Saw "Vertigo" in 70mm today

The Cinerama in downtown Seattle screened a restored 70mm print of Hitchcock's "Vertigo" today, and I made the trek south to attend. I saw the 70mm version on the deeply curved screen in this theatre in 1997, and (with one caveat) loved it. I had also seen the film, unrestored, 6 times in the 80s and the restored 35mm print one time several years ago. Today it was on the "flat" (gently curved) screen now installed at the Cinerama. Great movie.

Anyway, the print was in good shape, an 8 out of 10 I would say, and the picture quality was just as stunning as I had recalled. There are a few shots where the source was clearly a few generations away from the camera negative, but it's mostly razor sharp with excellent color. (...and with VistaVistion "F" marks in full bloom!)

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the movie as always, and it looked great in 70mm, I did have a couple of caveats.

1. I still have mixed feelings about the new soundtrack. I love having the music in stereo -- it sounds great -- but the foley effects are still jarring to me after all these years. (For those who don't know, new foley effects were added for the 1990's restoration. The 3-track music recordings and original dialogue recordings were found, but the effects tracks were not, so to facilitate a for-the-first-time-in-DTS-stereo soundtrack, a decision was made to re-record all the effects and mix them in with the original music and dialogue.)

2. It irks me to see how these 70mm films are exhibited at the Cinerama. Since they cut their union projectionists, things just never run smoothly. Today, the lights were dimmed, then the curtains opened all the way in complete darkness. After a pause of about a full minute, the Universal logo hit the screen, but the sound was almost non-existent. (I think maybe they had the surrounds routed to the main speakers, but that's purely supposition.) After about 30 seconds, the projector was shut off, and there was a pause of maybe two minutes. This time, the sound was fully on, but there was no picture. After about 30 seconds of this, both sound and picture were on, together. This sort of thing is pretty routine at the Cinerama whenever they show non-standard fare, i.e., non-scope or non-1.85 material. Pretty sad for Seattle's "prestige" theatre. (For a rundown of a similar --but worse -- experience at the Cinerama a few months back, click here.)

Despite those beefs, if Vertigo shows up in your town in 70mm, don't miss it! If you live in Seattle, you can catch it again on Tuesday and Thursday this week.

Matt

 

Unfortunately, the mono track will not sound like it is being played from good hi-fi equipment even if it is. It is pretty heavily compressed and there is a lot of noise on the track which is exacerbated by the compression which brings its level up higher relative to the RMS of the "signal".

Regards,

 

Follow-Up

A follow-up to my original post:

The overriding point of this post is one of my common gripes about movies: Too bad 70mm is basically a dead format.

Now the drivel/details:

I went with my niece last night to see a double feature at SIFF Cinema in Seattle: "Hi-Def Hitchcock," in which Rear Window and Vertigo were both screened in "Hi-Def" digital format via the theatre's 4k projector. This was my 10th time seeing Rear Window in the theatre: 7 times unrestored 35mm; twice restored 35mm; now once in digital Hi-Def. It was my 10th time with Vertigo: 6 times unrestored 35mm; once restored 35mm; twice restored 70mm; now once in digital Hi-Def.

Whether the presentation be on restored film or digital, the benefits of the VistaVistion system used on Vertigo are instantly apparent. Rear Window looks good, Vertigo looks markedly better.

Vertigo just played in 70mm at the Cinerama here in Seattle less than three months ago, and played last night in hi-def digital, so both versions are rather fresh in my head. A few things caught my eye regarding the differences:

1. On the digital version, the "F" framing marks that are visible in 70mm are now digitally erased. No surprise there.
2. In last night's digital presentation, the daylight/bright scenes looked really stunning, with vivid color and good contrast. The darker scenes, though, seemed to lack "punch" or contrast. In the scenes where Jimmy Stewart was trailing Kim Novak around town by car, when the shots would switch from Novak's car in bright sunlight to the interior of Stewart's car in relative shadow, the contrast change was quite jarring and unpleasant. (Some scenes looked really washed out, with no real "black" on screen, despite the overall darksubject matter of some shots. I never noticed this in the film versions.)
3. For both Rear Window and Vertigo in digital, there is just the darnedest look to things if you sit in the front third of the theatre (as I usually do). The initial impression is, "Geez, isn't this a clear, crisp picture," but as I sat and watched, I realized that there was an oddness to the clarity, something like: Everything is super clear, but there is a level of detail missing. It's a subtle thing, but once I noticed it, it drove me batty. I was never quite able to make out things like, for instance, whiskers on a face. The face might look great, but the whiskers didn't look like whiskers...quite. The details on the face that were there looked great, but the super-fine details that were visible on the film prints are now kind of washed out in a blur. Another example: Where there were books on a bookshelf, I could see that there were words on the spine, but I couldn't make them out.

Enough ranting. I still enjoyed the show, but.... I have to be a party pooper and say that, although digital presentation has improved since I first saw "The Perfect Storm" at the Edwards Spectrum 21 Theatre in Irvine, CA 9 years ago.... it still has some issues.

I'll also beef for a minute about the Cinerama in Seattle: Their promotional "machine" sucks. I'm guessing there were 40 people when I saw Vertigo there in 70mm in January. At last night's digital presentation at SiFF Cinema, which was well-advertised, it was a sell-out, despite being shown on a screen that is dwarfed by that of the Cinerama.

 

I wondered about that, too, but I just don't know.

 

My niece and I went to see TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN in 35mm at the Northwest Film Forum tonight, and we both were surprised to see that Woody Allen's character takes Janet Margolin's character to.....ERNIE'S for dinner -- same restaurant that Kim Novak goes to in Vertigo. Eleven years later, it still had the same red velvet wallpaper (at least in the movies, and I realize that they may have been 'sets' in both films.)

PS - Janet Margolin looked absolutely stunning on the big screen!

 

To clarify Harris/Katz comment, the new effects were only "necessary" if they were to present the music tracks in stereo. They had a separate dialogue track, and the separate 3-track music masters, but the only places where the original effects existed were within the original mono mix and within the combined "Music and effects" track that was used to create foreign-language prints. In other words, there was no independent, discrete effects track available; it was immersed with music and/or music and dialogue in all cases when the restoration was undertaken, so to expand the music to stereo on the print, they had to use the original 3-track music masters and re-create the effects from scratch, which is okay, I suppose, but they were not balanced correctly to my ears. That's the rub.

In 1984, that was the unrestored, mono soundtrack you heard. Mind you, it would never qualify as anything close to "5.1 DTS" or its ilk, but it was just fine for what it was. It was the old mono soundtrack.

The new version does sound much more contemporary, and it certainly has its positive points, and in some ways, it is superior. The music sounds great in 3-track stereo, for instance, and the film certainly LOOKS better in the restoration. My beef is with the newly added foley tracks. Nothing on the old mono soundtrack ever made me wince and think, "Oooo, that sounds wrong." There are several points on the new soundtrack that still just stick out like a sore thumb to my ears.

I guess I would say the old soundtrack is consistently a 7. The new one has many points where it's a 10, but a few where it dives down to a 2 or 3 -- all due to the newly done effects tracks. The new version sounds spectacular in spots (many spots), but the mono version, to me, is the one where all the balances sound "right."

 

I assume you are referring to the soundtrack specifically, and I see where you are going with this, but I don't think the salvation would come via "digital technology," but rather by simply re-doing the foley effects -- again from scratch -- in ways that are more appropriate to the film, and mixed at levels that correlate better to the 1958 mono track so things don't stick out. I think the bulk of the "issues" could be fixed simply by rebalancing the effects in relationship to the music and dialogue. They are way, way more prominent in spots than they ever were on the mono version.

...and just to be clear, I am (overall) a huge FAN of the 1996 restoration. The foley is my only real beef. My word, the picture quality in 70mm is utterly phenomenal! Everybody on earth should be tied down and forced to sit through that movie in 70mm on a giant screen. The opening credits alone are worth the price of admission, as they say.

In case you missed it, Vertigo is about to play in a restored 35mm print at SIFF Cinema in Seattle. Come one, come all! Details here:

http://www.siff.net/cinema/seriesDetail.aspx?FID=168

(I'm sure it will beat the pants of the "Hitchcock in Hi-Def" 4k digital presentation at the same venue a couple of months ago, which I attended, and which sold out at least in part due to the use of the buzzwords "digital" and "hi-def" in the advertising.)