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Such faith and dedication can only be applauded, especially when coming from the most unlikely of the big studios (save Universal, maybe) for putting out product like this. In the era of Ape Heads and Paramount Suitcases (or whatever the hell) Fox earned beaucoup respect on this & the Ford box (even with that cringe-inducing Becoming John Ford doc).

The head of Warner Brother's silents holdings should fucking intern for Feldstein for a month. Maybe some magic pixie dust'll rub off. Dolts.

So, now that we know that Fox's motivations are supererogatory, what's on the cards for 2010?

Can we hope for Raoul Walsh at Fox? A quick IMDB check shows a rich vein of late silents / early sound films, including the original What Price Glory and the highly regarded The Bowery (plus the irresistably-titled Me, Gangster from 1928). I think the only title already available from this period is The Big Trail. Then there are a handful of films from the end of his career: The Tall Men, Revolt of Mamie Stover, A Private's Affair and Marines, Let's Go!. There are potentially twenty or so titles eligible for inclusion.

Other contenders?

HerrSchreck wrote:The head of Warner Brother's silents holdings should fucking intern for Feldstein for a month. Maybe some magic pixie dust'll rub off. Dolts.

That would be George Feltenstein. Feltenstein would intern for Feldstein.

And the guy who wrote the Variety piece-- MERMELSTEIN (who filled Ehrenstein's shoes)-- will write about it.

So many steins I feel like I'm in a Bavarian dishwasher.

Went to high school with David Mermelstein. i think I owe him an email.

ola t wrote:Barnes & Noble made a reservation on my Visa card today, and the amount matches what I ordered this for. Are they going to ship it this early?

Well, apparently not. The reservation has expired and they haven't charged me, nor shipped anything. Sorry for the false alarm.

(Holds chest, heaving, head bobbing with with eyes wide)

Phew. Don't do that to me you hear? Was getting all psyched up over here...

Somebody just sent me caps from LUCKY STAR that are so beautiful I hadta change my pants afterwards. Furchrissakes this set may burn down even EDISON & UNSEEN CINEMA for "DVD of the Ages".

Get thee to a urologist

That's not the GIST of it.

Oh man, you have gastrointestinal syndromic tendencies too?

The urologist can wait, get thee to the Screen Captures thread!

domino harvey wrote:Oh man, you have gastrointestinal syndromic tendencies too?

Well.. we may be Going Into Something Trichinal... get it, silly tad?

DVD Beaver

Looks like the "European silent version" of Sunrise might be a new transfer.

Gordon Thomas

Oh well... looks like that European silent version of "Sunrise" has Czech (?) intertitles... okay, okay, faithful to the artefact, but YELLOW subs??

Much worse is this:

The Beaver wrote:Not unlike Ford at Fox from last year the discs come in a large binder but, for mine specifically speaking, in transit a number of the holders were torn and 5 of the 12 discs were not in their place-holders.

PLEASE NOT AGAIN!
PLEASE NOT!!
Hell, Gary lives just around the corner from Fox, but they have to send this thing to me around half the globe...

Otherwise, it looks as stunning as expected...

Canada aint around the corner from LA, though not as far from Germany.

Depends on where you are in Canada, but mocking and joking aside: I really hoped they had learned from the Ford packaging desaster, but it looks otherwise. I'm only glad that Gary doesn't report about severely scratched or even unplayable discs. I'm not normally a packaging fetishist, really, but the talk about torn holders and loose discs worries me in this case. Somehow I see this set as a sort of 'Gesamtkunstwerk'...

That European vs of Sunrise looks much, much sharper. Too bad it's cropped and has Czech intertitles.

denti alligator wrote:That European vs of Sunrise looks much, much sharper. Too bad it's cropped and has Czech intertitles.

It is a mild let down, of course... but I'll still be czeching it out anyway.

denti alligator wrote:That European vs of Sunrise looks much, much sharper. Too bad it's cropped and has Czech intertitles.

Odd how cropped it is.. it looks like a sonorized print has been sonorized again. I mean the prints we already see are LH cropped-- are these double cropped?

Tommaso wrote:Much worse is this:

The Beaver wrote: Not unlike Ford at Fox from last year the discs come in a large binder but, for mine specifically speaking, in transit a number of the holders were torn and 5 of the 12 discs were not in their place-holders.

PLEASE NOT AGAIN!
PLEASE NOT!!

Might just have to give Amazon a try just to see how much this gets massacred in transit...

(Hope Costco gets it...)

Hmm, looking at that Czech print again, I'm not really sure whether it's so much sharper, I'd say it's brighter and thus might appear more detailed (look at the beard stubbles). Have to see this in motion of course, but the cropping is worrying me in any case. If this is representative of the whole film, I think I'll stick to the good old movietone version.

The strange thing is the Czech print is supposedly 1.37, and the Movietone is appropriately pillarboxed to 1.19.

Looking at the caps, shapewise, this is true mathematically (the ratio of Gary's Czech cap is 1.333333333etc).

If they're taken at the exact same point in the film, then it may be that the Czech print was taken from a neg which came out of another camera that was taking the actors from just a little bit more over to the right vs the camera that shot the neg that was cropped for the Movietone optical strip. If you look at Margaret Livinstone's back you not only see all of it (which you dont see in the 1.19 print) but you see the swamp reeds/open space behind her.

But yet at the same time her hands are cropped, the bottom of the picture is cropped, etc. And Livingstone's figure is far larger in the Czech than in the movietone. The question I guess is whether or not this is due to a different camera being placed closer to the actors, or this print is artifically zoomed in in telecine.

David Pierce wrote this on the BFI website in 2004 (archive.org link):

The film survives in two versions - the American and European release editions. Sunrise was filmed as a silent, and the commercial need to add a Movietone soundtrack blocked a portion of the left side of the image, placing the compositions slightly off-balance. The European release of Sunrise was silent, so the image was intact. However, this edition used footage filmed by a second camera from slightly different angles, and the editing of the shots was different.

We need more comparison caps. If the European version is all second-camera footage, then all shots should look different in slightly different ways. There would be a mixture of shots that go closer and shots that go wider.

In that case, is there any way to determine which was Murnau's preferred version/edit? In the case of "Faust", it seems that the 'best' footage went into the German version, while 'lesser' takes were used for the export versions. With "Sunrise" being an American film, the situation is the reverse of course, i.e. one would assume that the definitive version is the Movietone edit. That doesn't mean of course that the European version is just a curiosity. If indeed vastly different, it will probably be a great pleasure to see this alternative and its differences.