Yea! New DVDs! Wait, what? It's yet another version of a movie that's already gotten multiple DVD releases? What about all the great old movies that have never been released on DVD at all?

Oh, it's pointless to complain about such stuff. And I sound grumpier than I am, because this is the 50th Anniversary Edition of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest we're talking about. The word classic gets so overused in connection with movies that it's almost ceased to have meaning: this is one of the few films it should be reserved for. Suspense, thrills, chases, romance, mistaken identity, and the ultimate expression of perfect cinematic pointlessness in the definitive MacGuffin: the nonexistent secret agent George Kaplan. This is such a perfect movie that even the sleek gray suit Cary Grant wears throughout the movie has been called "the best suit in film history." It's like Mad Men meets James Bond. (Heh: I'd love to see Don Draper get mistaken for secret agent George Kaplan; January Jones could play Eve Kendall.)

Still, I'm always a bit leery of anniversary-edition DVDs, particularly when it's the umpteenth version of the film on DVD. I mean, there's only so much video restoration and audio remastering that can be done. This one, the DVD sleeve tells us, has been restored from the "original VistaVision elements" -- VistaVision was a high-res widescreen format, and this was one of the last Hollywood films to be shot in it. It looks great to me on my widescreen LCD -- crisp colors and such -- but I've got nothing to compare it to. And while I'm sure it looks better than the remastering the film got for DVD on its 40th anniversary, I think it's safe to assume that for its 60th, technology will have advanced signficantly enough again for an entirely new version.

Among the bonus material, there are reruns, too, stuff that has been available before: a 2000 making-of, a vintage profile of Cary Grant. But there are some new bonuses, too, such as a commentary track by screenwriter Ernest Lehman (he reveals, for instance, how the famous cropduster sequence came to be). The new documentary, "The Master's Touch: Hitchcock's Signature Style Documentary," is a bit problematic, though: it features directors talking about Hitch, and while it's cool to hear the likes of Martin Scorsese and John Carpenter and Guillermo Del Toro on the Master, Francis Lawrence, the director of I Am Legend? Richard Loncraine, director of Firewall? Really? Do we care what they think?

No matter how much you love this movie, is it really worth spending your hard-earned dough on a new DVD if you already own an older version? Or do you wait another 10 years? That's your call, of course. This 50th Anniversary Edition is also being released on Blu-ray, which presumably looks even better than the regular DVD. I, for one, am exhausted, spiritually and financially, from the constant format upgrading music and movies have gone through over the last 20 years, and I'm holding off on Blu-ray, anticipating the day in the not-too-far future when everything will be on demand over super high speed Internet connections. And I readily acknowledge that that might be a MacGuffin I'm chasing...

North by Northwest (50th Anniversary Edition) is available on November 3 from Warner Home Video.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson never blogs on an empty stomach at FlickFilosopher.com. (email me)

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us