A personal pitch from Hitch

Cinema has never been short of showmen; flair comes with the territory. Arguably, no filmmaker has had a more natural gift for selfpromotion than Alfred Hitchcock, and while the director carefully positioned his movies via myriad creative methods (from personal appearances to pre-recorded instructions to theater personnel), nothing demonstrates his mastery better than a tour through the trailers created to promote his oeuvre over the years.

Thanks to Blu-ray and YouTube, the teasers that once hyped Hitch's pictures are now easily accessible to film historians and fans. Unlike today's movie previews, Hitchcock's trailers were often as high-concept as the pictures they touted, from the six-minute guided tour of the Bates Motel and mansion produced for "Psycho" to his tongue-incheek monologue about "the birds and their age-long relationship with man" for "The Birds."

This year, moviegoers experienced a return of sorts to this type of limitedtease, director-focused sales pitch with the Web trailers for "Prometheus" and "Looper" (the latter featuring helmer Rian Johnson and star Joseph GordonLevitt describing the trailer that would debut three days later on Apple). AU too often, however, contempo trailers merely condense a 2Vè-hour movie into 2V4 minutes of money shots. Largely lost is the more tantalizing art many Hitchcock films used of having the director or star walk out and personally talk through the film's highlights.

The best example is "Rope," which features the character of David Kentley (strangled in the pic's opening scene) sweet-talking his best gal on a park bench. Then Jimmy Stewart cuts in, ominously saying, "That's the last time she ever saw him alive. And that's the last time you'll ever see him alive" - a case where the trailer supplies a bit of sympathy-making backstory the film itself withholds.

In the trailer for 1956s "The Man Who Knew Too Much," after a loud crash interrupts...