Fox Catalog Titles on Blu

[FrauBlucher]

Murnau's Sunrise

[hearthesilence]

That Czech print is essential, even if it has less shots. It looks too damn good. I presume that's the "European" version?

[Lowry_Sam]

Of Fox's classic titles, I'd most like to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I'm surprised this hasn't been put on the front burner, given the popularity of Downton Abbey. Of course it would be nice if Criterion picked it up, but not very likely.

[cdnchris]

I always figured they would eventually release it since they did appear to have a thing for Ronald Neame nack in the day. I'm actually a little surprised they haven't.

[Feego]

I'd really like to see this released too (by Fox or Criterion, more likely by Fox). The print used for the old DVD was quite dirty and was missing the Oscar-nominated theme song over the closing credits (rights issues?). The print that has been airing recently on TCM is much cleaner and has the song restored.

[rockysds]

The Inn of the Sixth Happiness - February 4th

[domino harvey]

Highly recommended and how wonderful that it didn't go to Twilight Time so more people will take a chance on it!

[knives]

I agree. It's such unique take on what Hollywood, especially then, seems to always be horrible about. I think the use of language is its best attribute making the sound really work artistically.

[BillWatkins]

DVDBeaver reviews The Black Swan and Desk Set.

Both have been completely bathed in teal making the color look absolutely atrocious.

[Gregory]

Awful. So much of what was green or white or greyish is now blue or bluish. To reply to BK, whose email is quoted in the review: Obviously I agree that the middle caps from the Taiwanese release are horrible and wrong. Comparing this new BD to the old Fox DVD, though, I see little improvement in sharpness and far too much blue. I have to wonder what kind of print of Desk Set BK owned, what it happened to look like, or how precisely BK recalls its color timing.

Look at the second set of caps: the wall and ceiling are obviously brown, so where is this bluish hue coming from? Are television screens that are turned off supposed to be bright sky blue, not grey? So many things that were white are now blue: the white paper cards in the fronts of the file cabinets, the "no smoking" lettering in the 7th set of caps, etc.

And people haven't been pointing out the teal/orange thing for the last four years or so because it's "fashionable"; they've done it because it's an actual tendency in the color timing that's been pretty hard to miss.

[Murdoch]

My eyes! All I see for Black Swan is teal and orange, teal and orange. And that third set of Desk Set captures makes it look like the film was reshot with a blue filter!

[domino harvey]

Man, I'm glad I had no interest in upgrading from my Hepburn and Tracy box because Desk Set is an atrocity! That might legit be the worst color timing disaster of a studio era film I've ever seen

[Props55]

God these are horrible beyond all belief! Fox Tech/DeLuxe as reimagined by/with Bava gells! And that innervated, frail blu of JESSE JAMES (with occasional bursts of Cinecolor-like yellows) giving the cast a Hammer-vampire pallor. This is the Fox D-Team!

And yes, Mr. Hare, did we hallucinate the glorius IB Tech of NIAGARA!

[EddieLarkin]

The BK mentioned in the DVDBeaver review just has to be Bruce Kimmel. For what it's worth (round here, not much, I know), rarely is his opinion on colour out of sync with Harris'.

[Fred Holywell]

Agree, of course, that all these titles look atrocious. Very disappointing and sad that this is the best Fox thought they could do -- or worse, wanted to do. After "Niagra" and the other Marilyns, I had high hopes for them, particularly "Jesse James". But even "North to Alaska", probably the best-looking of the bunch, is nothing to write home about. And BK claims that "The Black Swan... replicates perfectly now what it should have always looked like". Is he mad or just color-blind?!

[Jonathan S]

Who knew Tracy & Hepburn made a blue movie!?

[zedz]

Ugh. And just look how, in the last comparative capture for Desk Set, the proper Technicolor pop of a scarlet skirt had been transmogrified into flat ochre.

[domino harvey]

Carmen Jones' colors look okay, but it's cropped (?) on one side-- did they just lop off the edge to hide the Cinemascope curvature?!

[EddieLarkin]

The AR is identical, so you've gained on the opposite side. Perhaps they've made allowance for where the soundtrack would have been, assuming they've used the OCN. Cinemascope was 2.66:1 full aperture, 2.55:1 with the soundtrack, which crucially was placed on the left.

[EddieLarkin]

Robert Harris says Black Swan is way off, whilst Desk Set is accurate.

[Gregory]

Maybe he should try to explain why so much of the array colors seen in publicity stills, faithfully reproduced in earlier transfers (discounting the Taiwanese DVD that "BK" chose to focus on) are now converted to various hues of blue. Did Walter Lang and DP Leon Shamroy have some extremely stylized color scheme in mind the whole time which has never been remarked upon before now, so that (to name one of many examples visible in the Beaver caps) the steel I-beam in the libary ceiling isn't the color of, you know, steel , but instead is blue?

Generally created from beautifully written screenplays, Desk Set was the penultimate, and the only one in CinemaScope. It was also one of their lesser efforts.

As a 1957 production, it has every reason to be problematic.

The surprise is, that it isn't.

Wow, cryptic.

[EddieLarkin]

If you ask him, he may be able to.

All I would say is at least see the disc. The one thing I would trust the least from caps is colour reproduction, as it's very unlikely your monitor and graphics card are calibrated in the same way as your TV. I'm not saying the blue bias would be absent, but it may appear reduced. The THX setting on my Panny GT30 has a surprisingly strong green bias that would probably negate a lot of it.

[Gregory]

I've almost never noticed any serious discrepancies between color timing between my display and Beaver caps. What I have noticed huge discrepancies in are RAH's "few words" about various releases. I'm not a member at HTF and have no intention of trying to challenge him to be more rigorous. There's also no way I'd buy this Desk Set Blu-ray to see for myself what it looks like, except perhaps if a review at Blu-ray.com reveals some serious problem Gary's caps.

[EddieLarkin]

I don't have much faith in anyone's decades old memory of colour reproduction, but Bruce says the Blu-ray is a dead match for what his IB tech print looked like (he commented further, here). Then you have RAH saying it is also accurate. Don't you think that's worth a little more than what the DVD looked like? Why would it be any more accurate than the Blu-ray? I have no agenda, I've not seen the film and have no interest in doing so, and if I had to choose one I'd probably say the DVD colour looks more pleasing. But I don't know what that's got to do with historical accuracy.

[Gregory]

I'm not basing my comments just on what the DVD looked like. This is a film I've seen many times, and none of these pithy assertions from RAH or BK that this is right are convincing. The BK post you link to reads like incoherent raving to me: "Yellow/green awful previous releases" (Huh? The Fox DVD and the Taiwanese are hardly the same, and what about so much of the browns, greys, and whites suddenly becoming blue?), apparent repeated denials of any teal/orange tendencies within the industry, and sloppy generalizations about Technicolor prints allegedly having blues predominate to the extent we see in the Desk Set caps.

(Edited for typo and to tone it down a bit)