Fun with box set reviews: Strangers on a Train

As a fan of Alfred Hitchcock's movies, I wanted to get Strangers on a Train for my library, and found this inexpensive box set of Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest. Since I wasn't certain what to blog about today, I decided to pull out this set to see if there were any shorts on it to review. When I opened the box, I was surprised:

The disc says "Disc One Final Release Version". (I should have taken the photo in landscape mode, but if you can't read that you can click on the image to see it quite a bit bigger.) The only other disc in the box set is the disc of North By Northwest, as one would have expected. So I did an Amazon search for Strangers on a Train, and one of the offers was this standalone DVD, which as you can see from the page is a repackaging according to Amazon's title, and "New Packaging" from the list of formats. But there's another one, this one which is clearly a "Two-disc Special Edition". So that would explain where they got the "Disc One" from. And for more evidence there was a disc two, I popped the disc into my computer's DVD player and got the following menu:



The preview version is apparently a version edited for UK audiences. I haven't seen it, so I'm not so certain what's different about it from the version we in America get.

As for the box set I picked up, the only special features on Strangers on a Train are an audio commentary (I didn't listen to it) and the theatrical trailer. Each of the two DVDs is on its one spindle, although one of the spindles is on a hinge that clips into the spine of the case. Another box set that I got (I think it's the Alec Guinness set) has a similar thing, except that one of the spindles has trouble staying in the case. The last DVD I mentioned, from the Gregory Peck Universal set, had two DVDs with one spindle on each side of the case. The hinge here seems stable, but who knows with these things.

The fact that the two movies are highly recommended goes without saying.