Mon Feb 09, 2009 10:03 am
Not long ago someone made a disparaging remark about the types of films being shown on MGM HD, a premium channel which would be more fairly called UA HD, since it has a wide range of independent product and none of the MGM library (and as a result tended to feature a lot of forgettable 70s-80s product).
As if they heard the remark and were stung by it, MGM HD has suddenly become the best place to look for HD transfers of older movies. Much of this seems to come from new access to the Goldwyn library, but there's really quite a range of interesting things turning up on the channel, and to a lesser degree (mostly post-1960 in these cases) on Universal HD and HDNet Movies. (As noted earlier, this even includes the first silent known to be shown in HD, The Winning of Barbara Worth.)
I thought it might be good to just start calling attention to these showings, referencing both the films and the quality of the transfers. Unfortunately, by the time they're referenced here current showings may be over, but one can at least hope that since the transfers exist, they'll turn up again... someday... or on Blu-Ray. I'll start with three British titles:
I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING-- Marvelous, much-imitated (eg Local Hero) romance about a young woman who thinks she wants to marry a tycoon, arrives on the Scottish island he's renting part of, and, well, explicitly the message is, can't buy me love, but that hardly does justice to the way this film dramatizes the process of rediscovering one's soul, one's deep connection to one's country and one's people and the land and the wild pagan side of our natures and our own mortality (it actually helps that neither of the romantic leads are spring chickens)... Material on this seems to be good, not spectacular (as one would hope for given Powell & Pressburger's visual rep) and so HD was not revelatory, but it's plainly more detailed than any version I've seen before-- I had never noticed, for instance, that an early shot of a factory gate was in no small part a matte painting, as becomes clear when part of the opening gate vanishes under the matte! (HDNet)
GENEVIEVE-- Automotive comedy about two rival car-club members who own 1900-era jalopies and enter a race, which soon takes on other dimensions of rivalry (including over the woman one of them won and married). On the plus side, this is a gorgeous Technicolor movie, seemingly shot in the colors of Fiestaware and offering a delightful open-air portrait of Britain in that time, tree-lined roads and country diners and gray Victorian buildings looking like bankers at the beach and so on. On the minus side, it's rather mean-spirited, moreso than the rash of cartoonish 60s vintage-race comedies it plainly inspired (Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, etc.), and so even as it's joyous to watch the HD Technicolor transfer, it's somewhat less than joyful-- until Arthur Wontner, best known for playing Sherlock Holmes in the 1930s, turns up in a one-scene bit at the end, and suddenly bats the movie out of the park and gives it the heart and soul it had lacked till now. (MGM HD)
SABOTAGE-- I hadn't seen this Hitchcock film-- the one with Oscar Homolka as an anarchist who sends his stepson onto a bus with a bomb-- in probably 30 years; my memories were certainly of 16mm murk typical for that time and for a film that had crossed oceans and was apparently at the time in the public domain. Camera negative or something very close to it must survive, however, because this transfer was absolutely stunning in its level of detail, you felt like you could walk around pre-Blitz London in it, reading the shop signs and newspapers (I was delighted to be able to see, at one point, that the color supplement article Homolka is reading at one point has an article about Lugosi in White Zombie!) While others of his British films may be better as slick entertainment, this one is peerless at showing what a fine observer of the British scene Hitch could be, the various anarchists all a seedy and unhealthy bunch living shabby, nervous lives, and Homolka is a kindly man in his own mind who fails to see how he's also a monster. Not a perfect film, the wrap-up is somewhat unworthy of the character drama leading up to it, but a rich and intelligent one that points to his best dramatic portraits of self-deluded, three-dimensional evil such as Notorious and Strangers on a Train. (MGM HD)
As if they heard the remark and were stung by it, MGM HD has suddenly become the best place to look for HD transfers of older movies. Much of this seems to come from new access to the Goldwyn library, but there's really quite a range of interesting things turning up on the channel, and to a lesser degree (mostly post-1960 in these cases) on Universal HD and HDNet Movies. (As noted earlier, this even includes the first silent known to be shown in HD, The Winning of Barbara Worth.)
I thought it might be good to just start calling attention to these showings, referencing both the films and the quality of the transfers. Unfortunately, by the time they're referenced here current showings may be over, but one can at least hope that since the transfers exist, they'll turn up again... someday... or on Blu-Ray. I'll start with three British titles:
I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING-- Marvelous, much-imitated (eg Local Hero) romance about a young woman who thinks she wants to marry a tycoon, arrives on the Scottish island he's renting part of, and, well, explicitly the message is, can't buy me love, but that hardly does justice to the way this film dramatizes the process of rediscovering one's soul, one's deep connection to one's country and one's people and the land and the wild pagan side of our natures and our own mortality (it actually helps that neither of the romantic leads are spring chickens)... Material on this seems to be good, not spectacular (as one would hope for given Powell & Pressburger's visual rep) and so HD was not revelatory, but it's plainly more detailed than any version I've seen before-- I had never noticed, for instance, that an early shot of a factory gate was in no small part a matte painting, as becomes clear when part of the opening gate vanishes under the matte! (HDNet)
GENEVIEVE-- Automotive comedy about two rival car-club members who own 1900-era jalopies and enter a race, which soon takes on other dimensions of rivalry (including over the woman one of them won and married). On the plus side, this is a gorgeous Technicolor movie, seemingly shot in the colors of Fiestaware and offering a delightful open-air portrait of Britain in that time, tree-lined roads and country diners and gray Victorian buildings looking like bankers at the beach and so on. On the minus side, it's rather mean-spirited, moreso than the rash of cartoonish 60s vintage-race comedies it plainly inspired (Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, etc.), and so even as it's joyous to watch the HD Technicolor transfer, it's somewhat less than joyful-- until Arthur Wontner, best known for playing Sherlock Holmes in the 1930s, turns up in a one-scene bit at the end, and suddenly bats the movie out of the park and gives it the heart and soul it had lacked till now. (MGM HD)
SABOTAGE-- I hadn't seen this Hitchcock film-- the one with Oscar Homolka as an anarchist who sends his stepson onto a bus with a bomb-- in probably 30 years; my memories were certainly of 16mm murk typical for that time and for a film that had crossed oceans and was apparently at the time in the public domain. Camera negative or something very close to it must survive, however, because this transfer was absolutely stunning in its level of detail, you felt like you could walk around pre-Blitz London in it, reading the shop signs and newspapers (I was delighted to be able to see, at one point, that the color supplement article Homolka is reading at one point has an article about Lugosi in White Zombie!) While others of his British films may be better as slick entertainment, this one is peerless at showing what a fine observer of the British scene Hitch could be, the various anarchists all a seedy and unhealthy bunch living shabby, nervous lives, and Homolka is a kindly man in his own mind who fails to see how he's also a monster. Not a perfect film, the wrap-up is somewhat unworthy of the character drama leading up to it, but a rich and intelligent one that points to his best dramatic portraits of self-deluded, three-dimensional evil such as Notorious and Strangers on a Train. (MGM HD)
“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier
