The Movie: This is the classic Hitchcock film that was recently restored, just before, as they say, it would have been lost forever. The film restoration was quite extensive, and included not only full restoration of the film elements, but also a full 6 channel soundtrack, printed to 70mm for a theatrical re-release. What is on this DVD is basically this newly restored film.

To be honest, I didn't really like Vertigo that much, but many people regard this as Hitchcock's masterpiece. I personally liked Rear Window a lot more. The beginning and ending were quite good, but about 2/3rds of the way through this movie, I was really struggling to keep paying attention. I'm sure some people are ready to beat me with some kind of blunt object, but hey, that's just my opinion.

But this movie did feature some pretty stunning photography, and although it is evident that some parts of the film were tougher to restore than others, overall, the restoration was quite successful. If you are a big fan of this movie, well, it never looked better, and probably never will.

But the sound restoration is a different matter. They went through great lengths to take this movie from it's original mono soundtrack and make a 6 channel surround track out of it. Most of the enhancement in this department is in the musical score, where the folks who restored this movie went back to the original source recordings which were actually done in multi-channel stereo, so that part of it sounds great.

The part I had trouble with is with some of the surround effects. At times they seemed a bit contrived. There was just something incongruous about seeing such an old film and then hearing the sound effect of a passing car whizzing by in a surround channel. To me it just didn't seem to fit.

But as I said before -- if you are a true fan of what is considered one of Hitchcock's greatest works, I'm sure you will be more than satisfied with this restoration.

By the way. If you don't know what this movie is about, it's about a retired detective with a deathly fear of heights (James Stewart) who is hired to follow his old-friend's seemingly spirit-possessed wife (Kim Novak) around to make sure she doesn't commit suicide.

In the process, Stewart ends up falling in love with Novak, but then she does killing herself. Stewart becomes obsessed with her, because his fear of heights is what prevented him from saving her, and he goes into a severe bout of depression. Until one day he meets a girl that looks just like the one that dies, and in some kind of neurotic episode, tries to remake her into the original girl.

Oh yeah, if you love San Francisco, you might like this movie too because there's a whole lot of footage from on location in San Francisco that you might enjoy seeing.

The DVD: The video transfer was quite good, showing off the brilliance of the photography. There were as I mentioned before, a few places where the image quality showed some degradation, but those shortcomings I would venture to say are on the original film. There were some occasional specks as well, but I'm sure that this transfer is just about as good as it could have possibly been.

The audio was also about as good as it could have been, considering the age of this film, even after the restoration.

There's some good stuff in the special features though. One is a documentary about the film and also the restoration process that I watched and found interesting. There is also a commentary track featuring members of the film restoration team as well as other people involved with Vertigo. There are also some storyboards, drawings, and stuff like that. Finally, there's the original theatrical trailer, as well as the trailer that was shown for the restored version's stint in the theaters.

Overall, I'd say the DVD was pretty good, and if you are a fan of this movie, I'm sure you will love it.