Alfred Hitchcock Collection – A review

Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock

I picked up the box of Alfred Hitchcock Collection because

  • It had one of my favorite movie – Rebecca
  • It was less than INR500/- for six movies from the master of suspense, thus an undeniable ‘Steal’

Well actually the box, marketed by moserbaer in India, is priced INR549/- but if you have good contacts with your neighborhood video store you get upto 10% discount on almost every thing. Of the six movies at least four appear to have been digitally remastered / cleaned up and an absolute treat to watch.

If you don’t know anything about Rebbeca here is a small something to whet your appetite

Rebecca : With a tag line of “The shadow of this woman darkened their love” This film released in 1940 is an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel of the same name. It tells a story of a naive young girl (Joan Fontaine) who meets the wealthy Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), marries him after a brief romance and returns to Manderley, his large country estate in Cornwall. Rebbecca, whom we never see in the movie, is the first wife of Max who is still troubled by her death in a boating accident the year before.

The second Mrs. de Winter while struggling to come to terms with the new lifestyle to which she is so unused to discovers that Rebecca still has a strange hold on everyone at Manderlay. In particular Mrs. Danvers the housekeeper who doted on Rebbeca.

The other movies in the box are

  • The paradine case (1947), The beautiful Mrs. Paradine is accused of poisoning her older, blind husband.
  • The lady vanishes (1938), Spies! Playing the game of love – and sudden death!
  • The man who knew too much (1934), Public Enemy No. 1 of all the world…
  • The 39 steps (1938), His First Picture Since “Monte Cristo” ROBERT DONAT
  • Murder (1930), A juror in a murder trial, after voting to convict, has second thoughts and begins to investigate on his own before the execution.

As can be seen from the year of release most of the movies are from Alfred Hitchcock’s pre-war British career – a rarity in itself I would say. In fact Rebecca (1940) while still set in England, was his first Hollywood movie. As mentioned earlier the movies are remastered but there are places where the audio is flaky but do not worry the all the DVDs have good English sub-titles so you don’t ever miss anything.

If you see this box, I can wholeheartedly recommend, “Pick it up”

  • Kingsly

    I bought The lady vanishes and the man who knew too much on DVD a couple of years ago.

    And then i learnt that they are out of copyright and in the public domain. So all the $$$ goes directly to the DVD makers!

    They can be downloaded from https://archive.org/ along with lots of other movies from the same era.

    • tariquesani

      I don’t mind paying the DVD makers for the trouble it saves me to have to download and burn a DVD and the trouble they go through for packaging the movies nicely.