Isn't this kind of 'father knows best' thinking what got us into trouble to begin with and what MoC is specifically trying to address / counteract with their edition?Peacock wrote:I think the problem more is that David Hare and others proved quite clearly that widescreen cuts out specific lighting effects and other things, making it clear that Welles very likely intended this for 4:3.
Any open matte print is always going to include 'things' that a more restrictive format cuts out, and the better the director and cinematographer are the better that extra space is going to look, particularly if they're keeping half an eye on future television screenings, or 16mm reductions or so forth, but it doesn't make open matte necessarily correct, so there's no substitute for a side-by-side comparison of the actual film. Anybody can cherry-pick screengrabs to argue for one aspect ratio or the other, too, so that's not always reliable as evidence either.