified – not boosted – contrast, which greatly enhances black levels while also preserving fine detail and the mid-register of their respective grey scales. So, good, solid-looking transfers that are sure to please. The inconsistencies, however, begin to flair up with the color features. The Trouble With Harry always sported anemic main titles and several shots that appeared quite dupey including the iconic moment when Jerry Mathers first finds Harry’s body in the woods. In this scene, a weird and persistent halo around Marthers’ head and fuzzy background info persist. It just looks awful, and, given that this same sequence was as horrendously flubbed on the Blu-ray, its repeat here again, leads me to concur Uni did not go back to original source elements for ‘new’ scans, but in fact took whatever digital files were already present and upgraded them to ultra-hi-def.

Another shortcoming occurs in Marnie. On the Blu-ray, a strange mosquito pattern, akin to looking at the image through a screen door, was present in the opening shot of Marnie in her black hair walking away from the camera with her ill-gotten gains tucked under her arm. There are several other shots where this ‘screen door’ effect occurred. And yes, it still occurs in 4K – if anything, more pronounced than before. Marnie on Blu also had a crazy awful problem with its grain structure – looking extremely unnatural and pixelated. In 4K, grain is mercifully better resolved, if not entirely cured. The weakest looking transfer here is Family Plot, which has never looked stellar on home video. Colors, even with HDR 10, still look slightly washed out, if much improved over the standard Blu. Could’a, would’a, should’a - doesn’t. Darn! The audio here is 2.0 DTS mono. Extras have all been ported over from the old Blu-ray releases and include extensive ‘making of’ content for each movie in this set, plus trailers and other featurettes. Bottom line: The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection Vol. 2 is Uni doing another short-shrift on a bumper crop of product they would rather market in a bundle than actually take the time to correctly remaster on a movie-by-move basis. Yes, you can buy these as individual discs. But really, it makes no sense. You will probably like at least 2 or 3 titles here, and to buy them separately will cost you as much as buying the set of 5 films bundled together. So, no-brainer, for sure. Has Uni put its best foot forward? Well, these do look uniformly ‘better’ than they did on Blu. Alas, perfection has – yet again – escaped the master of suspense in 4K. Good stuff that could have – and should have – been truly great.  

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

Overall 3

VIDEO/AUDIO

Saboteur 4

Shadow of a Doubt 4

The Trouble with Harry 3.5

Marnie 3.5

Family Plot 3

EXTRAS

4.5