Product Description: Alfred Hitchcock, The Legend Begins! 20 films, 27 hours! Includes The Lady Vanishes, The Farmers Wife, The Manxman, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Chaney Vase, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Rich and Strange, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Secret Agent, Champagne Blackmail, Easy Virtue, Jamaica Inn, The Lodger, The Ring, Young and Innocent, Juno and the Paycock, Sabotage, The Skin Game, Number Seventeen, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and BONUS: 55 minutes of Alfred Hitchcock Movie Trailers! Enjoy these greats anytime you like when you order this 4-DVD Set right now! Alfred Hitchcock, The Legend Begins
Don't be tempted by the price. Not a bargin!!! ^ I thought I was getting a great deal. Well, the saying "you get what you pay for" held true. In fact, this set is worth less than I paid for it. Half the discs won't play and I was lucky that when trying them they didn't damage my DVD player. Not worth it!
A plethora of genres! ^ Although I'm not typically and classic movie watcher, I couldn't beat the price for what is now one of my favorite directors. These movies are the really early ones (some go as far back as his silent films) that didn't make the headlines we remember well, but the stories are captivating. It's a treasure indeed and will be watching these for quite some time.
Great collection of early Hitchcock ^ This is a great collection of Hitchcock's early films, and for such a bargain. Unfortunately the resolution, sound, and quality of many of these films is not that great because of how old they are. Also, I find since they are British films, sometimes it's difficult with the un-restored sound to understand what they are saying. Three of Hitchcock's better early films are included among the bunch: The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Lady Vanishes, and Sabotage. These works are great predecessors for some of Hitchcock's later works, and you can definitely see a great film maker in the making here. This is a must-have set for any Hitchcock fan and it even includes hard to find films like many of his silent films!
Mainly older stuff ^ This is a 4-DVD set, 5 shows per DVD, approximately 28 hours of Black and White Hitchcock shows, ranging from 1926 to 1962, and varying from 24 to 98 minutes each. Some are silent movies and some are from the weekly Hitchcock television series.
Very mixed opinion on this. ^ For starters, it's great to see Hitchcock's early works. My big gripes about this collection are how the media was handled. The transfers are very poor. I'm not talking about degraded film, which is what it is. I mean the film was obviously transferred on substandard equipment in a hurry. They didn't take care in preserving the contrast of the original films or the framing. It's like they used an old film/video chain with the camera on autoexpose. So when it cuts to something bright, it's overblown until the autoexpose compensates. When it cuts to something dark, like a title card, it's fine until the autoexposure responds making for words that blur together. The framing isn't very good, like words getting chopped off the edge or bottom of the screen etc. At one point, you can see the transfer system stop, rewind, then resume playing for a brief moment in the middle of a movie. The times & synopsis on the cover often have nothing to do with the actual program material. There's also a lot of skips on the DVD. Finally, there's too many movies on each disk making for bad compression artifacts. If they were on such a tight budget, they should have broken the load into 2x 4-disk sets on sold them separately. It was VERY badly handled project done by what I can only assume was an amateur who just didn't care. It's a shame because there's some great early movies here that would have been much more enjoyable if they had been handled properly. I'd be almost tempted to find some of those movies and retransfer them myself with a 35mm projector and a DVX100.
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