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Interesting exchanges relative the respective quality of the two competing Ophüls editions.

Despite the reservations expressed towards the Criterion, I am still buying them because Second Sight commits the cardinal sin of using burned-in subtitles (there is no menu option for turning them off, a dead giveaway, and my 2 zone-free players could not make them go away either). I can be confident at least that they did not burn-in subtitles for the newly released Caught.

When the Criterion details were announced about 2 months ago, I decided to keep the SS for the non-repeated extras. And the ones unique to Criterion are enticing enough. Something I cannot say about the forthcoming SS edition of La Ronde.

Beaver on Madame de...

I'm confused, the Criterion looks boosted, not the Second Sight

I feel like a tool and I'm going to buy the Criterions.

The Criterion Madame de... looks significantly better (from those caps), and probably more so in motion. The SS looks like it's been edge enhanced or something. It has that artificial digitial look. Ugh.

domino harvey wrote:I'm confused, the Criterion looks boosted, not the Second Sight

Some of the Second Sight caps from Madame de... indeed look darker, but that's an issue with brightness levels in general and not necessarily contrast boosting.

The clearest example of actual contrast boosting is in Beaver's second pair of screen caps, depicting Danielle Darrieux sitting in front of the mirror. The Criterion has a smoother range of grays. Notice how in the Second Sight cap her hair is darker, but the highlights elsewhere in the frame are brighter, even burnt-out. That's contrast boosting in action--it exaggerates the contrast in the image and as a result reduces the middle range of grays. The highlights in the Criterion screen cap are still there, but they're more subtle and not nearly as harsh.

Couple of screenshots from the Spanish R2 release (http://dvd.es/dvd/La%20ronda/Analisis/2 ... 20239.html).




P.S. CC isn't bad but it could be better.

davidhare wrote:I hate to say this but the Spanish disc looks - wait for it - brightness boosted.

Yes, but not too much for me (it's close enough to what I saw on the big screen). On the other side it's sharper, provides more details and doesn't have the pictureboxing "feature".

DVDTalk on La Ronde.

Slant finds CC's LA RONDE "a somewhat disappointing package" but their reviews for LE PLAISIR and EARRINGS... are raves. Guess I'll wait till Beaver has caps up for the Second Sight of LA RONDE before I take the plunge on either disc.

La ronde
Le plaisir
The Earrings of Madame de...

Thanks for the reviews, Chris. I'm delighted, as I'm sure are many of my fellow R2ers, to learn that MADAME DE is streets ahead of the other Criterions, since it was the only one of the Second Sight editions that was subpar and needed upgrading. I can also vouch for the quality of the Second Sight LA RONDE. Pricey double-dipping averted, then.

reaky wrote: I can also vouch for the quality of the Second Sight LA RONDE.

If you've read the reviews of the Criterion LA RONDE (some linked above), would you say Second Sight's is from the same damaged master? The Digitally Obsessed review of the Criterion, for instance, complains of

some awful image problems in the last half hour of the film—a series of vertical squiggly lines dance about the right side of the frame for great periods, and it's intensely distracting.

I notice from reviews that the Criterion runs 93 minutes, previously indicated as 97 minutes. So there is now no length discrepancy (after accounting for PAL speed-up) with the Second Sight at 89 minutes.

Squiggly lines present and correct - seems to be from the same print.

reaky wrote:Squiggly lines present and correct - seems to be from the same print.

Thanks. Apart from the few and brief additional extras offered by the Criterion (both releases have the commentary and Alan Williams interview), it sounds like there isn't much to choose between these releases, though I'd still like to see an image comparison. I'm hoping the Second Sight might be a little sharper than the Criterion which appears to be unusually soft by their standards.

Speaking of La Ronde:

Jonathan S wrote:Apart from the few and brief additional extras offered by the Criterion (both releases have the commentary and Alan Williams interview),

An interview with Marcel Ophüls and another one with the usually excellent and charming Daniel Gélin are certainly nothing to sneer at as far extras go. And the Ophüls Criterion do not have burned-in subs (I must sound like a broken record on this point).

Well, my copy is in the mail and should reach me Monday; I'll see then if that "softness" is really the deal-breaker others seem to think it is. I know I will start with this one since it has been out of circulation for quite some time, while the other two popped up once in a while.

Florinaldo wrote:An interview with Marcel Ophüls and another one with the usually excellent and charming Daniel Gélin are certainly nothing to sneer at as far extras go.

I must admit I'll miss the Daniel Gélin interview but I'd probably sneer at Marcel for all of his six minutes due to his suppression of the longer cut of La Ronde and the German restoration of Lola Montes!

a 105 minutes, but sadly it's a Castilian dubbed version, is avalaible on the e*ule.

Received Madame De... in the mail yesterday, have never seen the film before, and just finished watching it. It reminded me in some ways of Scorsese's Age of Innocence (Scorsese indulges in long tracking shots quite a bit in that one, but not nearly as many as Ophuls) as well as Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust with regard to marriage, divorce, and the injustice of 19th century morality in a "modern" world. I loved the DVD supplement of the novelist Vilmorin totally ragging on the film: it had me in stitches! I'd probably be upset about all the changes too, but I can't believe her contempt extends all the way to calling the film boring.

I watched the de Vilmorin supplement today too and had a blast. Louise de Vilmorin (a grande dame & excentric who was the longtime mistress of André Malraux, french Minister of Culture, who then move on to her own niece, Sophie de Vilmorin) reminded me so much of Coco Chanel in this interview: an aristocratic free-thinker, a socialite artist and a total mysoginist. The way she trashes Ophuls' and Achard's adaptation of her short story is priceless.

Jonathan S wrote:I must admit I'll miss the Daniel Gélin interview but I'd probably sneer at Marcel for all of his six minutes due to his suppression of the longer cut of La Ronde and the German restoration of Lola Montes!

Too bad for you, it's an interesting 6 minutes.

Don't we sometimes have a certain fetishistic prejudice in favour of more footage, as if longer is always better? Wasn't the shorter edit of La Ronde the final preferred version of Max's? And isn't Marcel just being mindful of the author's wishes? It's not quite like Letter From an Unknown Woman where he did not have control over the numerous "adjustments" made by the studio.

I can sympathize with the yearning to "judge for oneself", but ultimately, the director made a choice, and this is the one that stands today.

As for the supposed softness of the image on the Criterion, I have sampled the disc and it does not seem as bad as others have hinted. I can't compare to my initial viewing in a theater since this goes back to about 30 years ago (and the print probably was not in pristine condition).

Florinaldo wrote:Don't we sometimes have a certain fetishistic prejudice in favour of more footage, as if longer is always better? Wasn't the shorter edit of La Ronde the final preferred version of Max's? And isn't Marcel just being mindful of the author's wishes?

I certainly wouldn't say "longer is always better". I do say "longer is always interesting" if it's a worthwhile film.

Few people would argue that the original cut of The Big Sleep is better with the extra reel of plot explanation etc. but I should think every serious admirer of the film welcomes the opportunity to see that version on DVD and compare it with the released edit. If anything it increases our appreciation of the latter (and not only because of the added footage).

If Ophuls cut La Ronde because it went down badly with preview audiences (according to the DVD review on this site, it "was met with boo") he was at least partly responding to the wishes of others nearly 60 years ago. Maybe the original cut would get a better reaction today and he'd feel differently. Maybe he wouldn't. But for many people one of the main reasons to buy DVDs - especially on a label like Criterion - is to gain a fuller understanding of how a particular film was created. Often this can only be assisted through commentaries and interviews that can be tenuous in the extreme. A film of this vintage seldom survives in any kind of preview version, and to deny access to it - alongside the final one - seems to me very misguided.

As for Marcel being "mindful of the author's wishes," it's surely just as possible that Max wouldn't have approved of his film having the option of being viewed with a commentary replacing the original soundtrack. I think it highly unlikely he'd have wished Madame de... to be released with an interview from the source author opining that he'd made a "boring" film! Perhaps he'd only ever have wanted his films to be seen in 35mm theatrical projection. But we live in a different world now, and I think all the available materials should be allowed entry to that world, so that all of us (not just a privileged few scholars) can - as you say - judge for ourselves.

Has anybody listened to the PT Anderson "introduction" on the Earrings disc? It's downright embarrassing... I sincerely hope he was stoned, because that's the only real explanation for some of his observations and insights he has on the film.

Maybe he was hanging out with Luiz Guzman right before filming