Alfred Hitchcock was a voracious filmgoer, and like many great artists, a bit of a magpie. Consciously or unconsciously, he would file away shots and sequences that impressed him, and years later some of them would re-emerge, reshaped by Hitchcock’s genius and fully integrated into his personal universe.

As “Vertigo” turns 50 this weekend, I’m reminded of Edward Dmytryk’s 1952 “The Sniper,” a Stanley Kramer production for Columbia that recently resurfaced on TCM after years of unavailability. (It’s missing, alas, from Sony’s recent Kramer box set, where it would have been overwhelmingly the best film in the collection.)

Based on a story by Edna and Edward Anhalt, “The Sniper” is one of the earliest films to conform fully to the serial killer formula as we know it today. Much of the film is told from the point of view of the sympathetic anti-hero, Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz), a young, mentally disturbed veteran of World War II who has taken to the streets of San Francisco with a high powered rifle he uses to pick off women. Harry Brown’s screenplay contains what is very likely one of the first uses of the quintessential line in serial killer movies, when a bystander remarks, “There’s a maniac loose in San Francisco and the police are powerless to stop him!”

Because San Francisco it is: again, “The Sniper” is very likely one of the first films – using the new, more mobile equipment that emerged in the late 40s – to take full advantage as San Francisco as a location, transforming the city’s famously vertiginous geography into a metaphor for its protagonist’s unstable mental state. Using the extreme foreground/background tension that is his stylistic hallmark, Dmytryk plays huge close-ups of Franz against the open chasms of the city, very much as Hitchcock would do – though in less tense, more lyrical manner – six years later. There is even a rooftop chase sequence, when a group of cops converges on a teenager they mistakenly believe to be the killer, that directly suggests the opening sequence in “Vertigo” – the chase that leads to Scottie’s fall.

If Hitchcock mined “The Sniper” for “Vertigo,” he seems also to have remembered it in constructing “Psycho.” Franz ‘s character is portrayed as a strangely asexual loner with a profound mother complex (there is even a fatuous police psychiatrist, played by Richard Kiley, around to “explain” his compulsion, just like Simon Oakland in “Psycho”). Just like Norman Bates, Eddie is driven to kill as a substitute for sexual fulfillment; he is alternately shyly protective around women (the Janet Leigh figure here is a nightclub pianist played by Marie Windsor) and violently contemptuous, a transformation triggered the instant a woman reveals a hint of sexual desire. Like “Psycho,” “The Sniper” ends with the camera closing in on an astonishing close-up of the killer, though in place of the death’s head grin that Hitchcock would give Norman Bates, Franz’s Eddie releases a single glycerin tear as he looks up at the police detective (a rumpled Adolphe Menjou) who has finally, providentially captured him.

And the detective’s name (no kidding): Lt. Frank Kafka.

It’s official: the e-mail below appeared in my in-box this morning, from Criterion’s New York publicist:

Hello – The time has arrived! Several titles from the Criterion Collection are set for Blu-ray treatment beginning in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and will be priced to match Criterion’s standard-def editions.

Titles lined up at this point include:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

Alongside the DVD and Blu-ray box sets of The Last Emperor, Criterion will also release the theatrical version as a stand-alone release in both formats, priced at $39.95. The Blu-ray release of Walkabout will be an all-new edition, featuring new supplements as well as a new transfer. An updated anamorphic DVD of Nicolas Roeg’s outback masterpiece will be released at the same time.

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In other news, Glenn Kenny, whacked by the front office imbeciles at premiere.com, has set up shop with his own Typepad blog, which he’s calling
Some Came Running (after the Minnelli masterpiece which, by happy coincidence, finally comes out on DVD this Tuesday).

After the massive Melies set last month, here’s another major release from Flicker Alley: a restoration of Abel Gance’s 1922 visionary grab bag “La Roue” with a running time of nearly four and a half hours. That’s about two hours more than we’ve had before, and it comes with a visual quality far beyond the muddy dupes that have been in circulation. It’s still short of the running time of the Paris premiere version — variously reported at 7 1/2 to 9 1/2 hours, probably depending on the caffeine level of the projectionist — but for the moment, it’s quite enough.

On the plus side, today brought news that Jonathan Rosenbaum’s blog is up and running, though in his introductory entry, Jonathan says that the blog will chiefly consist of two features:  a reprint of an older review, plus a list of Jonathan’s latest publications and upcoming personal appearances.

That’s a disappointment to those of us who’d hoped for something more ambtious, but I certainly understand Jonathan’s decision.  It’s an unfortunate reality that blogging on this scale produces little or no income, and after a couple of years, it becomes hard to justify spending much time maintaining a website, when that time is so obviously better spent on work that contributes to paying the mortgage.  Today, Tim Lucas expresses some similar reservations on his fine site, Video WatchBlog, going far enough to suggest that his days as a pixel-stained wretch are coming to an end.  Coming on the heels of Flickhead’s abrupt retirement from the field, it’s enough to make you wonder if the energy of this particular scene hasn’t begun to burn out — at least, for those of us who aren’t supported by corporate parents.  A wise man wondered some time ago whther blogging was really just the CB radio of the early 21st century — a fad that will inevitably come to an end.  There’s an awful lot of typing going on out there, and not a whole lot of writing.

Undaunted, the gang at The Screengrab is continuing to provide detailed, cleanly-written coverage of the dauntingly huge Tribeca Film Festival, for which this filmgoer is very grateful.  One personal recommendation if you are in the New York area:  don’t miss the repeat screening on Sunday, May 4 at 2 pm of Rene Clair’s 1929 “Two Timid Souls,” an overlooked silent farce from Clair’s most creative period (there are a couple of split screen sequences, perhaps inspired by Gance’s “Napoleon,” that seem years ahead of their time).  Tribeca is presenting the film in an archive print from the Cinematheque Francaise, accompanied by a 30 piece orchestra performing a newly composed score by Jaebon Hwang, Jin Kyung Lee, Jihwan Kim, and Seon Kyong Kim — all students in the Film Scoring Program at NYU Steinhardt.

This week in the NY Times, a look at the “First Ladies: Early Women Filmmakers” series from Kino, which includes Lois Weber’s allegorical oddity “Hypocrites” (an oddly allegorical moment is shown above). And there’s a new digitally restored and remixed version of Gregg Araki’s Angry Young Gay Man movie of 1992, “The Living End.”

Joe Baltake has a heartfelt plea to Sony to free Jack Lemmon on his site, The Passionate Moviegoer. Why do some movies just seem to disappear — in this case, nine of the fourteen films Lemmon made under his Columbia contract?  There are no obvious answers, and the studio is silent.

This week in the New York Times I demonstrate my newly conferred status as King of the Hipsters by interviewing Claude Lelouch and enthusizing over Shirley Temple.  Hipper than this you simply do not get.

The screen grab above is from Fox Home Video’s excellent new version of John Ford’s “Wee Willie Winkie,” which was included in the Ford box last December and is now part of the final installment of Fox’s Shirley Temple collection (along with William A. Seiter’s pleasant “Stowaway” and Allan Dwan’s quite interesting “Young People”).  After all the work Fox’s archivist Schawn Belston put into restoring the sepia tinting (and blue toned night scenes) used for the first release of Ford’s film, Fox Home Video has thoughtfully released it as a flipper disc, with what they are calling the “colorized” version on one side (i.e., the sepia print) and the black-and-white on the other.  Oh, the irony!  But Fox seems increasingly to have their corporate heart in the right place.  The company is issuing a do-over of their dismal transfer of “The Gang’s All Here” in an upcoming Carmen Miranda collection, and after issuing the Academy ratio version of Raoul Walsh’s key 1930 Western “The Big Trail” as part of their “Studio Classics” collection a few years ago, they will be putting out the 70mm widescreen version — perhaps the most stunning early example of Walsh’s pioneering use of extreme deep focus — as part of a collection of Fox Westerns in the weeks to come.  Now there’s something I’d love to see in Bluray — might even make me buy a player.

Criterion’s very nice disc of “Blast of Silence,” Alan Baron’s New York indie noir from 1961, contains among its many other virtues some strikingly unvarnished images of Manhattan in the early 60s. Above is a view of St. Mark’s Place, where Baron’s main character, a lone-wolf contract killer, takes a room in a seedy hotel that still exists with only slight modifications.  Next door is the bathouse that would enter American social history when it was renamed “The Continental Baths” a few years later; New York cinephiles will of coure recognize it as the present day headquarters of the Kim’s Video empire — where, no doubt, “Blast of Silence” is on sale at a healthy discount.

And I have a few words on the latest “film de gore” from France, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s “Inside” — the anti-”Juno” film par excellence, as Nathan Lee has pointed out.

It’s only mid-April, but I think we have a candidate for critic of the year.  Check out this perceptive analysis of “Sunrise” from the LA Times movie blog.

A big batch of Chris Marker’s essay films is being released by First Run/Icarus Films, including a double disc set of Alexander Medvedkin’s 1934/35 Soviet comedy “Happiness” and Marker’s critical documentary on Medvedkin, “The Last Bolshevik.”

Some disquieting news from the Auteurist Home Office in Paris. Le Monde, the daily paper that now owns “Les Cahiers du Cinema,” is going through the same economic crisis facing the US publishing industry, and has resolved to sell off some of its less profitable holdings — including “Les Editions de l’Etoile,” the parent company of “Cahiers.” While there’s very little chance that a brand as prestigious as “Cahiers” will simply be allowed to die, there’s no way of knowing what hands it will fall into. At least Rupert Murdoch doesn’t seem to speak French.

The subject of the single most notorious pronouncement in the history of film criticism — Michel Mourlet’s proclamation that “Charlton Heston is an axiom of the cinema” — Heston made himself easy to dismiss in his later years with his own notorious pronouncements — “I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands” — on behalf of the NRA.  Yet I never loved him more than when he got up and walked out on a duplicitous, condescending Michael Moore in “Bowling for Columbine.”  Richard Widmark he was not — and in some ways, Heston’s stolid, marmoreal qualities were the exact opposite of Widmark’s — but his place in film history is secure, if only for his role, both on screen and behind it, in the making of “Touch of Evil.”

The full Mourlet quote, as reproduced in “Cahiers du Cinema: The 1960s”:

“Charlton Heston is an axiom. He constitutes a tragedy in himself, his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty. The pent-up violence expressed by the somber phosphorescence of his eyes, his eagle’s profile, the imperious arch of his eyebrows, the hard, bitter curve of his lips, the stupendous strength of his torso - this is what he has been given, and what not even the worst of directors can debase. It is in this sense that one can say that Charlton Heston, by his very existence and regardless of the film he is in, provides a more accurate definition of the cinema than films like “Hiroshima mon amour” or “Citizen Kane,” films whose aesthetic either ignores or repudiates Charlton Heston. Through him, mise en scène can confront the most intense of conflicts and settle them with the contempt of a god imprisoned, quivering with muted rage.”

I’m upgrading my software, and hope to be back live as soon as humanly possible.