TCFHE Press Release: Forever Marilyn: The Blu-ray Collection (1 Viewer)

[ahollis]

Well since it looked as if the Blu-rays had all the same extras ported over from the DVDs, I guess I will just put the Blu-ray discs in the corresponding DVD cases and give the DVD's along with the Some Like It Hot and The Misfit's Blus to a friend. I checked a couple of Wal Marts today and they had nada.

 

[Matt Hough]

Finished There's No Business Like Show Business and The Seven Year Itch this afternoon. No bonuses to speak of for the former, but Itch has a nice selection of bonus features.

 

[kagemusha98]

I cannot believe how botched this release has been....not to mention..no NIAGARA or BUS STOP

 

[Matt Hough]

The movies mostly look wonderful, but for an iconic screen star, these should have been definitive releases with commentaries, documentaries on Marilyn's evolving career over the course of these movies, etc. Her historical importance to the history of movies and to Fox's 1950s output is completely missing.

 

[KPmusmag]

Thanks for the head's up about Walmart. For Marilyn, I visited Walmart. Found Gents, How To, No Biz and 7 Year for 9 bucks each. I had already ordered 7 Year on amazon for $8 so picked up the other three. I did not see any other Marilyn titles on blu except for those 4 titles. Pleased to have these titles at this price and in regular blu cases. (This was the Walmart on Lake Mead in downtown Henderson NV if anyone around here is looking.) I noticed that on Walmart's web site the prices are about the same as amazon's (in the $20 range).

 

[Mark Collins]

What about River of No Return? The title should be there. My Walmart in the Chicago area and the towns around it had them. I thought i was missing a title because they had the 4 together but on the next shelf was the 5th title. Some Like It Hot and Misfits were with them which makes sense. I am so glad I did not have to double dip for those titles. I placed all mine with their cases in the Diamond Collection Box vol 1. I still do not understand how Fox can do this to Monroe and her fans.
I hope the other collections I have ordered such as Indiana Jones Hitchcock and Universal Monsters do not come this way. I am very glad that these are not Fox films.

 

[Robert Crawford]

Originally Posted by MattH. /t/321170/tcfhe-press-release-forever-marilyn-the-blu-ray-collection/60#post_3956376
The movies mostly look wonderful, but for an iconic screen star, these should have been definitive releases with commentaries, documentaries on Marilyn's evolving career over the course of these movies, etc. Her historical importance to the history of movies and to Fox's 1950s output is completely missing.

Nah, it's a reason to do release them all over again such as her 90th birthday.

 

[Robert Crawford]

My favorite Monroe film has always been River of No Return. It's not close to being the best Monroe film, but it's always been my favorite. I think it's the image of Marilyn being in those tight jeans and soaking wet that has affected my judgement in that favorable light. Also, it doesn't help that River has such beautiful cinematography. The PQ of this BRD is excellent and I think most of will be very please with it.







Crawdaddy

 

[Mark Collins]

I looked at my last post and I meant to say Misfits and Some Like It Hot were not in with the 5 other titles. I do not know whether Walmart had the titles or not. I just was glad to pick up all 5. I encourage all fans to return the box set and buy if you can the 5 titles. I am so glad that you people informed me of this. I would not always go by what walmart states on the phone. I have called Walmart for titles and they are never interested it seemed in answering my question. I want to save gas but always had to make a trip there to check for sure. I always can buy something there so the trip is never a waste. River must be there unless there is a slow up in the chain.
I love the Seven Year Itch so that would be my Monroe pick. I also love Niagara and the Misfits. Some Like It Hot and River Of No Return too. I am sure everyone has heard the story about Marilyn feelin sorry for this guy being in the water back at Fox and stopped shooting until he was warm. I guess they were doing some close ups on River back at the studio.
I still hope for Somethings Got To Give. I am sorry I loved what Fox did with the restoration. The Diamond collection was done so nice. I do no understand what has happened at Fox to release Monroe films in this manner.

 

[Osato]

I stopped by Costco today and they had the following titles for $9.99.
There's No Business Like Show Business
The Seven Year Itch
How to Marrry A Millionaire
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Costco did not have River of No Return however.
This worked out great for me as I already have The Misfits and Some Like It Hot.
I'll have to check Wal Mart for River Of No Return.

 

[Garysb]

I stopped by Costco today and they had the following titles for $9.99.
There's No Business Like Show Business
The Seven Year Itch
How to Marrry A Millionaire
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Costco did not have River of No Return however.
This worked out great for me as I already have The Misfits and Some Like It Hot.
I'll have to check Wal Mart for River Of No Return.

Thanks for the heads up. I will go to Costco tomorrow. Amazon has How to Marry A Millionaire for $8.86 . You never know with Costco. Different stores may have different selections and River of No Return may be available at another store.

 

[Osato]

Thanks for the heads up. I will go to Costco tomorrow. Amazon has How to Marry A Millionaire for $8.86 . You never know with Costco. Different stores may have different selections and River of No Return may be available at another store.

No problem. I didn't have time to make it to Wal Mart today.
I only have one Costco locally here in my area.
I'll probably just keep an eye out for the last one either at Wal Mart or Amazon.
I thought others would be interested in knowing that Costco had many of the titles.
I was a little surprised that they didn't have River of No Return.
That being said they have surprised me twice with older titles on blu ray. First was with the 3 MGM Hitchcock releases earlier this year and then these titles today.

 

[haineshisway]

I'm afraid The Seven Year Itch gets a big fail from me - terrible brown color. I owned an IB Tech/scope print and the color was fantastic. Here - no. It's also too soft. Hoping this is not indicative of the rest of the Fox films in the set.

 

[Paul_Scott]

Bruce, have you ever seen a good, accurate print of River? The image on this disc is sharp and detailed, but the colors are frequently pushed to teal and orange. Compared to the included trailer, which shows a film with a broader and much more natural looking range of hues (and a wider spectrum of blues in particular), the disc looks half stunning and half like a laughable parody of the teal and orange fad. Is this in any way a good representation of how this film was supposed to look?
These are my impressions after spending about 20 minutes with each and then watching Seven Year Itch start to finish. Itch. I don't claim to have an unimpeachable frame of reference for how any of these should look specifically. My impressions are in relation to how similar films of the era have looked on disc, how these particular films looked on DVD, and how they look in general in relation to the best and worst looking vintage catalog titles on Bd.
While Itch is arguably the best film in the lot, it yields the least impressive looking image - although Millionaire may match it in terms of faded, bland colors, and a softness within the frame that I assume is part of the focus quirks of these early Cinemascope lenses. But Millionaire also adds some wonky looking coloring in places- skin tones seem way off in certain scenes and there is also a pronounced push to teal-ish looking blues quite often. In comparison, I didn't notice Itch looking particularly brown so much as just a bit blah.
I tweaked my settings a little and was able to squeeze out a picture I had little effort enjoying. And while it started off looking soft, the further it went along either the more I got acclimated to it, or the image did start to improve and it seemed to have a modest amount of precision to the detail within the frame. Not a revelation, but it certainly looked more refined than the DVD upscaled to my eyes. Faint praise I realize, but it's still an upgrade over what I had, and I got it for under $10 so I'm satisfied (not thrilled, amazed , or ecstatic) simply satisfied with it for now.
Gentlemen seems to fare MUCH better in the color department than any of the other films. It's a riot of color, and the kind of vivid hues that most (laymen I guess) normally associate with a saturated Technicolor look.
Sharpness looks excellent to me. This is easily the prettiest of the bunch, although if River wasn't so often reducing things to teal-ish and orange-ish, it would likely have been THE wow disc out the pack.
Show Business shows a coarser granular texture than I was expecting, but the color spectrum seems broader than River, which makes it an overall more natural feeling, less distracting image to me.
Overall I'm happy to have all of them- but the general impression they leave, inclusive of the packages as a whole, is one of a cheap jack, corner cutting exploitation opportunity. A far cry from the impression the studio used to give with its lushly, and classically, packaged Cinema Classics DVDs from years back. The MM titles look about the best we could probably expect from a company who is at the same time putting out such embarrassing and shamefully amateurish MOD releases.

 

[ShowsOn]

I bought the Australian version of this set today. I've only had a chance to have a quick look at How to Marry a Millionaire, but that one is a huge improvement over the Region 1 DVD version.
And that is a really tough film because it was shot with a 1920s anamorphic lens!
I am really pleased with the quality improvement of that one.

 

[RolandL]

The Walmart in Cromwell, CT had Seven Year Itch, How to Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. No price was shown but they rung up as $9.96.

 

[haineshisway]

Bruce, have you ever seen a good, accurate print of River? The image on this disc is sharp and detailed, but the colors are frequently pushed to teal and orange. Compared to the included trailer, which shows a film with a broader and much more natural looking range of hues (and a wider spectrum of blues in particular), the disc looks half stunning and half like a laughable parody of the teal and orange fad. Is this in any way a good representation of how this film was supposed to look?
These are my impressions after spending about 20 minutes with each and then watching Seven Year Itch start to finish. Itch. I don't claim to have an unimpeachable frame of reference for how any of these should look specifically. My impressions are in relation to how similar films of the era have looked on disc, how these particular films looked on DVD, and how they look in general in relation to the best and worst looking vintage catalog titles on Bd.
While Itch is arguably the best film in the lot, it yields the least impressive looking image - although Millionaire may match it in terms of faded, bland colors, and a softness within the frame that I assume is part of the focus quirks of these early Cinemascope lenses. But Millionaire also adds some wonky looking coloring in places- skin tones seem way off in certain scenes and there is also a pronounced push to teal-ish looking blues quite often. In comparison, I didn't notice Itch looking particularly brown so much as just a bit blah.
I tweaked my settings a little and was able to squeeze out a picture I had little effort enjoying. And while it started off looking soft, the further it went along either the more I got acclimated to it, or the image did start to improve and it seemed to have a modest amount of precision to the detail within the frame. Not a revelation, but it certainly looked more refined than the DVD upscaled to my eyes. Faint praise I realize, but it's still an upgrade over what I had, and I got it for under $10 so I'm satisfied (not thrilled, amazed , or ecstatic) simply satisfied with it for now.
Gentlemen seems to fare MUCH better in the color department than any of the other films. It's a riot of color, and the kind of vivid hues that most (laymen I guess) normally associate with a saturated Technicolor look.
Sharpness looks excellent to me. This is easily the prettiest of the bunch, although if River wasn't so often reducing things to teal-ish and orange-ish, it would likely have been THE wow disc out the pack.
Show Business shows a coarser granular texture than I was expecting, but the color spectrum seems broader than River, which makes it an overall more natural feeling, less distracting image to me.
Overall I'm happy to have all of them- but the general impression they leave, inclusive of the packages as a whole, is one of a cheap jack, corner cutting exploitation opportunity. A far cry from the impression the studio used to give with its lushly, and classically, packaged Cinema Classics DVDs from years back. The MM titles look about the best we could probably expect from a company who is at the same time putting out such embarrassing and shamefully amateurish MOD releases.

I do know exactly what River should look like and it's next up so I'll let you know what I think.

 

[JoHud]

I just got the FOREVER MARILYN 7 disc set. It is the worst packaging or handling of a "box set" I have ever seen!! The disc were loose when I open the flimsy cardboard ...and there is no mention anywhere of the contents on the discs!

That sounds like the the "Frank Sinatra Collection" and "John Wayne Collection" repackaged sets released earlier this year. The Sinatra set was such a piece of crap packaging-wise, I had been very skeptical of this set. Sad to see it doesn't appear to be much of an improvement. I'm seriously considering getting the singles instead.

 

[Mark-P]

You do all realize that with the exception of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" all these movies were shot with Eastman color film and the early CinemaScope lenses which hadn't yet been refined. Eastman color is not going to look like 3-strip Technicolor and early CinemaScope is not going to look like VistaVision or Todd-AO. I think your expectations are too high. Last night I spent about an hour previewing all 5 discs and they looked as good as one might expect under the circumstances. They had very little grain except for "There's no Business Like Show Business" which for some odd reason had a bit more. The 4 'Scope pictures sound great and retain the highly directionalized dialog. For GPB which was originally mono, they have created a very subtle 5.1 repurposing which sounds good too.

 

[haineshisway]

You do all realize that with the exception of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" all these movies were shot with Eastman color film and the early CinemaScope lenses which hadn't yet been refined. Eastman color is not going to look like 3-strip Technicolor and early CinemaScope is not going to look like VistaVision or Todd-AO. I think your expectations are too high. Last night I spent about an hour previewing all 5 discs and they looked as good as one might expect under the circumstances. They had very little grain except for "There's no Business Like Show Business" which for some odd reason had a bit more. The 4 'Scope pictures sound great and retain the highly directionalized dialog. For GPB which was originally mono, they have created a very subtle 5.1 repurposing which sounds good too.

Thank you for the history lesson, but I've been a film collector for almost forty years and in the business longer. My expectations are that the film look like the film should look. As I said, I owned a dye transfer scope print of Itch so I know exactly what the color should look like. I'm sure that you have seen several Blu-ray transfers from that era shot on exactly the same Eastman stock that look incredible. Watch Bigger than Life. And there are many other examples where the color is correct - Itch is not one of them. It's too soft (and I am not talking about the problem with the mumps) and it's too brown. The sound on Itch is great, but the image should also be great and it's not. I have only one expectation when watching a film I know well - it needs to look like the film I know well.