The new A Little Night Music DVD.. — Page 2

Yes, the print used is hardly a humiliation. And considering that it wasn't recorded in stereo, the Dolby-ized soundtrack isn't bad. Some of the singing is a bit metalic, but it's nice and loud and clear. I salute them for bringing it out.

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I'm gonna have to get this. I don't care if it's a bootleg!

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Best12: Yes, the "...Must Meet My Wife" sequence has an Ibsen-like ponderous feel. Since writing in this thread, I've gone back to the DVD at least twice, curiously looking for more to love. It reminds me of beloved films that turned up late at night on TV when I was a kid. They'd invariably shoe-horn a much edited version into a spot with many commercials, and whole chunks were just gone. That's the impression we're left with here -- seeing a ghost of what used to be there. (Wouldn't we kill for deleted material, outtakes, etc? Of course it's all gone, but it might explain something..) In a way, the film seems to have been conceived with a grand(er) scale, more GIGI, maybe, and then edited down to feel "intimate."

Having posted that Taylor "almost" brings off "Clowns," on repeat viewings I wince in places, at her head bobbing this way/that, at key moments when merely being still and letting the song -- and this beautiful woman singing it -- sell the material. It's exasperating when her instincts do her in. Best12, if you have thoughts on the "Clowns" sequence, share them. You were so right about Prince finding the wildly wrong tone for the late-night rendezvous of "...wife." In a way, that scene had the melancholy weight of the "Clown" scene -- so that it almost felt repetitive when we got there for the eleven o'clock spot. I know, I know, speculation, maybe too much analysis. I cannot wrap my brain around a man like Harold Prince making such errors -- with material he helped shape and create!

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I actually think Guard is pretty great in the role--and I liek that his role has been transposed (Sondheim said in the Sondheim Review that this the movie uses the lower key he wrote it in--it was only casting for the stage version that changed things) though that may be partly because now it's in a key I can sing...

Auggie I think your'e dead on with most of your views and I really enjoyed reading your review--I have a soft spot for the movie and defend it a lot but part of the reason I defend it is because among theatre fans the general urban legend on the movie is that it's unwatchable--a bad movie musical to end all bad movie musicals--and IMHo wqhen put up agains the likes of Mame it simply isn't. Faint praise maybe but...

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I actually got mine from DeepDiscount right after it was brough up on here--got it in a few days after

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This may be a bit of a tangent, but I'll give it a quick whirl...

1.66:1 is in that awkward ratio BETWEEN TV sizes.

Films were made in many ratios, going back throughout the history of the medium. The most common are:

1.33:1 (true 4x3 full frame)
1.66:1
1.78:1 (or 1.77:1 which is true 16x9)
1.85:1
2.35:1

There are many other ratios used, particularly in the 1950s and '60s when they were experimenting with wide screen film to compete with television.

TV sets are made in only two different screen ratios:

4x3 (which is closest to 1.33:1)
16x9 (which is closest to 1.78:1)

In order to make the movies fit into these two TV sizes, the film ratio either has to be cropped off or letterboxed to maintain its full image.

For wide screen (16x9) TVs the DVD format decided to take advantage of the horizontal information available on their 480 screen lines and instead of creating the "black bars" that everyone is familiar with on the video (basically losing around 1/3 of the available video image just for those bars, they decided to allow an "anamorphic" image to be encoded on the DVD. But when an anamorphic image is displayed on standard 4x3 TV sets, the DVD player itself generates those black bars so that the image doesn't look stretched out vertically (long, skinny heads, etc).

Most movies made today are either 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, both being wide screen formats, and nearly all the studios now do the anamorphic transfers (aka "enhanced for 16x9 TV sets"). They look much better on HDTVs.

And with old movies (pre mid-1950s) the ratio is 4x3 (1.33:1) and they play full frame on standard TVs.

But some movies of that era, and even a few more recent ones, use the 1.66:1 ratio, and that creates a problem for the DVD world, and for "purist" DVD consumers. If they just do a 4x3 letterboxed image, with the small black bars at the top and bottom, they get complaints that the image is softer, not as detailed, and DVD fans wonder why they didn't make it anamorphic/enhanced? But if they do the "16x9 enhanced" image on a 1.66:1 film, they will actually CUT OFF a bit of the visual information on the top and bottom in order to make the anamorphic image display correctly. Then consumers yell that some of the image seems to be missing on certain shots, etc. And they're right.

Disney has taken a lot of crap for this both ways. Lately they've been choosing to do the 16x9 enhanced image on their 1.66:1 movies, which means some of the top and bottom are missing, and the black bars generated on your TV set are actually in the 1.78:1 ratio. That would explain why sometimes the bars look bigger on certain DVDs you have with this ratio.

"A Little Night Music" was done without "16x9 enhancement," which means they're not cutting off any of the top/bottom ratio on your screen... so the black bars look smaller and there's more screen image vertically. But this is the true, correct, and full picture image for that in-between ratio.

*sits down*

A long-winded tangent, but that's the complete explanation for the "Black Bar Blues."

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I havent seen the DVD version yet, but i'm interested in peoples comments on here.

Henstooth arent usually known for great transfers, so they probably got the first print that was avaialble to them. There must more somewhere out there that are probably better, but knowing Henstooth, why bother paying for a better if your going to churn out a barebones disc.

Pauly knowing Image's woes with this title--they said they couldn't justify any resotration costs and that the best prints out there were all basically unreleasable in their words--which is why they dropped their planned release--I think Henstooth perhaps deserve th ebenefit and this was the best version.

On the Sondheim forum some have mentioned that it seems to be from a PAL source bcause the audio is pitched up and it has some PAL speed up, I haven't been anal enough yet to compare directly with my vinyl of the soundtrack or the soundtrack bonus song on the cast album CD but I actually didn't notice this (and I listen to the soundtrack a *lot*)--and usually it's the first thing I notice--like with the current Collector's Edition of The Last Unicorn where you really hear the pitch up in Jimmy Webb's songs (they used a German digital copy of the film).

*edit* ok apparantly I am anal enough--doing a brief comparison witht he movie Glamorous Life bonus track on the CD and the DVD I don't notice a pitch up in the sound--though it's hard to compare directly as the dvd version is longer with its dialogue...

I do know about TV overscan--Hen's Tooth actually window framed (i think that's the term) the whole movie slightly--so if you check out the whole frame with dvd options my tv doesn't miss the sides--but some tvs probably still would (you're right though that the titles probably ideally shoulda been windowboxed a bit more extremely as they are often for academy aperture releases). All the text does fit in the image you're right--but I still find lots of it much further to the edge than most movies would be framed at. Still everything was cheap about Corman's productions so...

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