Pre-Order The Old Dark House (1932) (Blu-ray) Available for Preorder (1 Viewer)

[JPCinema]

Both THE OLD DARK HOUSE and THE SEA WOLF I noticed how many times lines of dialogue ended with "I tell ya" It's so funny, it makes me wonder why it was used in so many movies?

 

[Rob_Ray]

Almost as funny as how many lines of dialogue in 30s films begin with "Say, listen!"

 

[JPCinema]

Almost as funny as how many lines of dialogue in 30s films begin with "Say, listen!"

Yes...I almost mentioned that one
as well!!

 

[Robert Crawford]

I'm extremely happy with my disc, which I watched last night.

I could swear I had seen this movie on VHS back in the day. Everything about the description when I preordered seemed familiar, and I could have sworn I knew it. But watching the film, I didn't recognize or remember a thing. I really enjoyed every moment of it, but it turns out this was a blind buy afterall. I must've been thinking about either "The Raven" or "The Black Cat". Either way, I'm very happy to have this, even if it wasn't actually the movie I was thinking of!

I viewed my disc this morning and what an improvement over that Kino DVD. I've started watching it again with Gloria Stuart's commentary.

 

[Dick]

I viewed my disc this morning and what an improvement over that Kino DVD. I've started watching it again with Gloria Stuart's commentary.

And she does great commentary! Often such actor commentaries, especially unmoderated ones and really especially when the commentators are elderly, tend to be loaded with long stretches of nothing, and comments mostly describing what we are watching and can see for ourselves, or simply doing the admiration thing ("He was so good to work with," or "She was so talented," etc.). Keep in mind that this commentary was originally recorded for the 1998 Image laser disc, which put her at age 88. A year earlier, of course, had she appeared in James Cameron's TITANTIC, and seemed pretty damned sharp -- more so than I am at 20 years younger!

 

[Paul Penna]

And she does great commentary! Often such actor commentaries, especially unmoderated ones and really especially when the commentators are elderly, tend to be loaded with long stretches of nothing, and comments mostly describing what we are watching and can see for ourselves, or simply doing the admiration thing ("He was so good to work with," or "She was so talented," etc.). Keep in mind that this commentary was originally recorded for the 1998 Image laser disc, which put her at age 88. A year earlier, of course, had she appeared in James Cameron's TITANTIC, and seemed pretty damned sharp -- more so than I am at 20 years younger!

I met her in 1999 in San Francisco at a memorial for my uncle and she was a firecracker. Utterly charming.

 

[Doug Otte]

Both THE OLD DARK HOUSE and THE SEA WOLF I noticed how many times lines of dialogue ended with "I tell ya" It's so funny, it makes me wonder why it was used in so many movies?

Possibly almost as often as people today start sentences with "So..." and end them with "...right?"

 

[Colin Jacobson]

And she does great commentary! Often such actor commentaries, especially unmoderated ones and really especially when the commentators are elderly, tend to be loaded with long stretches of nothing, and comments mostly describing what we are watching and can see for ourselves, or simply doing the admiration thing ("He was so good to work with," or "She was so talented," etc.). Keep in mind that this commentary was originally recorded for the 1998 Image laser disc, which put her at age 88. A year earlier, of course, had she appeared in James Cameron's TITANTIC, and seemed pretty damned sharp -- more so than I am at 20 years younger!

I agree Stuart's commentary was a pleasant surprise. I semi-dreaded it, as I figured it'd be a snoozer like you state. I still recall how awful Rosemary Clooney's "White Christmas" track was!

But Stuart's really pretty good. Wouldn't call it a great track, but very good - better than the one from the film historian!

 

[Robert Crawford]

I agree Stuart's commentary was a pleasant surprise. I semi-dreaded it, as I figured it'd be a snoozer like you state. I still recall how awful Rosemary Clooney's "White Christmas" track was!

But Stuart's really pretty good. Wouldn't call it a great track, but very good - better than the one from the film historian!

Considering she was 88 years old and commenting about a movie she filmed 66 years beforehand, I would call it great.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Considering she was 88 years old and commenting about a movie she filmed 66 years beforehand, I would call it great.

I wasn't grading on a curve!

 

[Alberto_D]

Someone said there is a ong interview about the 4K restoration, in http://www.classicimages.com , but I could not find, but a short reference I found in Tapatalk forum :

<< For a number of years now, I've been working with Vincent Pirozzi on many of our restorations. Vincent’s a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation and has worked on some very high-profile restorations. For Old Dark House, he had the Library of Congress send the incomplete nitrate neg, the picture positive and sound positive to him at Roundabout Entertainment in Burbank. We had a 4K scan done for all of the picture elements and used as much of the negative as possible, while filling in missing footage with the master picture positive. A frame-by-frame restoration was done that involved additional clean-up and stabilization, as well as color grading, along with the transfer of the track from the sound positive. Vincent also found that there was occasionally some dupe footage somewhat sloppily cut into the original neg – possibly to replace missing or damaged footage – and that would result in missing or doubled frames and inferior image quality. He replaced this footage with cleaner and earlier generation frames from the master picture positive. Even if you have seen the very nice 35mm print or prints that Universal had struck, you are still in store for a treat, seeing this picture looking better than it has in 85 years! <<

What I surprise, they use the original camera negative for most of the film in this 4K digital restoration. It's interesting, since by 1955 the first reel of OCN was already damaged beyound recovery. Five decades later the remaining reels of OCN still could be used.
Was cold storage that saved the remaing reels of OCN ?
Or was the first reel of different filom stock (more prone to decomposition) or developed not so well, with some chemicalls not well washed in final stages, speeding up decomposition ?
Or maybe both...

This page bellow have a long description of how they founbd the OCN in 1955, and preserved it. Reel one had a lavander protection to save the day, replace the bad reel,to allow preserve the film in 1955. The camera negative was as a track negative (negative with a soundtrack). But the suposed missing quality soundtrack youy refer in this topic is not from the beggining of the film.
Four preservation master were made in 1955, and send to many archives. How could the film, preserved with good duplication materials, be so many time available only in poor dupes from dupes in video editions?

http://prairieuprisingreviews.blogspot.com.br/2014/08/the-old-dark-house-film-group-essay.html

See number 4

"Resurrection
Curtis Harrington began his career as an experimental film maker. Later, he worked in Hollywood and made several highly regarded, if obscure horror films, most notably Nighttide (with Dennis Hopper in 1961) and What’s the Matter with Helen?, starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters in 1971. (Harrington is a remarkable figure – he knew literally everyone in Hollywood and his affiliations span the not-inconsiderable distance between the Hollywood demi-monde such as Forrest J. Ackerman, the editor of Famous Movie Monsters magazine, and his girlfriend Vampirella, to people like Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier.)

Harrington was fascinated by the Hollywood horror films that had been made in his youth. He recalled seeing an enormous billboard when he was a little boy on Sunset Strip for The Bride of Frankenstein that terrified and attracted him in equal measure. Harrington, who was gay, had friends of friends who knew Whale – particularly Christopher Isherwood – and, in the early fifties, wheedled his way into an invitation to one of the director’s pool parties in Pacific Palisades. (Isherwood’s boyfriend, Paul Bachardy, was a close friend of Gloria Stuart and she often went to Whale’s house to play Bridge with him.) Harrington was very handsome, athletic, and charismatic (and seems to have been a very affable fellow) and Whale was immediately attracted to him. For several years, Whale was a mentor to the young film maker and gave him career advice.

Around 1955, Harrington encountered Whale in Paris. Harrington was living hand-to-mouth and Whale generously gave his young protegee a significant amount of money to help him out. Harrington knew that there was a single surviving print of The Old Dark House maintained by the British Film Institute. He went to London and persuaded BFI officials to screen the movie as part of a retrospective of Whale’s films. The movie was well-received and Whale’s reputation, which was in decline, began to revive. Whale attended the retrospective and was pleased to be recognized again for his work completed 20 or more years before. Later, however, the BFI print of The Old Dark House went missing and by the mid-sixties the film was deemed irretrievably lost. Of course, films that can’t be seen can’t be criticized and the reputation of　The Old Dark House increased dramatically during the years when it was inaccessible. Indeed, the two most famous "lost films" in the horror genre were Tod Browning’s London After Midnight (1927) starring Lon Chaney as a hideous vampire and The Old Dark House.

Harrington suspected that a negative of the film existed somewhere in the Universal vaults. He personally explored the Universal collections in Hollywood but couldn’t locate a negative. Some documents that he discovered suggested, however, that the negative for the film had been shipped to New York for storage. (Universal maintains film repository in New York City.) Harrington made inquiries and persuaded a clerk who was a casual acquaintance to search the inventory of negatives kept in New York. The clerk contacted him and said that he had been unable to find the film. Harrington thought that the clerk’s search had been desultory. He demanded that the man make another search for the negative. A couple of weeks passed and the clerk contacted Harrington and said that he checked through most of the material in the vault, all of it uncatalogued, and that the movie was, indeed, lost. "Make one more check, please," Harrington demanded. He told the clerk that all records led to the conclusion that the film’s negative was in the New York repository: "I just know it’s there," To his surprise, the clerk said he would search the vault one more time. A week later, Harrington was told that a nitrate negative of The Old Dark House had been discovered.

Harrington traveled to New York to examine the negative. The footage was a "track negative" – that is, a camera negative with the soundtrack recorded. The first reel was decomposed and could not be used to make a print. The remaining reels were in reasonably good condition. Fortunately, Harrington located a so-called "lavender print" – sometimes called a "fine-grain master". A "lavender print" or "protection print" is a positive print of the movie with very fine resolution used to dupe additional prints. (The prints have a purplish grain in the emulsion and so are nicknamed "lavender prints.") Using the "lavender" or protection print, Harrington was able to duplicate the entire film with its soundtrack.

Restoration of the film was accomplished at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Four master-prints were made: one was given to the Museum of Modern Art in recognition of its role in financing the restoration; the second print was delivered to the AFI (American Film Institute), an agency also participating in funding the project. The other prints were provided to Universal and the Eastman House.

Universal no longer owned the rights to the film. It had sold the story-property to Columbia in the fifties. (And Columbia had made a substandard version of the movie in 1963 directed by William Castle.) Harrington obtained legal clearances for the film and since 2008 it has been available on KINO Dvd. "

 

[warnerbro]

I just compared the Cohen Blu ray to the Kino dvd and the Kino has much better sound and does not have the irritating hiss that comes in when Saul enters in the Cohen version.