Vertigo

"When we were working on the restoration of Vertigo, we were working in the Hitchcock Theater at Universal," confessed Robert A. Harris. "So we had ghosts all over the place."

Somehow, spectral visions of the past is extremely appropriate. After all, Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock's great lyrical masterpiece about the insidious emotional hold of the dead upon the living. When Vertigo was first released in 1958, it was widely dismissed (The New York Times referred to it as "another Hitchcock and bull story"). But over the intervening years, it has emerged as a film of immeasurable poetic depth and dark, fatalistic imaginings.

Which means that it is the kind of great movie that is approached cautiously by a wise restorer. But Harris and his partner, James C. Katz, also knew that if something wasn't done soon, Vertigo would eventually fade from sight

"Back in 1967," explained Harris, "Someone gave Hitchcock bad advice." All camera negatives and other materials belonging to Vertigo were destroyed by Hitchcock's
orders. "The only element that had survived, really, was a highly used optical soundtrack."

Which is ironic, since Vertigo is about the obsessive efforts of a disgraced private detective (James Stewart) to mold a stranger (Kim Novak) into the image of a dead woman (Novak, again)whom he loved but barely knew. This lost object of his intense passion was the subject of a case that the detective was working on, and her suicide could have been prevented if he didn't suffer from a near maddening fear of high places.

To say much more would reveal some of the most haunting plot twists ever devised in the history of l'amour fou (or mad love, as the English would say).

So Harris and Katz were once again working under the reverential pressure that they had previously felt when they had restored My Fair Lady and Lawrence of Arabia. "But we really had a brain trust on this film," noted Harris. Among the many people who supervised the restoration was Patricia Hitchcock (Alfred's daughter), Herbert Coleman (associate producer), Novak, and Sam Taylor (co-scriptwriter).

"We found the camera operator's reports; we had the location reports; we had Hitchcock's dubbing notes. So we had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the
production."

Which allowed Harris and Katz to retrieve the magnificent, elusive yet primal power of Hitchcock's most supreme achievement. Whether you are seeing Vertigo for the first time, or for the hundredth, this is the version that ultimately beckons with the musky allure of deadly compulsions. Despite its age, Vertigo still sends viewers spiraling to the edge of their seat...and beyond.

Vertigo is really that great of a film. In fact, it is among one of the greatest ever made. No wonder Brian DePalma keeps remaking it (e.g. Obsession, Blow Out, etc.).

But Harris would be happy with one, simple acknowledgment from the grave. "I would like to think that Hitchcock would have sit back and said, ' Hmmm. Not bad.
Not bad at all.' "