More Warner B&W BD plans: Maltese Falcon, Marx Bros., Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Bogart. (1 Viewer)

Originally Posted by Brandon Conway /forum/thread/293867/more-warner-b-w-bd-plans-maltese-falcon-marx-bros-errol-flynn-bette-davis-bogart#post_3616887
For what it's worth, just looking at 2-Disc SEs that Warner released between 2002-2007, here's what is not yet on/announced for BD (though I may be missing a handful). Black & White films italicized:

Excellent work, Brandon.
I've also discovered another form of research. Amazon has Dark Victory dropped to fire sale numbers perhaps preceding an official announcement: its either a bargain or a terrible mistake, if its coming on BD next year!
http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Restored-Remastered-Bette-Davis/dp/B0008ENIDE/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_cart_f
Dropped to rock bottom: $6 in most cases, except where noted.
Dark Victory
Charge of the Light Brigade
Jezebel
The Sea hawk
Rebel Without a Cause (discontinued!)
Sorry Wrong Number
Stagecoach (Single Disc),
Dial M. For Murder,
Ninotcha
Dinner at Eight
The Thin Man
The Letter
Out of the Past
To Have and Have Not,
Some other classics with rock-bottom prices, as with the above, which may or may not be related to impending BD releases: Foreign Correspondent, House of Wax, Oliver! Long Voyage Home, Curse of Frankenstein, Jason and the Argonauts, Blowup, The Bad Seed, Wait Until Dark.
Not dropped to rock bottom:
Now Voyager, Petrified Forest, Captain Blood, Sierra Madre, Baby Jane, A Night in Casablanca, Night at the Opera, Day at the Races, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Shall We Dance, Bringing Up Baby, Strangers on a Train, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Who's... Virginia Woolf, Band Wagon, Meet Me In St. Louis.Philadelphia Story, Queen Christina, Camille, The Little Foxes, Key Largo, High Sierra,
Of course The Maltese Falcon 3-disc SE has not gone rock bottom, but that doesn't help prove my theory, so I won't mention it.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Originally Posted by Ben Cheshire /forum/thread/293867/more-warner-b-w-bd-plans-maltese-falcon-marx-bros-errol-flynn-bette-davis-bogart#post_3616884
Just did a quick imdb and turns out aside from the one I remembered (Dark Victory), Bogie and Bette's careers intersected quite a bit. They starred together:
The Petrified Forest (1936), Marked Woman (1937).
As well as these, where Bogie was a minor character:
The Bad Sister (1931), Three on a March (1932).
Most famous of all of these I would say is Dark Victory (1939), also featuring Ronald Reagan. I'm hoping one of these pictures doesn't kill two hopes with one stone, particularly seeings it would cancel out the possibility of a Big Sleep or a Sierra Madre... But still, its a possibility..

I believe that should be Three on a Match -- it's in one of the SD-DVD Forbidden Hollywood volumes.

 

Corrected, ta.

 

[smithb]

My first choices would be Captain Blood and Petrified Forest. Those would be easy double dips in BR for me.

 

[David_B_K]

Originally Posted by BillyFeldman /forum/thread/293867/more-warner-b-w-bd-plans-maltese-falcon-marx-bros-errol-flynn-bette-davis-bogart#post_3616828
I'm hoping that the French company that did The General will do a Blu-Ray of it - I have never seen a better transfer, and there's no way the Kino will be as good - and the French has a great score by Joe Hisaishi that is perfect for the film. Fingers crossed, because I have little faith in Kino based on the hyperbole of their press releases versus the actual transfer on view.

I have both the French Cinema Club DVD and the Kino re-released DVD of The General. The French version looks great. They used a great print and did some cleanup as it looks spotless. However, I did not care for Joe Hisaishi's score. It was good as music, but IMO did not fit a film set in the Civil war. It was almost as if the score was composed for something else, and then Hisaishi got the call to do The General, and tried to recycle something he'd already written. It is frequently in the minor key, and has a tragic cast to it that does not fit a comedy/historical adventure. It seems like it would fit a European drama better than The General. Unfortunately, Robert Israel's alternate score is not one of his best, IMO.
The Kino DVD also uses a very good print. However, unlike the French DVD, they did not do a lot of cleanup, so spots and flecks occur. Also unlike the Cinema Club version, they applied the original tinting to the movie. I think The General is more atmospheric with the tints applied. Also, the Kino version includes Carl Davis' superb score from the Thames silents series. Over all, I definitely prefer the current Kino version of the General to all others. I expect their Blu-ray to be great.
The Cinema Club DVD versions of College, Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Three Ages are also quite worthwhile, with some cleanup done to the prints. The scores from The Art of Buster Keaton versions were retained for these versions.

 

Buster's shorts are often more brilliant and funny than his features; would be amazing if Masters of Cinema, for example, had the resources to convert their box into high def...

 

[Paul Penna]

Does anyone else get a good news/bad news feeling from this? The good news, of course, being the potential release of more classic B/W films on Blu-Ray. The bad news coming from this in the original Home Media Magazine article:

For Warner, cleaning up a black-and-white film for Blu-ray isn’t an easy or cheap process. "There’s an extraordinary expense in bringing these to Blu-ray," Feltenstein said.

I can't help but draw the inference that such expenses can be commercially viable only for high-profile titles of the broadest appeal. In other words, the Maltese Falcons, Wonderful Lifes, Night at the Operas, etc., skimming from the uppermost strata of the classic catalog exclusively. Previously, we've seen comments from industry spokesmen that existing high-def transfers, from which standard-def downsamples have been used for DVD releases for some time now, aren't up to snuff for what Blu-Ray buyers expect. Probably that's true for many buyers. But I wonder - what would one of these high-def transfers actually look like on a Blu-Ray disc? It's hard to believe they wouldn't look appreciably better than their downsampled, edge-enhanced, compressed-for-DVD counterparts. If so, how's this for an idea? Release lower-echelon classics in their existing high-def transfers, porting over any DVD extras in standard-def, and pricing them as if they were paperback book reprints - maybe $10-$12 list, with the expectation of normal street price discounting. There'd be lots of film noir titles, for example, that I'd be eager to upgrade on that basis.

 

[Reagan]

Excited about Maltese Falcon. As for Errol Flynn, here's hoping it's Captain Blood, as it is a very good movie.

-R

 

[Doug Otte]

I like your idea, Paul!

Doug

 

[Brandon Conway]

Paul - Interesting idea, but I don't think they would help themselves by undercutting their perceived A/V quality. It would be shooting themselves in the foot.

Ben - great research there. Some of those are going OOP because Warner is not renewing the licensing agreement (Stagecoach, Foreign Correspondent), but I think you may be on to something with titles like Rebel without a Cause.

 

[Paul Penna]

Originally Posted by Brandon Conway /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Paul - Interesting idea, but I don't think they would help themselves by undercutting their perceived A/V quality. It would be shooting themselves in the foot.

I'm sure you're right about that, but still, by placing the quality bar so very high, it becomes yet another factor that tends to leave us classic film lovers out in the cold.

 

[Brandon Conway]

I have to disagree - at worst it's a slight chill. There are still hundreds of titles available/being released. Then there are the thousands of DVDs that are still of very nice quality. Finances may hinder the same amount of catalog titles making it to BD as DVD, but it's not that bad all things considered. Besides, if relatively low-quality BDs are released, what's the point? Might as well just stick with the very good DVDs.

 

Originally Posted by Paul Penna /forum/thread/293867/more-warner-b-w-bd-plans-maltese-falcon-marx-bros-errol-flynn-bette-davis-bogart#post_3617045
If so, how's this for an idea? Release lower-echelon classics in their existing high-def transfers, porting over any DVD extras in standard-def, and pricing them as if they were paperback book reprints - maybe $10-$12 list, with the expectation of normal street price discounting. There'd be lots of film noir titles, for example, that I'd be eager to upgrade on that basis.

I say they already do this for most titles that end up being discounted to $15 in those amazon sales. A lot of titles that are blurry with DNR and EE I suspect were not struck anew but ported across.

 

[Timothy E]

Originally Posted by Doug Gaertner /forum/thread/293867/more-warner-b-w-bd-plans-maltese-falcon-marx-bros-errol-flynn-bette-davis-bogart#post_3616894
I take that Marx Bros. news with a grain of salt... Planning could mean someone saying "we own a few Marx Brothers films right?"
Collectors have been looking for better elements for years. I'm talking Horse Feathers and Night at the Opera (which has been missing footage since WW2). Those obsessed with the Marx Brothers know there isn't much out there. They had a chance to show off what they had back in 2004 on DVD and it wasn't much. Warner has never said anything about going to Hungary to get that complete print of Night of the Opera rumored to be sitting in some vault.

Has anyone confirmed that story about a complete print of Night at the Opera in a vault in Eastern Europe? I hate to think that a complete print exists out there, deteriorating daily, with no effort to recover and restore it.
There MUST be better elements in existence out there of the Marx Brothers films. I remember seeing Horsefeathers at a university screening in 1989 and my recollection is that the print had considerably fewer splices in it than the DVD version. If such prints survived to 1989, they may still exist today.

 

[Brandon Conway]

Originally Posted by Ben Cheshire /forum/thread/293867/more-warner-b-w-bd-plans-maltese-falcon-marx-bros-errol-flynn-bette-davis-bogart/30#post_3617192
I say they already do this for most titles that end up being discounted to $15 in those amazon sales. A lot of titles that are blurry with DNR and EE I suspect were not struck anew but ported across.

Perhaps. Those are typically the 80s-90s B-grade movies, though (such as Outbreak, Over the Top, Tango & Cash, etc.)

 

The Wild Bunch (1969) for example.

Even though they're not doing it for film noir titles yet, my point is the principle is already in practice; that little to no effort is being put into more obscure catalogue titles.

 

[Brandon Conway]

Well, The Wild Bunch was a transfer made for the Jan 2006 DVD that they released on Blu/HD-DVD in Sep 2007. The bar has been raised since those days. And even then I think it's a fine release, even if a bit DNR heavy (which I don't recall a single complaint about 2 years ago, to be honest).

 

Well i just saw it for the first time in 2009, and it seems like its dated quite badly as a transfer. It was DNR'd and EE'd to blurriness.

 

[Brandon Conway]

Which goes to show that expectations are only rising for A/V quality.

I'd be curious in seeing if Robert Harris would say of the disc today, as opposed to then:

"In place of that brilliant 35mm print, I now have a beautiful disc.

The frame is more stable, the color virtually a match, and the image cleaned up. One thing that used to trouble me were emulsion scratches that were built into the OCN of the Mapache sequence. As far as color goes, The Wild Bunch could easily be mis-timed, but this release replicates, with absolute perfection, the precise warmth originally seen in the brilliant blue skies. Dead on perfect!

...

Short of the Intermission and Entr'acte, Warner's new HD and BD variants of The Wild Bunch replicate the film to perfection.

...

What a glorious home video release!

No more needs to be said.

Extremely Highly Recommended!"


http://www.hometheaterforum.com/forum/thread/263339/a-few-words-about-the-wild-bunch-in-bd-hd

Now in 2009, would we get a "don't touch it with a 90' pole" Patton-esque review?

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Timothy E
Has anyone confirmed that story about a complete print of Night at the Opera in a vault in Eastern Europe? I hate to think that a complete print exists out there, deteriorating daily, with no effort to recover and restore it.

Yes, some 21 yr. old film buff in Hungary found a version of Night of the Opera that is longer and features some alternate scenes. It contains all the references to Italy intact. He paid $30 to watch the first reel and threaded it on the projector himself (!).... apparently this was a great sum of money for him. He even took some old foreign posters laying around that featured images of the Marx Brothers never seen before to prove he had found this stash.
He explained in great detail his find to anyone willing to listen... mainly fan forums, newsgroups...etc. Someone contacted Leonard Maltin, who then contacted some of his friends at Warner. This was around October 2008. The story ends there.... so far.
The news of Marx Bros. on blu-ray raises a few eyebrows. I don't think they were planning a super-deluxe version of A Night in Casablanca. I'm curious what they are working on.../img/vbsmilies/htf/smiley_wink.gif