The Scandal of Vertigo: It’s Not What You Think

“I found it hard myself to believe that the home-video releases of one of the most highly regarded films ever made could be incomplete, but they are, and I still wouldn’t believe it if the evidence were not indisputable.”

The scandal of Vertigo is that when you put a DVD or Blu-ray — I’ll stick my neck out here very slightly and say any DVD or Blu-ray — of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece into your player and watch Vertigo, you’re watching a cut version of the film. If that doesn’t shock or disturb you or cause you incredulity, then you should probably stop reading this article right now, as I’m writing it for film lovers. I found it hard myself to believe that the home-video releases of one of the most highly regarded films ever made could be incomplete, but they are, and I still wouldn’t believe it if the evidence were not indisputable.

That evidence wasn’t easy to come by, although it would have been a lot harder to come by — especially for someone living in Australia — were it not for the internet. (Thank you, eBay!) A bewildering number of releases of Vertigo have appeared, and I kept acquiring copies of them until it became obvious that there was little if anything further to be found inside the ever-variable packaging. I have 3 different VHS releases, 11 different DVDs, the Region-B Blu-ray included in last year’s Blu-ray Hitchcock “Masterpiece Collection,” the pre-restoration 1984 laserdisc, and the 1997 Signature Collection laserdisc (released the year after the Harris/Katz cinematic restoration), and have compared parts of 12 of these releases frame by frame.

Before beginning that comparison I expected all the versions released after the 1996 restoration to be identical. I have no idea why they are not, but they are not. There are in fact, broadly speaking, five families that the releases can be sorted into:

• The pre-restoration 1984 laserdisc (“’84 LD”)
• The Collector’s Edition NTSC DVD (“CE DVD” hereafter) and the 1997 laserdisc
• Other NTSC DVDs (typical of which is the Masterpiece Collection DVD, re-released in 2012 as the 100th Anniversary Edition [“100 DVD”]; I take this last release to be the current standard US DVD)
• All PAL DVDs (I use the current standard UK DVD, the “Alfred Hitchcock” packaged disk, as my reference for this article)
• The 2012 Blu-ray

Within these families, the versions are for the purposes of this article barely distinguishable. From one family to another, however, there are radical differences.

Where the versions differ radically is in how they fade. Vertigo begins with a fade-in on a woman’s face and ends by fading out on Jimmy Stewart standing on a ledge. In the 127 intervening minutes there occur 10 periods of blackness to which the film fades out and from which it fades in, which adds up to either 12 fades or 22 depending on how one chooses to count it. For convenience I count it as 12.

Beginning with the very first frame on which the anonymous woman’s face is discernible under image enhancement and counting up to the point at which James Stewart’s name first appears on the credits, I find the versions to run in seconds thus:1

Blu-ray	100 DVD	UK DVD	CE DVD	’84 LD
woman’s face pre-credits	5.833	6.167	6.292	6.292	6.073

The woman’s face appears on the Blu-ray, you will note, for almost half a second less than on the CE and standard UK DVDs. From the very start of the film there are differences from one version to another, then, and such differences continue to its very end.

Fade 2 consists of Hitchcock’s directorial credit fading out to black followed by a fading in on the iconic shot of a horizontal bar with a night-time cityscape behind it. This initial shot of the bare, ungrasped horizontal bar lasts almost a full second shorter on Blu-ray and DVD than on the ’84 laserdisc, and so some of the movie proper goes missing right there at the outset, with more still to join it.

The versions incidentally differ also in precisely when they fade. The frames on which fades begin and end differ from one family to another, sometimes less than slightly, and again with little apparent regard for the integrity of the original film. In fade 3, for example, from the last cut back to Scottie Ferguson hanging from the spouting and up to the cut on his “ouch” in Midge’s apartment, the versions run as follows:

	Blu-ray	100 DVD	UK DVD	CE DVD	’84 LD
Scottie undimmed	2.417	2.375	1.917	2.167	2.135
Scottie fading out	1.167	0.792	0.667	1.167	1.268
Blackness	1.583	1.917	2.500	1.667	1.101
Apartment fading in	0.792	0.833	0.792	0.917	1.335
Apartment fully visible	3.500	3.542	3.583	3.583	3.637

In theory each column of that table should be identical; and admittedly some of the differences are too small to be bothered by. The difficulty of deciding when optical fades begin or end is probably to blame for some of the disparity between the ’84 laserdisc and the digital versions, but is hardly to blame for all of it.

Nor is “experimental error” (i.e., mine) to blame for the disparity between one digital family and another. The top and bottom lines of that table are as a practical matter the easiest to determine, and even they differ markedly. Note for instance that the UK DVD begins to fade a full half-second before the Blu-ray does, a matter of 12 frames. One feels that there ought to be a correct point for any fade to begin or end, and that at the very least the 1996 Harris/Katz cinematic restoration should have standardised those termini for the home-video versions that came after it. (I have never knowingly seen that cinematic restoration, by the way — I haven’t seen Vertigo in a cinema in 30 years — and cannot comment on what part it had to play, if any, in the inadequacies of the home-video releases; that’s a separate question for another time.)

Each family at some point can be said to omit frames apparently present in one of the others. (Each of them is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy might have put it.) It is usually the ’84 laserdisc that runs the longest, coming out of a fade or heading into one; the Blu-ray runs the longest only once — when Scottie hangs from the spouting — and runs the shortest more often than not.

Adding up by how much each version falls short of the longest at each fade, we can see how much each omits from the hypothetical longest version one could compile from them all. The Blu-ray wins this dubious honour with 23.41 seconds omitted; the ’84 laserdisc in contrast omits just 3.10 seconds. (The 100th Anniversary DVD by this measure omits 22.61 seconds; the UK and CE DVDs, 15.40 and 16.11 seconds respectively.)

All five versions have the same approximate length, however, the excisions being compensated for by a lengthening of the periods of blackness. This is a casual way to treat a masterpiece, and to think that Hitchcock wouldn’t have cared about such things — when he was capable even on an off-day (i.e., in Torn Curtain) of an insert shot so fast one has to call it subliminal — is preposterous.2

To play devil’s advocate one could point out that much of the omitted footage necessarily consists of stray pixels in darkness, undetectable by the eye alone. (My eyes had the help of image-editing computer software in all of this analysis.) It could be argued further, I suppose, that even where the omissions are directly observable, it makes little difference to one’s perception of the film whether a shot of Jimmy Stewart at the wheel of his car runs 2.3 seconds or 2.4 seconds or even 3.1 seconds.

Beyond the obvious point that we want the film as Hitchcock made it, my reply would be that some of the changes do in fact make a difference to our experience of the film. Three or four in particular are worth discussing.

On the pre-restoration ’84 laserdisc, the fade-in on Midge standing at her easel (01:05:25 on the 100 DVD) shows her to take her hand away from the canvas and a definite step backwards with both feet. On all subsequent home-video releases (including the 1997 Signature Collection laserdisc apparently endorsed by restoration guru Robert A. Harris; his is one of the signatures), the start of this shot is cut by around 0.8 seconds and by the time one gets to see them, Midge’s hand is well clear of her painting and her left foot is stock still. This doesn’t require a stopwatch, computer, or PotPlayer frame captures — useful though they all were — one can simply see the details in one version and their absence in the others.

This is even truer of the fade-out a few minutes later as Midge berates herself with the words “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” to end the scene. On the ’84 laserdisc one sees her fading out but visibly saying the word three times. She spits it out at the end, which is worth seeing, but no other home-video version includes the footage, and so in all probability you haven’t seen it.3 In all probability, that is, you have yet to see Vertigo in full.

On all subsequent home-video releases (including the ’97 Signature Collection laserdisc), the fading-out happens faster — twice as fast on Blu-ray as on the ’84 laserdisc — and all up we lose variously between 0.40 and 0.69 seconds here, the effect of which is to turn Midge momentarily into a disembodied voice: on the post-’84 releases, we hear her say the third “stupid” a moment after she has faded entirely from sight. Hitchcock was certainly capable of prolonging dialogue into a fade-out and beyond his visuals when he wanted to: he used this technique unforgettably in Under Capricorn. But he didn’t use it in Vertigo.

Around three-quarters of the fades occur faster, over fewer frames, on the subsequent releases than they do on the ’84 laserdisc; whoever was responsible for these changes evidently saw no cinematic difference between a fast fade and a slow one. (And if I sound like Daffy Duck in Duck Amuck here [“I demand to know who’s responsible for this!”], it’s because I feel like him; this is what a faceless studio-industrial complex does to you.)

When Midge walks down the hospital corridor and out of the movie (01:28:30), we have on the pre-restoration ’84 laserdisc a slow fade-out followed by a dark pause, followed by an equally slow fade-in.4 The ’84 laserdisc is itself questionable in periods of darkness — one detects changes in image quality that bespeak intervention — but not so here. Here the entire fade-out, the pause, and the fade-in have an organic analogue integrity that one feels to be original to the 1950s and subsequently untampered with, and the effect of it is masterly: it works as a whole to suggest the passage of time and a fresh start for Scottie after his mental breakdown.

All of the later versions fade out on Midge in the corridor with a suitably sombre slowness; indeed, they run longer here than the ’84 laserdisc. But in general their digital fades are crudely mechanical in comparison with the optical fades of the laserdisc, and never cruder than in the fade-in that follows Midge’s corridor scene. The slow laserdisc dawning of a new day is replaced on Blu-ray with a rushed effort that brightens in one-third the time, and we lose much of the emotional force of the original with that acceleration.

One might have hoped that the final shot of the film would be treated with care and respect — even with love — but the blameworthy let us down here worse than ever, as though eager to outdo themselves at their last opportunity.

The final fade-out on Jimmy Stewart is one of the slowest fades of the film and by any measure its most significant one; on Blu-ray and DVD it becomes one of the fastest and most truncated. A shot that on the ’84 laserdisc faded out funereally for over two seconds fades out on Blu-ray in around 0.4, so fast as to be practically a cut to black rather than a fade.

Blu-ray	100 DVD	UK DVD	CE DVD	’84 LD
final shot undimmed	17.583	17.583	17.708	17.708	18.285
final shot fading out	0.417	0.375	1.750	1.292	2.269
total	18.000	17.958	19.458	19.000	20.554

It’s actually worse than that, and help here comes from an unexpected source. Included in the bonus material on the later releases is the so-called “foreign censorship ending,” a scene of Midge and Scottie in Midge’s apartment. This previously unseen footage in the bonus material is preceded even there with the ending of Vertigo itself. This supplementary version of the film’s final belltower shot runs longer than any other home-video version ever released — 627 frames at 29.97 fps, or 20.92 seconds — and shows that the Blu-ray in particular deletes the final three seconds of the film.

If that isn’t scandalous, what is?

The bonus material shows that it was possible to do a vastly better job of transferring Vertigo to home video than has been done on Blu-ray, DVD, or the Signature Collection laserdisc. And until that better job is done, the scandal of Vertigo will continue.