Love Story Blu-Ray review

Boy meets girl. Girl curses at boy. Boy defies father to marry girl. Boy and girl face tragedy. That’s Love Story in a nutshell. A simple, unpretentious and moving romantic drama, Paramount’s Blu-Ray provides meager extras, but they will never have to say they’re sorry for the excellent picture quality. Recommended.

Love Story (1970)

Studio: Paramount

Year: 1970

Rated: PG

Length: 99 Minutes

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

Resolution: 1080p

Languages: English 5.1 Surround DTS-HD MA, English Dolby Digital Mono, French Dolby Digital Mono, Portuguese Dolby Digital Mono

Subtitles: English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese

MSRP: $22.99

Film Release Date: December 16, 1970

Disc Release Date: February 7, 2012

Review Date: February 12, 2012

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

The Movie:

4.5/5

In 1970, while the United States was in crisis over wars, riots and revolutions—metaphorical or otherwise—Hollywood was suffering from an identity crisis. The old stars, directors, writers and moguls who made the Golden Age of Hollywood golden were retiring or dying. The family-friendly, big-budget costume dramas and musicals that once were popular events were now struggling to recover their escalating budgets, threatening the studios’ fiscal futures and driving the new studio heads to go after younger audiences with lower-budgeted, supposedly anti-Establishment fare. But for every Easy Rider there were dozens of quickly forgotten flops that failed to capture the Counterculture’s interest and alienated the Silent Majority. During this tumultuous period, Paramount managed to bridge the growing generation gap with a simple, unpretentious love story simply called Love Story.

Harvard law student and hockey player Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O’Neal) is a genteel WASP from a wealthy family whose name graces one of the buildings there. Radcliffe music student Jenny Cavelleri (Ali MacGraw) is a tough-talking, working-class Italian-American. After overcoming their initial tensions when they meet in the Radcliffe library, they start to realize their feelings for one another. Eventually, they fall so much in love they wish to marry when Jenny graduates. Oliver’s staunchly traditional father (Ray Milland) disapproves, threatening to cut him off if they go through with their plans. With the help of Jenny’s father Phil (John Marley), a baker in Cranston, Rhode Island, they have a modern wedding ceremony. When the elder Mr. Barrett follows through and cuts Oliver off, Jenny must support both of them as a teacher while he finishes his studies. When Oliver graduates near the top of his class, he gets a position at a New York law firm. With a considerably improved financial situation, they decide to have a child. When they fail to conceive, they seek a doctor’s assistance; he brings them a grim prognosis.

Much of Love Story is a product of late 1960s thinking. The attitude of the era was “do your own thing,” which is exactly what Oliver and Jenny do, defying expectations based on social conventions and class differences and embracing love on their own terms, not what someone else thinks love should be. Yet the love they create evokes the same emotions as the greatest Hollywood romances. Nothing can destroy it: not their different backgrounds, Jenny’s cutting barbs, Oliver’s anger at his father, not even tragedy. Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw spend much of the movie playing a game of verbal ping-pong ball off one another, giving an edge to the characters that makes them more interesting than the standard romantic drama archetypes. It is because of the love underneath that hard-edged surface that makes the film’s tagline believable when it comes out of their mouths. They never have to apologize for what they say because they know their words are just that: words. Their actions reflect their true feelings for one another.

Arthur Hiller’s direction is a model of economy, depicting only what the film absolutely needs to tell its story, no more, no less. Wisely focusing mainly on the two lovers and how their relationships with their parents affect them, eschewing the fluff of subplots and adding supporting characters only when necessary, it is as economical as a French New Wave film (Francis Lai’s lush score betrays its French influence as well). Hiller’s editing and shooting style has a strikingly simple, realistic, no-frills look that dispenses with the usual visual clichés of romantic movies; it does not bathe Ms. MacGraw in diffusion filters, letting her natural beauty shine through. He works well with his actors, bringing fine performances out of his stars and even better ones from Ray Milland and John Marley as their respective fathers.

The moviegoing public, young and old, loved Love Story enough to make it the top-grossing film of the year. Its $106,397,186 gross was more than enough to cover its meager $2 million budget, bring romance back to movie screens and help restore Paramount’s fiscal health. Hollywood honored it with seven Oscar nominations including Best Picture, winning one for Best Original Music Score (whose theme became a huge hit on record for Andy Williams), as well as five Golden Globes out of seven nominations.

The Video:

4.5/5

The film is presented at its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1. It’s become cliché to say “the film has never looked better,” but in this case there’s truth to this cliché because this is a definite improvement over the DVD. The picture is free of significant dirt and dust while the grain, which is reasonably low in most scenes, increases slightly in any shot with optical effects or credits. The AVC encoding handles it perfectly; there are no digital noise or compression artifacts to be found anywhere. The picture is razor-sharp with abundant fine details while the color saturation is strong without blooming or clipping highlights and shadows.

The Audio:

3/5

Originally released in mono, Paramount has remixed the film for surround sound, offering a 5.1 channel DTS-HD MA track as well as the original mono. Purists should be satisfied with the mono track, but the surround remix does not stray too far from its mono roots. The track remains front-heavy with only occasional moments of indistinct surround activity. Even Francis Lai’s Oscar-winning score does not benefit from very much expansion. The dialogue sounds boxy and slightly distorted, but almost all early 70s movie dialogue is like that. With such lackluster stereo separation, one might as well stick with the original mono track. There are also French and Portuguese tracks if you’re curious about the French equivalent of “preppie.”

The Extras:

2/5

Three extras were ported over from the film’s DVD release:

•An informative audio commentary by director Arthur Hiller. He goes into detail about the film’s themes, its casting, its production and how he managed to work within the constraints of a low budget.

•Love Story: A Classic Remembered (480p, 14:51): Hiller looks back at of the film’s production, recalling its casting process, its low budget, its score, its editing, and turning down The Godfather to direct it.

•Theatrical trailer (1080p, 2:57): Released after the Oscar nominations were announced, this theatrical trailer tells the film’s story in pictures with very few words.

Final Score:

4/5

Love Story is as simple and unaffected as its title; its appealing leads and sensitive, no-nonsense direction raise it above the level of the clichéd boy-meets-girl romantic drama template. One of Paramount’s biggest hits, it has provided it with a fine Blu-Ray treatment with few extras but superb picture quality, making it a worthwhile upgrade from the DVD. Recommended.

Quote:

Originally Posted by haineshisway 

I posted about this last week in the announcement thread - a perfect transfer, which is my only nitpick with the excellent review posted here - I don't understand a 4.5 instead of a 5. In other words, I don't think this could look better and isn't that worthy of a perfect score? A wonderful movie and a perfect transfer equals Blu-ray bliss.

I would have given it a 5 were it not for a few dupe shots that exacerbate grain and at least one that was an optical zoom-in. That wasn't the fault of the people making the transfer. It's the fault of science. They didn't have good dupe stock until the 1980s. Watching movies on a 136" projection screen reveals a lot of things most people would miss on smaller displays.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Richard--W 

Thanks for the review of this Blu-ray, Matt. Those of you who haven't seen Love Story before will find it fresh and new. Its emotional underpinnings haven't dated.
Arthur Hiller. One of my favorite directors of the 1960s and 1970s. I think his last film was just a few years ago, for National Lampoon. Hiller is a sophisticated dramatist equally adept at comedy, drama and action. He started out in live television and gradually started making features. One of those directors who was consistently reliable, always did good work, but was never high-profile. By the late 1960s he was at a creative peak. His films are all about character and humanity. He is at his best when finding humor in desperate circumstances. Every film he made is interesting. Here are some of my favorites, and they should all be on Blu-ray:

Rewatching this film and listening to the commentary really made me appreciate both this film and his skills as a director more than before, and your poster montage contains several titles I would be proud to own on Blu-Ray, namely The Americanization of Emily, The Out-of-Towners, The Hospital and The In-Laws.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scott Calvert 


So why subtract a half a point? That's what the film looks like, so....?
Isn't the goal to faithfully reproduce the film as accurately as possible? Subtracting half a point for film anomolies that couldn't be avoided at the time only encourages the studios to homogenize these things for video (like a certain other recent high-profile release).

I mentioned it for the benefit of anyone who has never seen the film and would like to know why the shots look the way they do. I always try to be as magnanimous as possible toward things like this because the public deserves to know why a $2 million dollar movie from 1970 or a 1980s sitcom shot on analog tape will look different from a modern blockbuster.

There were maybe one or two shots in the body of the film (I'll have to go back and check) outside of the opening title and the credits that were grainier than the rest, but that's it. This does represent the film accurately to the best of my knowledge, which, admittedly is not as much as some people here (I have only seen it before on DVD). But this is the best the film will ever look unless there's ever a 4k home viewing format (which I highly doubt will happen at this point, even as a niche) and even a slightly flawed diamond is still a diamond. If trying to correct them will make it worse, then I say leave it alone. I'm happy with it, and I was surprised how low the grain levels were as a whole, as so many films from the last three decades of the 20th century seem to be rather grainy.

We'll have to agree to disagree on whether this is enough to affect my score, but I simply thought it was worth mentioning. It looks great overall, but I just found those very few shots jarring. I might have given it a 5 otherwise. I would have taken more than half a point off if they had used DNR and done it badly. I don't know about the condition of this film's negative or other preprint elements over the years or whether any restoration work was done, but if it was, it was done well.

I agree that the tools to treat it probably would have made it worse, like Paramount's early Blu-Rays with heavy-handed DNR (The Untouchables, Coming to America, Fatal Attraction, etc.) and Universal's fiascos who shall remain nameless.

From a technical standpoint, the 5.1 remix was the one thing about the disc that I believe could have been done better. I know of very few catalog films for which studios actually went back to the stems and did true stereo or surround remixes, or whether that was even possible for this film. I will give Paramount credit for including the original mono mix, which is becoming less and less common these days.