To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Arts & Entertainment Feb. 10, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/col/srag/2000/02/10/sragow_window Window washers Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz bring the reds, whites, blacks and blues back into Hitchcock's nimble masterpiece about the burden of perception. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Michael Sragow The superbly rich and moody new print of Alfred Hitchcock's frolicking 1954 masterpiece "Rear Window" has fewer splashy coups than the previous feats of those master showmen and restoration experts Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz. There were no cut sequences to be discovered, as there were with "Lawrence of Arabia" (a Harris solo effort) and "Spartacus," and nothing as spectacular as the stereo recording that brought Bernard Herrmann's score to new prominence in Hitchcock's "Vertigo." But as I watched this peerless piece of cinematic play for the first time since its last theatrical release in 1983, I was happily stunned. The subtle wonders worked by restoration director Harris and restoration producer Katz had managed to amplify this film's comic-dramatic weight without getting in the way of its fleet wit or its masterfully escalating momentum. Before seeing it with a cheering audience on opening night at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, I had thought that "Rear Window" called for the Katz and Harris treatment simply because it was a movie-movie milestone in sore need of repair. After seeing it, I thought that it was not merely a deserving but an ideal choice. For one thing, this movie is about perception -- and the burden it places on the perceiver. James Stewart, the photographer-antihero with the busted leg, looks out from his New York apartment with his phallic long-lens camera. He watches a variety of marital and erotic soap operas from his rear window through the rear windows of his neighbors across adjoining courtyards. But he can't keep his distance when one of these mundane sagas -- about a traveling salesman (Raymond Burr) and his bed-ridden wife -- appears to end in murder. Far from being dated, this movie now comes off as prophetic: a forecast of the kind of close-yet-strange apartment or condo existence that would become a negative paradigm for city-dwellers, giving unwonted resonance to real-life tragedies like the Kitty Genovese case. And Hitchcock's treatment of the attitudes that Stewart -- and his classy paramour, Grace Kelly, and his earthy nurse, Thelma Ritter -- express toward romance and wedlock is spry and satirical. Visually and dramatically, the blending of light and dark -- and all the muddy areas in between -- is what makes the movie's depiction of voyeurism so adult and cathartic. The parallels between Stewart and Kelly's affair and the stories behind other rear windows don't solely comment on love and marriage 1950s-style. They show that life is always bigger than our view of it. If Stewart thinks he uses that long-lens camera as a telescope, it turns out the reverse is also true: he is turning a microscope on himself. In John Michael Hayes' script, as in the original Cornell Woolrich short story ("It Had to Be Murder"), we absorb the mystery as the wheelchair-bound hero does, from the blinking rectangles of light in the apartments across the way. Hitchcock designed the production around that concept, plotting intricate yet unobtrusive camera moves in a single enormous set. Built on a Paramount sound stage, it contained 31 apartments with eight furnished rooms among them. The last release print of "Rear Window" gave us little except those blinking rectangles. The colors had faded, sometimes to nonexistence. When Burr puffed on a cigar in his darkened living room, the ash registered light gray, and when "Miss Lonelyhearts" went looking for love, she walked to a bar that suffered from brownout. The contours of the backgrounds had dulled, too. When Stewart, spying on Burr and then retreating from Burr's glance, pulled himself in and out of the courtyard lights streaming across his windowpane, he moved between glare and muck. And every apartment wall opposite him looked more California than New York, thanks to the soothing earth tones of an aging negative. In the prints from Harris and Katz's restored negative, Burr's cigar glows red. Miss Lonelyhearts steps tentatively into a neon-tinged night-world streaked with all the colors of the spectrum, and the skimpy workout outfit of the aptly nicknamed "Miss Torso" has progressed from white to pink. Most important, you never lose the lived-in quality of Stewart's messy apartment (and messed-up life), even when you see it in shadows. And you gain a renewed sense of the weight and emotion of the lives going on across the way. With the heightening of the palette in her apartment, Miss Lonelyhearts brews up a forlorn romantic aura when she sets a candlelit dinner for two -- knowing it's only for herself. The subliminal benefit of the restored negative is immense: it makes Stewart's (and our) peeping Tom-ism more of an adult game and less of a video game. "The incredible thing for me," said Katz, in a phone conversation from his office in Burbank, Calif., "is the reaction of kids who haven't seen it before. They have no sense of history. Someone asked me what Stewart is flashing -- he had no idea what a flash attachment to a camera was. Maybe he would have if it was attached to the camera. The picture is 50 years old, but because it looks so good now the audience wants to put it in a modern-day perspective. I had a screening with a lot of younger people in the movie business, and one of them asked, 'You couldn't make this movie today, because the set alone would cost you $60 million.' I said, 'You couldn't make it today because it takes place during a heat wave and the windows would be closed and everyone would have their air conditioners on.'" As with "Vertigo," the major stumbling block for the restoration was Hitchcock's ill-advised junking of most of the materials crucial to striking quality copies when rights reverted back to him in 1967. For Katz, the key to making this restoration work visually was the use of Technicolor's new dye-transfer technology, an update of the venerable (and venerated) process that used metal dyes washed over three matrices to create color of unparalleled vibrancy. As Katz says, "To get the feeling of the Miss Lonelyhearts part of the story you've got to see her posing in her green suit and red lipstick against her purple walls." To clarify the techniques behind the Harris and Katz revamping of "Rear Window," I contacted Harris at his home in Bedford, N.Y. He told me that past releases had lost "quite a bit" of background to fading, in the rooms and in the bar across the alley, and that "an overall loss of contrast" also blunted the impression of sharpness. The dye-transfer process helped them "create an illusion of more sharpness," even when "there really isn't any more. At the same time it does add a great amount of depth to the picture -- rather like (and this may be a bad analogy) a really great paint job on a car, i.e., 14 coats of hand-rubbed lacquer on a Rolls. The paint takes on a depth that makes it look as if you can stick your hand in it." The dye-transfer process fit this film in particular, Harris said, because "one of the things that sets 'Rear Window' apart from some of Hitch's later films is that in many ways the color schemes hark back to the three-strip Technicolor days (even though it was shot on the earliest incarnation of Eastman stock). This is most readily seen in the sunsets." But it also registers in the look of the players, from the deep-blond beauty of Kelly to the surprisingly dapper appearance of Wendell Corey as Stewart's police-detective friend, who now makes a spectacular entrance with his black tie, white shirt and blue eyes. "I'm glad you noticed," Harris said. "Early on, when we were having problems, his tie would have green fringe on one side and magenta on the other." Imagining what morning, noon and night would look like in the studio world of "Rear Window" was, to Harris, "Easy. Well, almost." The few original 1954 prints they had were "faded to total magenta," but he and Katz were able to use them "to discern relative contrasts and the comparison of light vs. dark. Based upon a faded scene, we could still calculate comparatively how much lighter or darker one scene is compared to the next." For color, they also had a number of dye-transfer prints made for a 1962 reissue, "and even through the beige look of the reissue, one could get quite a good idea where the director of photography was going." Using these same 1954 and 1962 materials, they judged just how far to shove Stewart into the darkness in his peeping-tom scenes. Harris said that if they could have employed dye transfer in "Vertigo" (the process was revived two years ago), they could have made the controversial murky climax murkier and still preserved details of the figures left in shadows. In the new prints, Hitchcock buffs will appreciate how crucial his sophisticated audio effects become to our ecstatic enjoyment of "Rear Window." The direction of each scream, thud, song or bark is clear -- and so, amazingly, is the length it travels. The few frenzied farragoes of growling and whimpering get fuzzier as they echo up and down the courtyards. Closed windows mute or seal off noise. And throughout, there's an artful array of audio graffiti and music emanating from streets and apartments. It's nothing like the wall of sound you get at today's thrillers: it's more like aural pointillism. How difficult was the sound restoration? Harris said, "Oh boy! As in 'Porgy and Bess,' we had plenty o' nothin'." The elements that had been saved -- including the 35 mm optical track negative, which was used to print the track to 389 release prints in 1954, as well as other prints "into the early '70s" -- turned out to be "junk." All Harris and Katz had to go on "were used 35 mm prints." What was worse, said Harris, "We found that the track negative made in '54 had been produced defectively. You've seen 35 mm tracks ... two clear impulses against black. On 'Rear Window,' the inboard impulse was out of focus and narrow, which acted to mute and distort the sound. Therefore, all of the sound was taken from the outboard impulse of a number of different prints, all of which had wear. The fact that sound has survived, even after being digitized and cleaned, is a tribute to the superb recording that was done by Paramount in 1954. Remember this was a Paramount -- not a Universal -- production." (Universal is re-releasing the film under the aegis of USA Films.) "Rear Window" doesn't have the picturesque vistas of "Vertigo," but it's a peak example of Hitchcock's mastery at creating tension with light. While Stewart is spying on Burr, Hitchcock jacks up our adrenaline whenever he wheels too close to the window -- which we estimate by the light that splashes in on his chair. I asked Harris whether adjusting the color and image density for these scenes was as big a challenge as any in his career. "Yes ... and no. Making the color 'correct,' and not only good-looking, is always a problem," especially with fading negatives, he answered. According to Harris, the original negative of "Lawrence of Arabia" -- wherever he had the original negative he needed -- was barely faded; "the problem was more getting it dead-on." The same was true with "My Fair Lady." But "Spartacus" had "a totally faded original negative," and that film's separation masters (which record, on three positive black-and-white films, the three separate components of a color negative) "had their own limitations." And "Vertigo" had "fading from beginning to end and was a nightmare of trying to get the color, not even dead-on right, but just close and good-looking, even when we knew what it should look like." The pre-restoration shape of "Rear Window" was roughly on the "Vertigo" level, with specific problems "worsened by the overall fading of the surviving sections of original negative." One of those bad-news areas was an amazing erotic shot now known as "The Kiss," which occurs when Kelly first sweeps in and plants a beaut on Stewart. I couldn't analyze its tingling whoosh at a single viewing. Harris explained, "It was slowed down at the beginning and then run normal speed for the dialogue," making it an optical-effects shot in the pre-digital era. Unfortunately, the colors of "The Kiss" had melted down "to yellow-green." Intent on avoiding a quality gap comparable to the grainy flashback scene in "Vertigo" ("This would not have made us smile," Harris said), Harris and Katz experimented with combining elements that were never meant to be used together. After several optical-effects houses turned them down, Phil Feiner of Pacific Title pitched in and agreed to test the team's "rather odd concepts" of cooking up a "Technicolor mélange." In addition to the original negative, dupe material and an interpositive (the color master positive used for making duplicate negatives), the process involved a motion-control optical camera, new exposures of pure red and pure green information from the interpositive, blue information from the old yellow-separation master and digital cleaning. With this complicated recipe, it's not surprising that one writer called Harris the Martha Stewart of film restoration. "Try living that one down with your kid," he groaned. Then why not gain a reputation as restoration's Don Corleone? According to Katz, he and Harris are aching to do "The Godfather" next. Katz said it presents challenges similar to those on "Rear Window": "It's a dark movie, but with colorful sequences. And it needs to be saved." Having seen the horrible brown-yellow print at the movie's 25th-anniversary gala three years ago, I can testify to the necessity of salvaging this landmark film right now. Harris and Katz have got to convince Paramount to let them do it. Artistically, at least, it's an offer the studio can't refuse. salon.com | Feb. 10, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Michael Sragow's column about moviemakers appears every Thursday in Salon. For more columns by Sragow, visit his archive.