You're welcome Falcon! I remember when I first started studying Hitchcock all the big textbooks played up the original version's importance and all but thumbed their noses looking down over the "tawdry" 50's American version. The British film just is not a complete story as the remake is. It is a great movie, exciting and fresh today, and very ahead of its time but as Hitch himself said the later version was made by a professional.
Looking at my DVD Masterpiece Collection title by title after all this time has been very revealing. That TMWKTM is heinously bad. I sure hope that the Blu-ray comes from a different master, but with no work really going into it or Vertigo I think it's going to be the lesser regarded titles that will shine. (Saboteur, but especially Rope and The Trouble With Harry which both have stunning repertory prints I've seen in the last few years. Imagine the DVDs on massive steroids. Massive. If done correctly, Harry should be catalog title of the year.)
My problem with the early films and the silents has always been the sheer awfulness of any available transfer and their confinement primarily to the public domain. It wasn't even until pretty recently that you could even hope to see The Pleasure Garden and the only decent releases are PAL and a bit on the expensive side. I've always held out for someone (Criterion, clears throat, this should have been no. 1 in your Eclipse line) to finally do NTSC transfers worth a damn. I haven't seen Blackmail in ages because of this, which I hold as likely the first fully functioning talkie and light years ahead of its time.
Have been thinking about getting one of these PAL sets though I loathe speedup. I'm so very tired of all my ultra el-cheapo DVD sets with prints so worn that they look far worse than all the public domain VHS tapes I grew up on.
Yes I do hold The Lodger as a silent masterwork, but even in the silent period, I've always felt that Hitch was still learning; still gaining all of the necessary aspects that came to define his career. There was his early successes, his early failures, the period of adaptations and that darn musical before TMWKTM v.1, and also his working/training at Ufa.
The first true Hitchcock film was The Lodger. But it took time for the first fully fledged and complete Hitchcock film to emerge and that is
The 39 Steps (1935)
Masterful, exciting, inventive, exhilarating, endearing, genuinely funny, and one of those few absolutely perfect films. The foundation for the sound action adventure film, and chock full of all the famous Hitchcock motifs that popped up in nearly every one of his later films. Magnificent in every way.
There is more storytelling in one minute of this film than ever conceivable. This is where The Master earned his title.
4 balls out of 4...steps? missing top joints of the little finger? pairs of handcuffs?
As for Batman Forever, I still think it is in no way awful. It was extremely compromised by imposed edits not once but several times, and it's surprising that what was left in even makes sense at all.