Alfred Hitchcock: Masterpiece Collection [DVD] [1966] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

I have only just got this fabulous set but I want to say acouple of things.

This is all the UNIVERSAL Hitchcocks. It has everything from Rear Window onwards apart from To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man and North by Northwest which were not Universal.

It's absolutely essential as it's the first time The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain and Topaz have been released in the UK in the correct format. The older issues of The Bird, Marnie and Tirb Curtian had the sides chopped off to make 4:3 old TV style pictures. Topaz was a 4:3 image but showed the full frame rather than the masked wide screen picture that you should see so you get mike booms nad things you shouldn't see. These films were shot on a 4:3 negative with the intntion of being masked to make a widescreen image in the cinema.

Most important - I feel that Marnie is the best quality we are likely to get here. I have known this film well since seeing it at the BFI in 1972 and this looks right. I think some things people are saying are grainy or fuzzy are actually shots using gauzes and soft focus effects - mainly close ups. On the opening shot you can see the effect of the gauze when the camera pulls out to long shot. In the 6os such effects were common in closer ups.

I might be wrong but I don't think we'll ever see these looking better.

A smartly packaged box set that feels like good quality. The paper extras in the back envelope are nice, especially the movie poster cards, but you probably won't look at them more than once.

A lot has been said about the variable quality of the blu-ray transfers of these films and I have to agree.

For most of the films, the transfers are good and some are fantastic, but unfortunately, others are awful.

When you see Vertigo, for example, the colours and sharpness are AMAZING - it takes your breath away to see that classic film looking so good and almost makes up for other deficiencies in the other films.

The very early films such as Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt look great too - impressive for 1940s films, which makes it all the more disappointing that much later films such as Family Plot look awful in places.

Family Plot is probably the worst transfer and the trailer for that film in the extras is much better quality than the film itself. I guess that's from the DVD version! But Frenzy, from roughly the same period, looks great. Doesn't make sense.

Marnie is very grainy and Torn Curtain suffers from the same problem until it has outside scenes, which are sharp, strangely.

Luckily, the best films - Vertigo, Rear Window, Psycho, The Birds - do look very good, so I can live with the fact that lesser films like Family Plot are so poor.

It's a shame that not more of Hitchcock's classic are included - North by North West, Dial M for Murder, Strangers on a Train for example - but I guess this is down to copyright issues and different studios being involved.

All in all, I would recommend the box set, but it has its limitations. If all of these films had received the same incredible transfers that some of the films have got, then it would have been a truly outstanding box set.

Despite what all the doom mongers have been saying about this set, this is the best presentation of these films on home video yet (and maybe ever). They have even reinstated the Paramount/VistaVision logos on The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo. All movies are in their correct aspect ratio except for Rear Window which suffers from the bogus 1.66:1 syndrome which seems to afflict too many companies these days (it should be 1.75 or 1.85:1, or full 16x9 anyway).