Alfred Hitchcock: The Essentials Collection [Blu-ray]

Hitch at the apex of his career
Though he was an undisputed genius of the cinema, not everyone needs the complete Hitchcock features. If you're a keen fan, they're available on DVD in the 15-disc Masterpiece, nine-disc Signature, and eight-disc Premiere Collections, which will run you between $50 and $100 per box (and which don't include his "non-Hitchcockian" silent films and talkies from the 20s and early 30s). But many Hitchcock lovers recall the five films on this reasonably-priced five-disc set most fondly, and they are without question among his finest achievements, all of them produced in Hollywood between 1954 and 1963.

Presented here in digitally restored, crisply remastered editions with a few interesting extras and options, the DVDs will do nicely for most folks (though not for the angry Blu-Ray aficionados who've given single-star ratings to this excellent set; this may come as a shock to them, but some people who are just discovering Hitch have ordinary DVD players and 32-inch TVs and are not...

Great set!!
This DVD box set is Beautiful, Great Art work! It is nice to see that this came with every movie on its own disk. Many company's are putting 2-3 movies on one disk. Also for never owning any of these movies there are many extras. I see that people are wanting it on Blue which I do not buy but I am sure it will come out eventually. I own about 12 Box sets and this is the nicest one I have bought and for 17 Dollars it was A steal.

Regression
I'll add my voice to the chorus calling this set a pointless cash-in. These recycled transfers are really out-of-date in light of recent high-def restorations of some of these films. For example, Psycho here is presented in the same master as the Masterpiece Collection, not the superior one from the later special edition. And the extras added to that release are not included here. Vertigo, Rear Window, and The Birds are presented with a similar lack of concern here.

Universal has a history of not giving viewers the best releases of the Hitchcock films they own. When they reissued Vertigo with better picture quality in their Legacy Series, they didn't fix the existing botched color, and they dropped the original mono track, including only the 1996 soundtrack with all the doctored foley work/sound effects. Another example is The Man Who Knew Too Much in the Masterpiece collection, which had inferior picture quality to Universal's earlier DVD of the film. More recently, they...

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