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A Few Words About A few words about...™ Glorifying the American Girl - in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

Robert Harris

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Filmed at Paramount's Astoria studio in 1929, and directed by Millard Webb, Glorifying the American Girl tries to mimic a Ziegfeld Production, by gathering talent for some early Talkie musical numbers and comedy bits, and generally succeeds.

Paramount was able to add a couple of two-color Technicolor sequences to boot.

This all comes together nicely courtesy of The UCLA Archive's preservation work, although I would have preferred to see a bit of the left side of the screen cropped before finalizing a video master, as Mr. Soundtrack (you remember him) occasionally makes his presence known.

The quality is extremely pleasing, especially considered that the source element for the major black & white portion of the film, no longer survives.

The two-color appears nicely captured to Eastman Color dupe, and allows an excellent idea of what the original would have looked like.

A problem free Blu-ray from Kino.

Hats off to UCLA for their continuing work toward saving our motion picture heritage.

Only oddity here, is that I'm unable to come up with the rationale behind two of the added extras - the three-strip Technicolor short La Cucharacha, which looks very nice, and reasonably accurate to the original.

The other is a tour of early Hollywood, which is nice, but how does it relate to a film made in Queens, NY?

Image - 3.5

Audio - 4

Pass / Fail - Pass

Recommended

RAH
 
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ahollis

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I was happy and support Glorifying the American Girl, I was not that pleased with La Cucharacha. For a three strip Technicolor short, the colors just didn’t seem to pop. (IMO)
 

Marc Hampton

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I think I said "wow" out loud when the opening credits came on the screen. Im very surprised how good this looks. I tried to watch this movie years ago and the quality was so bad I couldn't even tell what was going on or what was being said.

2 movies I least expected to ever see on Blu-ray were this and "The Story of Temple Drake". But there they are...and in the same month!
 

John Skoda

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A couple of us on another thread have discs for this title where all the sound for the feature comes out of the left channel only.
 

Robert Harris

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A couple of us on another thread have discs for this title where all the sound for the feature comes out of the left channel only.

Correct. On one additional niggling point, several feet of leader could have been removed at the head of the Tech sequence. Don’t recall if it affected both.
 

Patrick McCart

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Forgot this was coming and ordered along with the Hitchcock 5-film set. I love these deep cuts Kino is unearthing.

While La Cucaracha is a weird inclusion, my guess is that they were unable to include it on the Becky Sharp release, which would have been far more appropriate. But they at least have the common thread of being UCLA preservation projects.
 

TJPC

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Apparently there is a replacement program and a link, but I can’t call it up in Canada. I have tried on two iPads, 2 iPhones and a Windows 10 computer.

If anyone has had better luck, I would appreciate knowing how you did it.
 

TJPC

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I was able to order the replacement disc on a trip to the States a while ago. It was in my US PO Box on Wednesday. I am sure it’s fine, but I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.
 

Jay_Z_525

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Slightly off topic but, my replacement disc arrived last Sunday via USPS, bent at a 45 degree angle. I can’t imagine the force needed to do this. Anyway, I contacted Kino as soon as it arrived and had a second replacement disc delivered, via UPS by Thursday afternoon. I couldn’t be happier with their response and the speed with which they handled the issue.
 

dukiejosh54

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I just bought this and read about the audio issues. do you think Lorber is still sending out replacement disc? or are the disc they are selling at amazon corrected now?
 

Hedley Lamarr

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I ordered this in December from Amazon and received the defective version. I contacted Kino and ordered the replacement disc. It just arrived today, and it's a second copy of the defective version. I emailed them today regarding this.
 

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