Did they do any vocal rerecording? 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," he says. (Those who haven't seen the film should skip the remainder of 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," says Katz. (The scene will probably show up on the laser disc.)
For the crucial visual elements, the restorers 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 haven't been 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," Harris says. "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. They failed to get either in one of the film's critical patches: Judy's flashback explanation of the plot. Harris and Katz are 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 restorers are reconciled to "half a dozen purists" complaining about their work. But friends and critics emerged from the first screening, on September 20--held, aptly enough, at the Alfred Hitchcock Theater on the Universal lot--shaken and stirred. For viewers who have 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.
I ask Harris whether he'd achieved any profound insights into Vertigo as a work of art. He demurs. "You've got to realize," he says, "when we're in the middle of a project like this, we're not dealing with a movie, we're dealing with pieces of film." He speaks as if he were a Renaissance mason intent on polishing every bit of filigree before he would judge his cathedral. Post-screening, he is pleased to proclaim, "It's a great film."
Vertigo is playing at GCC NorthPark 1-2, 1100 NorthPark Shopping Center, North Central at Park. Call 363-7541 for times.
