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Foreign Correspondent



In 1940, Alfred Hitchcock made his official transition from the British film industry to Hollywood. And it was quite a year: his first two American movies, Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, were both nominated for the best picture Oscar. Though Rebecca prevailed, Foreign Correspondent is the more quintessential Hitch film. A full-throttle espionage thriller, starring Joel McCrea as a green Yank reporter sent to Europe to get the scoop on the imminent war, it's wall-to-wall witty repartee, head-spinning plot twists, and brilliantly mounted suspense set pieces, including an ocean plane crash climax with astonishing special effects. Foreign Correspondent deserves to be mentioned alongside The 39 Steps and North by Northwest as one of the master's greatest adventures.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New piece on the visual effects in the film with effects expert Craig Barron
• Hollywood Propaganda and World War II, a new interview with writer Mark Harris
• Interview with director Alfred Hitchcock from a 1972 episode of The Dick Cavett Show
• Radio adaptation of the film from 1946, starring Joseph Cotten
• Have You Heard? The Story of Wartime Rumors, a 1942 Life magazine "photo-drama" by Hitchcock
• Trailer
• One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar James Naremore

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No commentary?! That's a sad first

Yeah, Hitch movies always seem to cry out for them- though I suppose no commentary isn't a lot worse than a Marian Keane commentary.

The Warners disc came with a half-hour Laurent Bouzereau documentary. Those are always a bit flighty, but entertaining enough that I'm wondering if this will be the first time I don't get rid of the non-Criterion version of a Hitchcock title.

Easy for me to hold onto my copy since it came in that giant Warners Signature Collection!

Sadly missing the "Personal History: Foreign Correspondent" making of documentary from the Warner Bros DVD

Wait, why does this take two DVDs? There aren't nearly enough extras to justify that

domino harvey wrote:Wait, why does this take two DVDs? There aren't nearly enough extras to justify that

The Dick Cavett interview should be over and hour without commercials. Maybe the other interviews are lengthy too.

The windmill scene in this film is one of the tensest set pieces Hitch ever did, I feel like it's criminally underrated (like Saboteur) and deserving of some new attention.

movielocke wrote:The windmill scene in this film is one of the tensest set pieces Hitch ever did, I feel like it's criminally underrated (like Saboteur) and deserving of some new attention.

I agree, it's one of my favourite of his, and was criminally underrated by Hitchcock himself, if I remember rightly.
Saboteur, however, is not much cop at all and is definitely not underrated, in my view.

I didn't see this posted anywhere else, but just in case, a short look at the making of Criterion's edition of Foreign Correspondent.

DVD Savant's review of the Blu-ray is here.

Anyone knows why the Blu-ray is not available and "under review" on amazon.com right now?

Will Barks wrote:Anyone knows why the Blu-ray is not available and "under review" on amazon.com right now?

Probably several people returning their copy hoping for a pristine Digipack to satiate their collecting needs.

It appears that Criterion will be reissuing Foreign Correspondent in separate blu-ray and DVD editions this coming Tuesday. The listings appear on both Barnes and Noble's site and amazon.ca, though I didn't find them on amazon.com.

I'm under the impression that these will be released in the scanovo cases, so if like me, you want to get ahold of the film in the fantastic dual-format packaging but have been holding off, you may want to bump this up on your wish-list.

I wonder if Criterion will sell single-disc Blu-Ray cases on their website for releases like this. I'll still be holding onto my DVDs, but I wouldn't mind transferring the Blu-Ray into a smaller packaging that will fit better on my shelf.

Or better yet, replacement 3-disc plastic cases for people who'd like to move their dual format release into the more efficiently sized packaging. But probably not, as that would require printing different-sized sleeves.

Wouldn't that be the same thing they did for the early sleeved Blu-ray digipacks? Though I think the problem there would be fitting the digipack-sized booklet into the slightly smaller scanovo cases.

They'll be producing the smaller booklets for these new releases, so if there were any kind of a replacement program, it would probably cost more than before to cover the case, sleeve, and booklet.