This Thursday, Oct. 28, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho returns to Toronto movie theatres in a newly restored version featuring cleaned-up picture and sweetened audio, timed for the film’s 50^th Anniversary, and debut on Blu-ray.

Since 1996, the year Universal released their similarly cleaned-up version of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the window between theatrical and home video premieres has radically shortened to the point where a run in the cinemas is purely for fans and a high-profile, promotional run for the DVD and Blu-ray [BR] release, which is fine, because certainly in the case of Psycho, a theatrical run brings back into circulation crisp prints of a 50-year-old movie most people have probably never seen on the big screen.

Psycho has always been available in rep theatres because it’s the Hitchcock film people should see: it’s the apex of the director’s career in film technique; its original theatrical release came with a careful blend of old-style showmanship (“no one will be admitted after the film begins”) while actually delivering the shock goods; and it was Hitch’s next-to-last international blockbuster before a career downslide that included back lot, cyclorama-inhibited, star-studded duds such as Torn Curtain, Topaz, and Family Plot, the last one his final completed film where the director and writer Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest) rolled as many Hitchcock clichés as possible into an uneven blend of mordant comedy, wan suspense, and weirdest of all – a peppering of contemporary profanity.

The term “restored” is a bit of a misnomer because no new footage was added or removed, scenes weren’t re-ordered, and the music score wasn’t reassigned to different locations as was the case with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, which Universal re-conformed according to Welles’ detailed memo on how the film should’ve been cut and mixed, had it not been taken away from him in 1958.

The cleaned-up Psycho premiered in April at Cannes as part of their Cannes Classics series, and will be screened at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Cinema 3 – a good-sized theatre with excellent surround sound. Instead of a 35mm print, it’s a digital projection, but it looks gorgeous, and the most striking feature for longtime fans will be the level of detail that wasn’t present in prior video versions, let alone on TV.

The new digital ‘print’ is so clear one can see the peach fuzz on Janet Leigh’s cheeks (not those cheeks – on the face); and when Leigh looks up at the Bates’ hilltop house for the first time and sees “Mother” standing in the window, mum isn’t a flat silhouette but a faint dark figure with a pale grey head. Visually, the film’s never looked better.

Like Vertigo, Universal decided to spruce up the audio mix, which is a controversial move since the mono mix was/is perfectly fine. The problem is that with people dropping cash for a new HD home theatre system, the audio needs to be brought up to modern standards. That’s their line, but purists are right in being skeptical of whether mucking around with mono audio elements really works.

Vertigo received a new batch of effects elements in 1996, and some of the original effects were actually dropped from the DTS mix. Although no new effects were added to Anchor Bay’s 5.1 for Dario Argento’s Suspiria, the 5.1 remix robbed the film of its audio oomph, and the best mix – with the gradual rise in dynamics and oppressive volume – is the old Image laserdisc, with its humble Dolby Pro Logic mix. Go figure.

Psycho apparently underwent a different creative redesign: the original elements were tweaked using a new system designed by Audionamix. The process takes mono elements, and using complex algorithms, creates discrete audio stems that can be reworked for a 5.1 environment. (The process, and details on the company, were profiled in a great piece at Digital2Disc.)

How does Psycho sound in 5.1? Not bad, but it isn’t perfect. The publicity pap that surrounded the Cannes premiere used wordage like “reconstructed” and “restored music score,” which is nonsense since the music that’s been married to the film for 50 years has never changed; nothing’s been removed or added, so nothing’s been restored.

(Fox had a habit of using the term “Restored Original Mono” on its classic film DVDs. The original mono mixes on releases such as the 1950 virus thriller Panic in the Streets were probably cleaned up, but if nothing was physically altered, “restored” is a bit rich in terminology.)

With the upgraded Psycho remix, there’s a separation of frequencies that allows for a better simulation of stereo, placing the violins and celli to the left, and grinding double bass to the right. It’s superior to the bullshit stereo mixes that United Artists used on their fake stereo LPs from the 60s, and the wonky Surround Sound remixes Fox used on their DVD of said classic films. (And if anyone out there is familiar with Crown Records and their “Telesonic” process, you’ll know that’s the nadir of hype, and bad audio.)

Psycho’s stereofied main titles did sound a bit watery, which may have been a technical issue in the digital master, a projection bug, or it may have been present in the master mono elements and became more prominent after the audio tweaking. The watery “drainpipe” effect is sometimes perceptible when the strings play extended notes in high registers, but it’s minimal within the film’s overall remixed music cues. The most effective use of the simulated surround occurs in the murder sequences, with Herrmann’s slashing strings filling the room.

The most obvious changes, however, lie in the sound effects. Rainfall envelopes the audience, passing cars move sonically right to left, and car engines have bass (although in fairness, Marion Crane’s Ford Custom 300 kind of sounds like a GM delivery truck in need of a catalytic converter upgrade).

The 5.1 mix is generally subtle, but the music does sound different – even from the true stereo re-recordings done over the past 40 years by various music and soundtrack labels.

Within the home video realm, if the original mono mix is included, then audiences have a choice, but in the theatrical realm, this may be a portent of future classic film exhibition. Sometimes the tweaking works, and Psycho ranks a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10, and engineers still have to figure out ways to make a natural balance where inherent flaws aren’t augmented, and new flaws don’t detract from the filmgoing experience.

The newly tweaked Psycho, released earlier this summer in the UK on BR, arrived in North America on Blu-ray Oct. 19, and the disc includes all of the extras present on the prior Legacy DVD edition, except the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “Lamb for the Slaughter” (which is available on DVD in Universal’s Season 3 set).

Both the DVD and new BR include those rare publicity extras that adorned the 1998 laserdisc release, but were left off all prior DVDs. Viewers can choose between the 5.1 remix and 2.0 mono original, although once again Universal’s policy of eschewing isolated scores means the music-only track from the laserdisc has once again been ignored.

Fifty years, and not one note from the original score recording has ever been commercially released, but perhaps Intrada’s recent spate of scores from the Universal Music catalogue might finally yield an official release.

Of course, I could rant about how few original score recordings from Hitchcock films are out there, but that would be too easy.

—

Somewhat related:

Following the recent trend of screening silent films with live musical accompaniment (as was done for Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Erich von Stroheim’s Greed at the TIFF Bell Lightbox this month), a few lucky cities will get a chance to enjoy Psycho with its score performed by a live orchestra. The official Bernard Herrmann website lists several international cities and play dates, and while Toronto is actually listed for an upcoming concert featuring music from Psycho and Vertigo on Oct. 30 and 31 as part of a Creepy Classics event, the TSO site lists different content.

‘Tis a bummer.

- MRH (2010)