Fox Catalog Titles on Blu

[Gregory]

Awful. So much of what was green or white or greyish is now blue or bluish. To reply to BK, whose email is quoted in the review: Obviously I agree that the middle caps from the Taiwanese release are horrible and wrong. Comparing this new BD to the old Fox DVD, though, I see little improvement in sharpness and far too much blue. I have to wonder what kind of print of Desk Set BK owned, what it happened to look like, or how precisely BK recalls its color timing.

Look at the second set of caps: the wall and ceiling are obviously brown, so where is this bluish hue coming from? Are television screens that are turned off supposed to be bright sky blue, not grey? So many things that were white are now blue: the white paper cards in the fronts of the file cabinets, the "no smoking" lettering in the 7th set of caps, etc.

And people haven't been pointing out the teal/orange thing for the last four years or so because it's "fashionable"; they've done it because it's an actual tendency in the color timing that's been pretty hard to miss.

[Murdoch]

My eyes! All I see for Black Swan is teal and orange, teal and orange. And that third set of Desk Set captures makes it look like the film was reshot with a blue filter!

[domino harvey]

Man, I'm glad I had no interest in upgrading from my Hepburn and Tracy box because Desk Set is an atrocity! That might legit be the worst color timing disaster of a studio era film I've ever seen

[Props55]

God these are horrible beyond all belief! Fox Tech/DeLuxe as reimagined by/with Bava gells! And that innervated, frail blu of JESSE JAMES (with occasional bursts of Cinecolor-like yellows) giving the cast a Hammer-vampire pallor. This is the Fox D-Team!

And yes, Mr. Hare, did we hallucinate the glorius IB Tech of NIAGARA!

[EddieLarkin]

The BK mentioned in the DVDBeaver review just has to be Bruce Kimmel. For what it's worth (round here, not much, I know), rarely is his opinion on colour out of sync with Harris'.

[Fred Holywell]

Agree, of course, that all these titles look atrocious. Very disappointing and sad that this is the best Fox thought they could do -- or worse, wanted to do. After "Niagra" and the other Marilyns, I had high hopes for them, particularly "Jesse James". But even "North to Alaska", probably the best-looking of the bunch, is nothing to write home about. And BK claims that "The Black Swan... replicates perfectly now what it should have always looked like". Is he mad or just color-blind?!

[Jonathan S]

Who knew Tracy & Hepburn made a blue movie!?

[zedz]

Ugh. And just look how, in the last comparative capture for Desk Set, the proper Technicolor pop of a scarlet skirt had been transmogrified into flat ochre.

[domino harvey]

Carmen Jones' colors look okay, but it's cropped (?) on one side-- did they just lop off the edge to hide the Cinemascope curvature?!

[EddieLarkin]

The AR is identical, so you've gained on the opposite side. Perhaps they've made allowance for where the soundtrack would have been, assuming they've used the OCN. Cinemascope was 2.66:1 full aperture, 2.55:1 with the soundtrack, which crucially was placed on the left.

[EddieLarkin]

Robert Harris says Black Swan is way off, whilst Desk Set is accurate.

[Gregory]

Maybe he should try to explain why so much of the array colors seen in publicity stills, faithfully reproduced in earlier transfers (discounting the Taiwanese DVD that "BK" chose to focus on) are now converted to various hues of blue. Did Walter Lang and DP Leon Shamroy have some extremely stylized color scheme in mind the whole time which has never been remarked upon before now, so that (to name one of many examples visible in the Beaver caps) the steel I-beam in the libary ceiling isn't the color of, you know, steel , but instead is blue?

Generally created from beautifully written screenplays, Desk Set was the penultimate, and the only one in CinemaScope. It was also one of their lesser efforts.

As a 1957 production, it has every reason to be problematic.

The surprise is, that it isn't.

Wow, cryptic.

[EddieLarkin]

If you ask him, he may be able to.

All I would say is at least see the disc. The one thing I would trust the least from caps is colour reproduction, as it's very unlikely your monitor and graphics card are calibrated in the same way as your TV. I'm not saying the blue bias would be absent, but it may appear reduced. The THX setting on my Panny GT30 has a surprisingly strong green bias that would probably negate a lot of it.

[Gregory]

I've almost never noticed any serious discrepancies between color timing between my display and Beaver caps. What I have noticed huge discrepancies in are RAH's "few words" about various releases. I'm not a member at HTF and have no intention of trying to challenge him to be more rigorous. There's also no way I'd buy this Desk Set Blu-ray to see for myself what it looks like, except perhaps if a review at Blu-ray.com reveals some serious problem Gary's caps.

[EddieLarkin]

I don't have much faith in anyone's decades old memory of colour reproduction, but Bruce says the Blu-ray is a dead match for what his IB tech print looked like (he commented further, here). Then you have RAH saying it is also accurate. Don't you think that's worth a little more than what the DVD looked like? Why would it be any more accurate than the Blu-ray? I have no agenda, I've not seen the film and have no interest in doing so, and if I had to choose one I'd probably say the DVD colour looks more pleasing. But I don't know what that's got to do with historical accuracy.

[Gregory]

I'm not basing my comments just on what the DVD looked like. This is a film I've seen many times, and none of these pithy assertions from RAH or BK that this is right are convincing. The BK post you link to reads like incoherent raving to me: "Yellow/green awful previous releases" (Huh? The Fox DVD and the Taiwanese are hardly the same, and what about so much of the browns, greys, and whites suddenly becoming blue?), apparent repeated denials of any teal/orange tendencies within the industry, and sloppy generalizations about Technicolor prints allegedly having blues predominate to the extent we see in the Desk Set caps.

(Edited for typo and to tone it down a bit)

[domino harvey]

In cases like this, I believe anyone with eyes can be called an expert witness. It would take a miscalibration of biblical proportions to explain away the Beaver's caps re: color. Can the HTF crew please not blindly fall back on "Let's trust the professional" here?

[Props55]

David, while I've never seen the Fuller in 35 (the one 16 I've encountered looked decidedly Eastmany as does the DVD) you're correct in stating that Fox did commission 35 IB scope release prints beyond the initial scope introduction phase (THE ROBE, HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE) and I saw several in later double bills as a kid. BROKEN LANCE and GARDEN OF EVIL most notably. The former looks gorgeous and the latter pretty damn good in DVD. 16mm tech prints could be quite variable. Any imprecision in aligning the matrices were magnified by the narrower gauge and fringing was common. I can't now recall any outstanding Fox titles in the format but I've seen immaculate 16 IB tech prints of MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, THE HANGING TREE, SAMSON AND DELILAH and EL CID both back in the day via non-theatrical rental and later in the collectors market. Surely some are still around to at least use as reference tools!

Re: DESK SET - the Thai screen caps are a red (or green, ... er ... make that a teal herring) as least as latched upon by "BK" (Batshit KrazY?). The DVD caps look like a properly timed color feature of the period would look upon initial release in lab fresh prints. Any extreme shift to red or blue (exclusive of specific design elements as illustrated by Mr. Hare's example of HELL AND HIGH WATER) in the spectrum generally indicates age related fading in Eastman based prints.

[EddieLarkin]

Thanks for the new comments. Naturally I don't know what to think. My eyes tell me that it looks fine colour wise when taken on its own. That first solo cap I see and think "Nothing wrong there!". It's only when you put it up against the DVD that the stark difference becomes obvious. The DVD looks overly brown to me but the colour of specific objects looks stronger.

[FrauBlucher]

blu-ray.com reviews...
The Ghost and Mrs Muir
Desk Set
Carmen Jones

[rockysds]

The Agony and the Ecstasy - March 4th

[captveg]

The 300 Spartans (1962) has officially been rescheduled for a 2/25/14 release

[captveg]

Norma Rae (1979) on 4/1/14

[domino harvey]

The DVD looks pretty bad but I assumed that was in part due to the film stock used-- will be interested to see how the Blu turns out

[FrauBlucher]

Looks like Fox did a very nice job.
Sunrise