criterionforum.org

Title leaked on Amazon.




SPECIAL FEATURES

1080p presentation on Blu-ray
Optional English SDH Subtitles
Brand new audio commentary by film historian Joseph McBride (author of Searching for John Ford)
New video essay by Tag Gallagher (author of John Ford: Himself and His Movies)
A collector’s booklet featuring a reprint of Judge Priest short story The Lord Provides; a new essay by James Oliver; and an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Fantastic news. I wonder if Olive will magically reappear with a signature edition at some point.

The notoriously difficult to please John Ford regarded The Sun Shines Bright as his favourite film. Based on material from Irvin S. Cobb’s “Judge Priest” short stories, Ford had previously directed the 1934 film Judge Priest starring Will Rogers, but was unsatisfied with the handling of the film by 20th Century Fox – specifically their decision to cut a vital scene depicting the main character condemning an attempted lynching. Two decades later he chose to revisit the material for Republic Pictures, and the result was yet another masterpiece from the great director.

Set in 1905 Kentucky, Judge Priest (Charles Winninger) is fighting for reelection against a Yankee prosecutor (Milburn Stone). Despite the Judge’s popularity, his generosity and sense of justice may cost him the election.

The Sun Shines Bright almost shared a similar fate as Judge Priest, with ten minutes of footage being removed by Republic Pictures. Fortunately the original uncut master was not destroyed, and has now been fully restored and makes its UK debut on Blu-ray as part of the Masters of Cinema series.

SPECIAL FEATURES

1080p presentation on Blu-ray
Optional English SDH Subtitles
Brand new audio commentary by film historian Joseph McBride (author of Searching for John Ford)
New video essay by Tag Gallagher (author of John Ford: Himself and His Movies)
A collector’s booklet featuring a reprint of Judge Priest short story The Lord Provides; a new essay by James Oliver; and an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Great to see this finally get the release I hoped that Olive would give us back in the day. It is a shame that Eureka haven't seen fit to include the theatrical cut for posterity though.

I know the Olive disc also uses the uncut version (and perhaps MoC will be a better encode of the same master - the Olive BD is a single-layer disc), but what was in the ten minutes that was cut?

You can watch a shorter cut of the film on YouTube that is presumably the original theatrical version (I won't link to it here because I'm unsure about the legality). It looks like most of the cut material was from the beginning. In this shorter version, the movie basically opens with John Russell's entrance.

hearthesilence wrote: Thu Oct 21, 2021 6:06 pm (and perhaps MoC will be a better encode of the same master - the Olive BD is a single-layer disc)

I received my copy in the States today. Just quickly scanning through, it's not quite as "pulse-y" as the Olive disc but darker areas really aren't optimized that good and can look quite mushy.

Have just watched the MoC release. I can't compare it to the Olive disc, but let me say that I was very pleased with the image quality. While there are some rather negligible print imperfections, I thought it looked very filmlike with great clarity and very convincing reproduction of some of the grainier shots (of which there are quite a few). No issues with the darker areas for me; I thought that greyscale and detail looked really convincing for a film of this age. Audio was fine for me as a non-native speaker, too (unlike with some other older American films, I never felt tempted to switch on the subs, as practically everything was clearly understandable, even considering Stepin Fetchit's accent).

But most of all this is a really fine package in terms of extras. I only sampled the audio commentary which seems to be very informative, and, as usual, the Tag Gallagher video piece draws your attention to some details otherwise easily overlooked, but I was also impressed by the booklet. Unlike many other MoC booklets which have a lot of photographs and only short texts, this one comes with almost no pics but with three rather expansive contributions in a small font. I didn't read the Judge Priest short story (which doesn't seem to be that short after all), but the James Oliver essay does a fine job examining the film and its somewhat problematic depictions of race and addressing them convincingly in the historic context. The Rosenbaum piece is somewhat anecdotic and makes some far-fetched comparisons to films like "Gertrud" or even Tati's "Playtime" which seem somewhat stream-of-consciousness, but I nevertheless found it a good read as well.

So, a release that does full justice to one of Ford's finest and most personal films in my view.