Film Classics Get A Face Lift

The 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film, Rear Window has been given a new look and hits theaters nationwide this month. The CBS News Early Show's Mark McEwen reports the story of two men on a mission to save the classics.

It's the latest movie to be given a facelift by famed movie restorers Robert Harris and James Katz. Thanks to their expertise, many classic films that would have been destroyed by years of wear and tear have now been preserved for generations to come.

A few years ago if you'd rented the movie Vertigo you would have seen a worn and faded version of a classic. Rent it today and you can see the brilliance of the original version shine through.

The same goes for My Fair Lady and Lawrence of Arabia, all the work of Harris and Katz, who take the oldest, most mangled of negatives and make them new again.

"We generally pull in the camera negative and we figure out what the problems are. Before we even print it, we try and get all the old paperwork. We'll talk to the director, if he's alive. We talk to the director of photography. We'll talk to the producer," explained Harris.

And the questions they ask are about how the film was made.

"How it was shot, why certain scenes may look the way that they do," he added.

Their latest project, Rear Window, was perhaps their toughest. The original negative was stored improperly and over-printed. But thanks to the advancement of dye transfer printing processes and specialized computers that correct color fading, a new negative was reconstructed.

The scene where Grace Kelly kisses Jimmy Stewart was, for example, particularly problematic.

" The main problem with the kiss was that it was made as an optical, as a dupe, and it had faded. By the time we got it and tried to print it, it came out yellow-green," explained Harris.

Now the image as it jumps off the screen is perfect, he noted.

" What we basically did was we made it look like a new movie," explained Katz.

Another scene where viewers are going to see the difference is inside the windows, he added -- something that is particularly helpful in this film, noted Harris, given its name.

"There's one shot that really jumps out at you. And there's a scene when the dog is killed. Everyone comes running out of their apartments. The owner of the dog is screaming. All of the apartments are lit except for Raymond Burr's. Now in 1983, in the prints, you look in the window and what do you see? Darkness. On television you see darkness. In this print you look in this dark window and sitting way in the background you see a cigar glowing gently. You know that he's sitting there," explained Harris with laughter.

Harris and Katz also restored Spartacus and added a scene that had been left originally on the cutting room floor, a scene they call "snails and oysters."

There were problems, though. Over the passing of time, th dialogue for the scene had been destroyed and Sir Lawrence Olivier had passed away.

What to do?

They went to his widow Joan Plowright and asked her who best could mimic her husband's voice. And her surprising answer was Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins.

"Tony used to do him to his face at cocktail parties," said Harris about Hopkins.

"He would sneak up behind him and do Larry in his ear. So we got him to agree to do this. And we went over to London and we voiced Olivier's character from the script," noted Katz.

So what's the next project for Harris and Katz? They're hard at work restoring the film Williamsburg: The Story Of A Patriot.

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