Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Vertigo is a tremendous film; if rating the film alone, I would give it the maximum rating. Vertigo deserves to have been carefully restored and preserved for posterity. The reason for my low rating for this DVD is that the restorers have seriously overstepped the bounds of conservation, actually changing the film for the worse. They have eliminated many original sound effects and created many new ones, to jarring effect. Evidently, their discovery of a stereo recording of the musical score so excited the restoration team that they felt they had to incorporate it into the restored print. As the original mono mix included effects with the score, this means that the restorers went into a Foley studio and cooked up replacement sounds--newpaper's rattling, footsteps, doors closing, cars driving past, etc. The result is VERY noticable: the modern, digitally recorded sounds have a sharply different quality from the analog originals, and the two are mixed together uneasily. The film was mixed, presumably under Hitchcock's careful supervision, with a mono soundtrack, which has survived in good condition. (Although the individual elements were scandalously destroyed in the 1970s as the result of a tussle over distribution rights to the film.) The soundtrack may have benefitted from some "cleaning up," but there was no good reason to create a new soundtrack. Please, Universal: include the original soundtrack as an option, at least, on future editions of this DVD. (The stereo recording of Herriman's musical score would make a nice DVD bonus track, too.) And please be more circumspect in future restoration projects. (There are problems with the color restoration, too, but at least there the restorers were addressing a real problem--the existing prints and film elements had seriously deteriorated. With the soundtrack, the restorers actively created problems where none existed.)