Orson Welles

Just a little warning for those of you who collect DVDs of great old movies: the new special edition of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which came out today, has a completely screwed-up soundtrack. In 1996 when the film was restored, the producers wanted to create a stereo soundtrack, but they only had the musical score in stereo, not the sound effects. So they ill-advisedly dubbed in sound effects from a “modern” effects library, obviously not the original effects and just as obviously not in the same acoustic as the rest of the picture (including gunshot effects that come from a gun that didn’t even exist in 1958). It doesn’t sound so bad when put into words, but believe me, when watching the film, the fake sound effects are obvious and distracting. The new special edition claims on the box that it contains the mono soundtrack, but those who have seen the set have confirmed that Universal screwed up and just included two versions of the faked stereo soundtrack.