Salutations! Savant's All-Noir reviews today are
Hello again. Not much to report except to say that the new noir releases were a nice break from star-oriented boxed sets, which I'll be continuing with shortly with Criterion's Eric Rohmer Moral Tales collection. Looking forward to more big titles (in Savant's estimation): This Island Earth, Gojira, Playtime, Pretty Poison and Jesse James.
There was a minor consumer revolt over at the Home Theater Forum over the supposedly poor treatment given the James Stewart western The Naked Spur by Warners. I can only repeat Robert H. Harris' calming response: Restoring Technicolor movies from scratch (recompositing the original B&W matrices by photochemical or digital means) is prohibitively expensive, like, many times what it takes to put an old negative or duping element through the mill. So far only top tiltles (Oz, Singin' in the Rain) have been done this way and only on an experimental no-profit basis. As I said in my review somebody eventually may come up with an economical process to restore IB Tech films, but until then I'm not calling for vigilante justice when an individual transfer isn't as beautiful as it might be, even when the film is a personal favorite.
Back to the fun: Correspondent Aitam Bar-Sagi pointed out this Russian Music Video "Vot tak" that uses generous film clips from Metropolis, including one shot he says is not in any present restored version. Note: The shot is at 52 seconds; it's mostly blocked by a matted figure but shows flames billowing out of the Moloch machine. I fully expect Aitam to start tracking down the film source for the music video -- his collection already includes many stills and even a shot or two not restored to the usual versions of the film! -- Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at August 14, 2006 02:03 PM