I had to register at that newspaper, but here's the text:
On Sunday, Nov. 19, the Bedford Playhouse will have a special screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” completely restored by Universal Studios and well-known film preservationist Robert Harris of Bedford. Thanks to those efforts, the color and sound quality of the film will be equal to those of the original production. A Q&A with Mr. Harris and film critic Janet Maslin follows the film.
Starring James Stewart and Doris Day, the film was initially released in 1934 and then re-made in 1956 with a significantly different plot and script. It was from the later version that Mr. Harris worked, in conjunction with the Universal Studios Restoration Department. Sunday’s screening is a gift to the Bedford Playhouse by NBCUniversal.
Mr. Harris recalled in an interview last week that when he started working on the project, he found that the film had deteriorated to the point that it was not usable except in low resolution formats.
At the time, he was working with a partner, Jim Katz, who as head of Universal Pictures Classics had acquired the licenses for five, long out of distribution Hitchcock films.
Universal was underwriting all the costs for the Hitchcock restorations, and the first one they approved was “Vertigo” in 1996. When Mr. Harris and Mr. Katz started on that film, they also examined “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and found it was in far worse condition than expected. Many of the old films shot in the 1950s were photographed on an early Eastman Kodak negative stock that deteriorated over time, “it was basically gone,” Mr. Harris said, “no longer printable.”
Attempting restoration was complicated by another decision. In 1967, all rights to four of the Hitchcock films — those two titles along with “Rear Window” and “The Trouble with Harry” — reverted to his company. As a result, hundreds of cartons of original production elements were scheduled to be delivered, but an order was sent to Paramount and Technicolor to destroy all elements worldwide with the exception of original camera negatives, protection masters, optical track negatives and five prints each.
What Mr. Harris saw when he first reviewed the film in 1996 was, in his words, “a perfect storm. The yellow dye layer was virtually gone. The black-and-white protection master prints had shrunk. There were layers of problems, and we did not have the technology to fix it.” (At the screening on Sunday, he will run a short segment showing what the footage looks like without the restoration.)
At that point, “The Man Who Knew Too Much” was put into cold storage and Mr. Harris went on to do the restoration on “Vertigo” and “Rear Window.” Then, four years ago, as new technology became available, Universal agreed to fund the restoration of the 1956 Hitchcock masterpiece.
Finally, around 2021, work got started. With the new technology in place, the restoration process took place in a steady stream of communications between Mr. Harris and archival experts at the studio. They would send him files with modified color and density, which he examined in detail and then he would respond with additional changes. Several times throughout the project, Mr. Harris arranged for reference copies of the footage to be projected at the Playhouse as a quality check. The finished product was actually finalized on an iPad Pro, which was synchronized electronically with the studio.
Both Mr. Harris and the studio are “thrilled” with the final outcome. “It was a team effort,” he said, “We had a great technical team of archivists and colorists who brought back all the original color. This has much better resolution than the 1956 35mm release, and the sound in the Playhouse will be phenomenal.”
Mr. Harris has been in the motion picture business for many years. He started at the age of 14 when he got a job at Warner Bros.-Seven Arts as a messenger, working in different departments. In college, he worked for Warner Bros. and later with a company that made movie trailers and featurettes. Also in college, he worked on Francis Ford Coppola’s first studio film, as a gopher, in his words, “the lowest of all jobs.”
He started restoration work in the 1970s and acquired the rights to a film called “Napoleon,” which was made in France in 1927 and went on to be shown at a number of film festivals and later at Radio City Music Hall. In addition to the restoration work he did on the Hitchcock films, he has earned wide praise in the film industry for similar work on such iconic films as “The Godfather” (I and II), “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Spartacus,” “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and “My Fair Lady.”
Mr. Harris has received a number of awards. In 2010, he was honored by the International Press Academy with its Nikola Tesla Award for Visionary Achievement in Filmmaking Technology. The Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is home to the Robert A. Harris Collection, which consists of film, video tape and audio material related to his restoration work; it includes over 1,100 items.
Many of the old classics have been lost due to the deterioration problem, but, thanks largely to Mr. Harris and his restoration skills, “The Man Who Knew Too Much” is not one of them.
