The Long Goodbye ( 1973 ) Region B (1 Viewer)

U.K.s Arrow Video just released this Robert Altman film onto blu ray - after reading a good number of reviews I think it is worth picking up. Any thoughts? It is region locked although I have a multi region player thankfully.

Brent Avery said:

U.K.s Arrow Video just released this Robert Altman film onto blu ray - after reading a good number of reviews I think it is worth picking up. Any thoughts? It is region locked although I have a multi region player thankfully.

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I don't know anything about that edition, but it is conceibable that Criterion or Twilight Time could release it in the U.S.

I got my copy last week and it is region locked but I have a region free player. I think the transfer is really good because of the way the film was shot. Te audio has that annoying hiss with S when actors say things but that isn't Arrows fault just the fault of the audio track itself but The film is so good IMO it doesn't ruin it for me. I just wish the original UA logo could have been used but Arrow emailed me that for legal reasons they had to use the more updated version.

I continue hoping for a Blu-ray upgrade in Region A. Gould may be an odd choice for Philip Marlowe, but the story is a good mystery.

THE LONG GOODBYE - UK Blu-ray.

This has been a favourite film since first seeing it in the 70s and shares with another of my 70s favourites (Truffaut's LA NUITE AMERICAIN) always being a low quality cinema experience. This persisted into recent years when I saw both films at the NFT: Excessively grainy pictures and awful mono optical sound, made extra uncomfortable by the NFT's dreadful excessive level policy irrespective of the painful distortion involved.

I looked forward to the Blu-ray of THE LONG GOODBYE not only to see it again but to - finally - have decent quality picture & sound. The picture is indeed very good, better than I've ever seen it, but even having read in the highly unusually provided generous and comprehensive booklet about Vilmos Zigmond's post flashing techniques I'd still prefer normal, untampered with photography.

The sound, however, is a revelation - and not in a good way. Can I assume it's Mastered from a magnetic as opposed to an optical source? I ask because it's as terrible as ever! - but now, hearing it at home, I understand more about it.

The period in which it was made coincided with my first few years working in theatre sound and radio mics were so bad that they were used sparingly. The actual mics were worse than the radio transmission/receiver part of the chain and I now realise that it's Robert Altman's pioneering use of radio mics, maybe only later recorded on multitrack machines, that is largely responsible for the prevailing muffled, rustley distortion on the dialogue.

That the title song by John Williams also sounds so over compressed and distorted is why I'm unsure of the source being a mag or optical Master.

The style of the sound mixing is to have particularly intrusively loud backgrounds and whilst with a set of beautifully recorded clean tracks this would be fine, under these circumstances the general effect of this soundtrack on me remains as hard going and soporific as ever.

So I don't see any of the problems as being of Blu-ray transfer origin but stemming from the original production which used techniques impossible to reconcile with acceptable quality at the time.

It brings back to me the awful panic that, thankfully, I experienced on relatively few occasions when for whatever reasons at the time I was supposed to say 'Sound's ready' I could only think 'I can't record this'

I didn't but they did.

Will be interesting to see if the upcoming Kino Lorber blu-ray will have the same transfer.

However I imagine that the Arrow Video blu-ray will have extra features not available on the Kino Edition, which will most likely just include hold-overs from the MGM DVD.

The Long Goodbye is one of my all-time faves. As far as I recall, the British version was slightly censored - the scene in which Mark Rydell gave his girlfriend a Coke bottle in her face was shaved of a few seconds. I don't know if the Blu-ray has the uncensored scene.

The coke bottle scene is there and, as far as I remember, is the same as I've always seen it. But if Adrian knows it's previously been trimmed in the UK then I don't recall that one fleeting, brutal shot well enough to know if it's now any different.

I would venture that however it might have been censored the effort was wasted as it's effect was only too obvious.

'It's all right with me .........'

One of my cats has switched alegiance to a brand of food whose supply is erratic from the only chain that stocks it (LIDL) and the rejection scene was beautifully played here last week. But, unlike Marlowe's cat, she came back moments later.

As a sound person who is pleased to no longer do drama in this age of concealed radio mics I'm amazed that Robert Altman accepted such appalling sound in certain scenes. But then there's lots of bad radio mic sound on tv and in the cinema every day and the recordists are forced to do it by the directors who lay out scenes that are impossible to totally cover with a boom. That often means that very easy parts of scenes, in order to match, are also on radios.

Malcolm - I have the US DVD and the difference in the scene is quite striking - as striking as the murder of Sonny Corleone in The Godfather which was originally cut in the UK.

Adrian: Thanks for the message. Just back from lunch with Kevin B. You're welcome to visit if you're in London to see this version. Your LOA book has a shelf position of honour.

[email protected]

Best wishes,

Malcolm

Thanks for that, Malcolm.

Lunch with Kevin B? You're a lucky man. And I must read 'The Parade's Gone By' again, Soon.
And when I lived in London from '68 to '73, my wife Robyn and I haunted the NFT ... with regular dinners of pate sandwiches and cider ... and I seem to remember the sound always being quite high even then.