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Yojimbo wrote:I will admit to being concerned with McGoohan's prudishness, however: he explicitly insisted that guns not be used and 'no fooling around with women'!

...which is why he wasn't cast as James Bond, despite being a clear front-runner - and a much more obvious candidate than Sean Connery.

MichaelB wrote:

Yojimbo wrote:I will admit to being concerned with McGoohan's prudishness, however: he explicitly insisted that guns not be used and 'no fooling around with women'!

...which is why he wasn't cast as James Bond, despite being a clear front-runner - and a much more obvious candidate than Sean Connery.

Yeah, the Bond films just wouldn't be the same without 'the Bond girls'!

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse is getting a Blu-Ray upgrade on September 24th

Calvin wrote:Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse is getting a Blu-Ray upgrade on September 24th

Release of the year for me.Thank you MOC!

Now I don't know what to do. I have the original Eureka DVDs of the first two Mabuse films. Have long been meaning to upgrade to the box for the 3rd film & the booklet/extras. But now there's a separate blu-ray of Testament. Confusing!

BrokenFace wrote:Now I don't know what to do. I have the original Eureka DVDs of the first two Mabuse films. Have long been meaning to upgrade to the box for the 3rd film & the booklet/extras. But now there's a separate blu-ray of Testament. Confusing!

Sell your car and just buy'em all,MOC deserves support.

This will be the third copy of Mabuse I own simultaneously- I wish I knew if there were blus coming of the other two, so I'd feel ok about letting the box go.

Not much help but:

Are you going to be releasing the other two Mabuse films on Blu Ray too?

MoC Twitter wrote:No immediate plans, I'm afraid.

This is going to be one of those occasions, where if Criterion released it on Blu-ray I'd probably snap it up as there's a lot of extras on there that aren't in the MoC box, but as there's nothing really new here I'm probably going to wait for a great price, since it's not a film I'm completely mad about and I couldn't really sell the old copy at this stage.

I want the MoC Blu-ray, since the Kalat commentary is apparently different from the Kalat commentary on the Criterion (which I already have), but I'm very disappointed that this film is the only one out of the box in which there are plans to upgrade.

If there are no plans to upgrade the others, they should at least be released separate from the box.

I'm guessing that HD materials just aren't available for Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler and Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse because, if there were, I doubt MoC would just upgrade Testament. If you look at the boxset, Gambler and 1000 Eyes are "new, officially licenced transfer[s] from restored materials" while Testament is a "new, officially licenced high-definition transfer from restored materials".

Would Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler need to come from FWMS? I haven't seen the film so don't know if it comes from there...but perhaps that could be the reason no HD is available for that film?

Nick's twitter:
I've responded to folk numerous times about the COMPLETE MABUSE box not being upgraded to Blu-ray. Which is very unlikely to happen. TESTAMENT was available singly from Eureka before the MoC Series existed, and they've had HD materials for years. So it made sense.

Full details are now available for the DF upgrade of Testament. It looks like the only difference (other than the film being in HD) is that the booklet will be 20 pages longer, including writings by Lotte H. Eisner and Fritz Arno Wagner. Also, the excerpts of vintage interviews with Fritz Lang are now described as being "substantial," if that means anything.

I'm very happy to endorse that - the transfer looks fabulous. Allowances for age obviously have to be made, but fewer than you might expect.

One thing I've never understood, though, is this implication that I've encountered in quite a few reviews that scripting commentaries in advance is somehow a bad thing (the use of the word "but"). Obviously, it's great if you're a natural raconteur like John Waters and you actually made the film, but I'd actually be more reassured if a critical commentary had been scripted in advance than otherwise.

Looks like a fair upgrade to me.

Will buy now.

Just watched Dr Mabuse, and found the picture to be not so clean (I expected a bit better).

It has visually all the defects you usually expect from a BD of a 30s movie, but I thought that many white speckles and scratches are typically stuff that would have been cleaned if the movie was from a major studio.

The audio track is also not in a very good shape and many sequences sound like you listen to the movie through an electric fan. The burning at the end of the movie, with all the fire trucks sirens, makes it extremely noticeable, but it's something you can also hear around the 25th minute, during the discussion at the coffee shop.

For about 10 minutes it was really bugging me why David Kalat sounds so friggin' weird on the Testament Blu-ray commentary, when I realised it's because when he recorded this back in 2009, he had to do so to the slightly shorter 25fps DVD! They've slowed him down now to match the correct 24fps on the Blu. I never thought I had an ear for these sort of things (never really encountered a PAL DVD I've had a problem with, or indeed slowed down NTSC DVDs like Alexanderplatz), but I guess I'm so familiar with Kalat's voice I immediately realised something was up. I popped the DVD in and all was well.

Maybe he recorded them to NTSC, they were sped up to PAL for the DVDs in 2009, and you think this is what he sounds like normally? Maybe the Blu-ray brought it back down to "normal Kalat"?

I had only days before got through his epic der Spieler commentary, so maybe you're right! Either way, I prefer 25fps Kalat to 24fps Kalat!

EddieLarkin wrote:I had only days before got through his epic der Spieler commentary, so maybe you're right! Either way, I prefer 25fps Kalat to 24fps Kalat!

Funny, my father always had the pitch shifted up just a hint on his turntable when I was a kid, and I always heard music just a tone higher than it was meant to be heard.

To be sure, listen to the Kalat commentary on MoC CITY GIRL (or on any Criterion) and let me know!

Actually, in his introduction to the commentary Kalat says "over the next 115 minutes", which is the 25fps runtime. I listened to the City Girl Blu-ray commentary a few weeks ago and I'd say in Testaments case, 25fps Kalat is authentic Kalat!

Btw, anyone here who might dismiss a film like Godzilla, or who have seen it before and didn't appreciate it, should know that Kalat's commentaries on the Criterion disc are the best he ever did and worth the price of the disc alone. Don't miss out!