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Bitter Rice



During planting season in Northern Italy's Po Valley, an earthy rice-field worker (the seductive Silvana Mangano) falls in with a small-time criminal (Vittorio Gassman) who is planning a daring heist of the crop, as well as his femme-fatale-ish girlfriend, played by the Hollywood star Doris Dowling. Both a socially conscious look at the hardships endured by underpaid field workers and a melodrama tinged with sex and violence, this early smash for producer extraordinaire Dino De Laurentiis and director Giuseppe De Santis is neorealism with a heaping dose of pulp.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Giuseppe de Santis, a 2007 documentary by screenwriter Carlo Lizzani
• Interview with Lizzani from 2003
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by critic Pasquale Iannone

This is fantastic, De Santis in the CC... Much overlooked & significant figure in Italian neo-realism and after, although career mysteriously petered out after half a dozen or so very reckonable films including this... I have a lot of time for the guy & this is simply a really great release!...

BTW it was Producer De Laurentiis who got the girl, shortly after marrying Silvana Mangano as his first wife....

New High Def transfer ? That doesnt look good.
Or maybe they will refine the phrasing about the source later ?

tenia wrote:New High Def transfer ? That doesnt look good.
Or maybe they will refine the phrasing about the source later ?

You were expecting low-definition? High def can mean just about anything, but probably 2k.

I can't actually vouch for the accuracy of this number, but 96% of Criterion releases advertised with the generic "New high-definition digital restoration" descriptor are sourced from dated masters.

The Italian Cristaldi Film DVD of RISO AMARO, out since 2007, is billed as 'restored and remastered', make of that what you may (also boasts a DD5.1 remix of the soundtrack)... I'm guessing things have moved on since then & maybe Criterion have done their own high definition digital restoration from a 35mm transfer of the negative...

Moshrom wrote:I can't actually vouch for the accuracy of this number, but 96% of Criterion releases advertised with the generic "New high-definition digital restoration" descriptor are sourced from dated masters.

That's exactly why I'm concerned.

Great news. A world first on Blu-ray of a great film. Neorealism meets film noir

This is featured in the current Cinema Neorealista exhibition @ Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin - still from an excised bathing scene from RISO AMARO...

And from the shoot...

While featured...

BluRay.com

"This new high-definition transfer was created on a Spirit DataCine film scanner from the 35mm original camera negative. Thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, and flicker were manually removed using MTI's DRS, while Digital Vision's Phoenix was used for small dirt, grain, and jitter. The original monaural soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from the optical track print. Clicks, thumps, hiss, hum, and crackle were manually removed using Pro Tools HD and iZotope RX4.

Transfer supervisor: Lee Kline.
Colorist: Roberto Cesario/Cinecitta Digital Factory, Rome."

More important is this:

Dr. Svet wrote:On my disc there appears to be a small mastering defect. There is a short sequence with multiple quick skips/dropped frames which begins at 01.17.59 and ends around 01.18.10. They can be seen as the ill girl slowly walks down the stairs. At the moment I do not know if the defect appears only on my disc, but I have contacted Criterion and will make a clarification when I have proper information. I have a market version of Bitter Rice.

Do remember also that Code Unknown has a few dropped frames, and someone on this forum reported on a similar problem with Blind Chance. Is this now slowly becoming the next big issue for Criterion? I hate to keep piling on a company that I obviously love and respect (and their 2016 slate is already shaping up to be very impressive), but what is going on lately...

Another possible mastering defect, according to Blu-ray.com review:

On my disc there appears to be a small mastering defect. There is a short sequence with multiple quick skips/dropped frames which begins at 01.17.59 and ends around 01.18.10. They can be seen as the ill girl slowly walks down the stairs. At the moment I do not know if the defect appears only on my disc, but I have contacted Criterion and will make a clarification when I have proper information. I have a market version of Bitter Rice.

criterionsnob wrote:Another possible mastering defect, according to Blu-ray.com review:

On my disc there appears to be a small mastering defect. There is a short sequence with multiple quick skips/dropped frames which begins at 01.17.59 and ends around 01.18.10. They can be seen as the ill girl slowly walks down the stairs. At the moment I do not know if the defect appears only on my disc, but I have contacted Criterion and will make a clarification when I have proper information. I have a market version of Bitter Rice.

Before people start freaking out this is NOT the same fast-forward-for-a-split-second thing on Code Unknown. It literally is just missing frames that happens immediately after a transition. You hear the jump in the soundtrack as well. It more than likely is a matter of missing frames in the source.

We've seen this on several other Criterion releases in the past. The Fallen Idol comes immediately to mind. It's just par for the course with some of these older films with few prints to pull from

If it's the high shot where the woman walks away from the camera, slowly down the stairs and across to a horsedrawn cart below, which she sits into, before it moves away, I'm not seeing any missing frames on the Cristaldi DVD (adjusting the times cited for PAL speedup)... Strange!...

ellipsis7 wrote:If it's the high shot where the woman walks away from the camera, slowly down the stairs and across to a horsedrawn cart below, which she sits into, before it moves away, I'm not seeing any missing frames on the Cristaldi DVD (adjusting the times cited for PAL speedup)... Strange!...

Same here.

Does anyone know where that DVD was mastered from?

I was able to check Hulu through someone that had it after I saw Hulu had Bitter Rice up there. Holy shit that print is in rough shape, making the Blu-ray even more impressive. BUT the same frame drops happen at the same scene, but they're a bit more obvious and jarring: the frame shifts and there are obvious splices. It appears Criterion has simply tried to make it "smoother".

EDIT: and someone on Blu-ray.com actually was able to post the scene from Hulu: http://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p ... stcount=15" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That looks like actual missing frames, as opposed to a digital error. Much less distracting.

Wow, that's bad... It's a smooth & unbroken shot on the DVD... Franco Cristaldi is the sole Producer credit for the film it says on the Cristaldi DVD cover, and it is an 'edizione restaurata e rimasterizzata', which also boasts an alternative remixed DD5.1 soundtrack in addition to the original mono... Whereas Criterion & several other sources including the actual opening titles give Dino de Laurentiis sole Producer credit (in fact he married Silvana Mangano after)... Production company however is credited on IMDBPro & the titles as Lux Film (founded in Turin in 1935) a company associated with Ponti, De Laurentiis & Cristaldi (apparently Cristaldi's heirs acquired the extensive Lux Films library in 1996)... Perhaps this is the root of the problem, divided rights & prints of the same film?... Not unknown in Italian cinema... Meaning Criterion maybe did not have access the Cristaldi materials... Possibly they had a previously struck undamaged print or interneg while there was subsequent damage on this shot on the original neg...

According to pro-b at blu-ray.com, Criterion says that the missing frames are missing from "the original film element." And there are other details of his email from Criterion about this issue here: http://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p ... stcount=16" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

He still can't say "I was wrong"-- is Pro-B actually the Fonz?

Actually, his reply in the post quoted is quite thorough : we all know now that the existing frames exist and have made their way to video before, so if they're not present on the Criterion release, it means somebody somewhere chose to present the movie without them (whichever the reason).

Criterion saying "there are missing frames in the original film element" clearly is wrong : a DVD has been produced with the frames present, so there's at least some film elements somewhere that have them.

In the present case, I'd say instead that it's Criterion who can't admit they're wrong.

Read the entire thread it comes from. He flat out stated that it had to be a disc mastering error, and then once he heard back from Criterion, refused to walk this back. Criterion can't possibly have access to every film element, but it's reasonable to believe this problem was present in their elements. I don't think anyone thought what Criterion was saying was that it existed in the original negative or whatever, and calling it a disc error is utterly false.