I’ve just watched a few portions of the new Vertigo Bluray that’s part of Universal’s Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection, and I can report that the aubergine tint in James Stewart‘s brown suit — a fairly persistent element in the DCP version that I saw on the Universal lot last August — is now a mostly tolerable, off-and-on thing. It’s become a mood suit that sometimes drifts into faint aubergine brown, depending on the source of light.

The suit is solid brown in sunlight or shaded-sunlight scenes (Stewart following Kim Novak in the car, spying on her at the Mission Dolores cemetery) and aubergine-tinted when he’s indoors in Midge’s apartment or inside the McKittrick Hotel. So it’s still a slight problem but not much of one. I’m done with it. I can live with it, I mean. Yes, I wish the suit was pure brown all the time but the likelihood of the Universal guys re-doing Vertigo properly is very slight so we just have to live with it, and it’s not that bad anyway.