It won't stop....

20th Century-Fox's Cinema Archives vault of hard-to-find cult and library titles has released Tender is the Night, the 1962 romantic drama based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, directed by Henry King (in wide, wide CinemaScope), and starring Jennifer Jones, Jason Robards, Jr., Joan Fontaine, and Tom Ewell. I wanted very much to see this particular drama; it's exactly my cup of tea: lush, expensive, talky, and long. However, as I wrote in my reviews for 23 Paces for Baker Street and Warlock, I didn't watch Tender is the Night for longer than a minute past the properly-ratioed credits because Fox has released this in a grainy, blown-out, softly-focused 1.33:1 pan-and-scan botch that completely undermines the whole point of their Cinema Archives concept. Whether or not they did this deliberately, or because this is the only print that was available, is beside the point: the era of asking collectors to go along with a pan-and-scan version of a widescreen movie is long over (after all, collectors are the only people buying a title like this―it's an on-demand disc, for god's sake). So no need to review the movie itself. Deeply disappointed in this trend of full-screen transfers of widescreen movies, Fox.... Skip this release of Tender is the Night.