Vertigo

Coleman had first-hand knowledge of the kind of behind-the-scenes chaos audiences never think about (and thanks to men like him don't have to). It was Coleman, for example, who located a place to finish recording the score when a musician's strike prevented Herrmann from conducting it himself in Los Angeles. "The conductor, Muir Matheson, worked with the London Symphony for a day or so, then was told to stop because the British unions were sympathizing with the American strike; so Hitchcock went home and gave Coleman the command to complete it somewhere, and he ended up taking Matheson to Vienna." Some 40 years later, this left the film's restorers a tangled legacy. Harris and Katz were working with 70 percent of the music recorded in three-track stereo in London and 30 percent done in mono in Vienna on inferior recording stock. To get an idea of the complexity of reconstruction: When big musical holes emerged in one sequence, they ransacked their inventory (including material from Germany and Italy) and found a 1983 Spanish print using a music and effects tracks made for Spain in 1958; they took one-and-a-half minutes of mono music off that print, spread it, equalized it, made it sound seamless.

Did they do any vocal re-recording? Katz takes a roundabout route to admitting ... just a little, and for a footnote at that. He divulges, "There was not an alternate, but an extended ending to the picture that Hitchcock never wanted shown." (Those who haven't seen the film should skip this paragraph.) "There's a fade-out to Midge's apartment. Midge is sitting there, listening to one of those big old Blaupunkt radios -- and coming over it we hear that Gavin Elster has been spotted in Paris, and so-and-so says that he will be apprehended in a short time, and [in an unrelated item] that students in Berkeley were seen leading a cow up the stairs. Then Scottie comes in, she clicks off the radio, mixes him a drink, goes back to the window, hands it to him, and that's the end of the picture, leaving you to think that something may happen after all with him and Midge. It was shot because in French Canada and Scandinavian countries, the bad guy couldn't get away." Some Vertigo fans contend that they've seen this ending on TV, but Harris and Katz don't believe it. They didn't even think that an English track had been recorded until a producer at San Francisco's KPIX-TV informed them that longtime anchor Dave McElhatton had been the original voice on the radio. When Harris and Katz got word that the Hitchcock estate didn't want that scene used, "in order to minimize its importance, we did the radio broadcast ourselves." (The scene will probably show up on the laserdisc.)

For the crucial visual elements, they had a faded negative and black-and-white separations. The separations record the blue, red, and green patterns that combine to make the final full-color image; the problem was, the separations didn't fit together (they had shrunk at different rates) and were riddled with contrast. Without correction they would produce the kind of image you see in newspapers when printing plates aren't properly aligned. And, to top it off, says Harris, "they were dirty -- they didn't have wet-gate printing; all the scratches, all the dirt showed through." Restoring Vertigo required a painstaking process of getting the registration right on the separations and then going through the film frame by frame. "There are 1300 feet of process shots in this movie -- there's not a scene you can look at where you can say, this is real! And you take a scene that looks simple, like Madeleine jumping in the water, and you've got fully-exposed shots, and shots made with water-fog filters, and with half-fog filters, full fog filters, then you go back to no fog -- and every time you use a different filter, the exposures are different, the look of the film is different; you have less contrast, and the less contrast and the lower the color saturation, the more it's faded; so you have to compensate using different methods for each shot, not each scene, each shot."

"We're always trading off qualities, like color for sharpness," confesses Katz. In one critical patch of film, they failed to get either: Judy's flashback explanation of the plot. They're frankly abashed that they can't hide the deterioration of the image. I watched the film with two movie-savvy buddies who didn't notice; since the content is jolting anyway, the abrupt alteration seems natural. And once the flashback is over, Harris and Katz's theatrical instincts come into play. Rather than immediately resume with their prime material, they ease back into it with footage of an intermediate quality -- as Katz says, "We didn't want the audience to be traumatized by sudden changes in picture and sound."

When Harris and Katz showed parts of the movie to a Herrmann scholar, he was initially outraged: "He said, `There was no triangle here, no oboe there -- why are you tampering with the score?' " They didn't do any such thing: The state-of-the-art presentation had brought out previously-hidden details. The team is reconciled to "half-a-dozen purists" complaining about their work. But friends and critics emerged from their first screening, on September 20 -- held, aptly enough, at the Alfred Hitchcock Theater on the Universal lot -- shaken and stirred. For audiences who've seen worn-out revival prints or the dark old MCA/Universal Home Video tape or the new, artificially-sweetened and brightened tape, the Harris-Katz version will be a revelation for its luster, keenness, and scale, for the magnificence of the score, and most of all for its clarification of Hitchcock's intentions. Even the makeup on Stewart and Novak seems less obtrusive, more persuasively stylized: entirely fitting for a story about the games ghosts and people play. The background noise is well-judged, at times eloquent: When Scottie and Gavin Elster confer at a club, the amplified masculine rumble conveys the complacent power of men in a men's world.