The scandal of Vertigo is that when you put a DVD or Blu-ray - I’ll stick my neck out here very slightly and say any DVD or Blu-ray - of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece into your player and watch Vertigo, you’re watching a cut version of the film. If that doesn’t shock or disturb you or cause you incredulity, then you should probably stop reading this article right now, as I’m writing it for film lovers. I found it hard myself to believe that the home-video releases of one of the most highly regarded films ever made could be incomplete, but they are, and I still wouldn’t believe it if the evidence were not indisputable. That evidence wasn’t easy to come by, although it would have been a lot harder to come by - especially for someone living in Australia - were it not for the internet. (Thank you, eBay!) A bewildering number of releases of Vertigo have appeared, and I kept acquiring copies of them until it became obvious that there was little if anything further to be found inside the ever-variable packaging. I have 3 different VHS releases, 11 different DVDs, the Region-B Blu-ray included in last year’s Blu-ray Hitchcock “Masterpiece Collection,” the pre-restoration 1984 laserdisc, and the 1997 Signature Collection laserdisc (released the year after the Harris/Katz cinematic restoration), and have compared parts of 12 of these releases frame by frame.īefore beginning that comparison I expected all the versions released after the 1996 restoration to be identical. All PAL DVDs (I use the current standard UK DVD, the “Alfred Hitchcock” packaged disk, as my reference for this article).Other NTSC DVDs (typical of which is the Masterpiece Collection DVD, re-released in 2012 as the 100th Anniversary Edition I take this last release to be the current standard US DVD).The Collector’s Edition NTSC DVD (“CE DVD” hereafter) and the 1997 laserdisc.The pre-restoration 1984 laserdisc (“’84 LD”).There are in fact, broadly speaking, five families that the releases can be sorted into: I have no idea why they are not, but they are not. Within these families, the versions are for the purposes of this article barely distinguishable.
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