Fake wide screen (1 Viewer)

[Thomas T]

This subject has been brought up before but a recent viewing of Carol Reed's The Man Between (1953) has irritated me enough to bring it up again.

It's not available on region 1 so I sent away for the French region 2 edition from Studio Canal. While the print is just fine, the film is inexplicably "wide screen". Which means that in the close ups, chins get unceremoniously cut off and occasionally tops of heads are lopped off.

Before anyone resurrects the "Well, they knew wide screen was coming in 1953 so they shot it with wide screen in mind", while it's possible it was shown some places wide screen, the director Carol Reed was a consummate director and certainly wouldn't frame a shot knowing faces would have parts eliminated.

In the "old days", there was justifiable outrage when legitimate wide screen films were panned and scanned to cater to the "I want my TV screen filled up" crowd. Now with the proliferation of wide screen TVs, it's the opposite with academy ratio films given the wide screen treatment either by the DVD label or at home by zooming or stretching the picture to fill the screen.

What a world! End of rant!

 

[JoHud]

Yeah, that's a mistake. The German "Arthaus" edition of the film has the correct academy aspect ratio.

 

[Thomas T]

Yeah, that's a mistake. The German "Arthaus" edition of the film has the correct academy aspect ratio.

That's good to know but the German edition is now out of print and going for 60 euros at amazon.de. Hopefully Criterion will pick it up for U.S. release and do it in the proper ratio.

 

[Brent Reid]

This is an interesting thread, but it's gone nowhere. Just going by its precise release date & online screencaps, I'm pretty sure that this film was intended for some sort of widescreen presentation. Probably 1.66:1, as per the UK DVD...

Instead of starting a new thread, you should have posted all this here:
http://www.hometheaterforum.com/topic/313215-aspect-ratio-documentation/