comment #1

mutinyco says ...

Funny. I always thought the original Dirty Harry was phenomenally well-shot.

comment #2

The Big Snake says ...

Yeah, we're getting into a weird area here. I love and own the previous DIRTY HARRY dvds (and all the old laserdiscs), but I also trust Glenn implicitly given his pedigree (we used to work at MGM at the same time in the late '90s).
If I buy a Blu-Ray player this Christmas, it will be because of the DIRTY HARRY movies and the 007 movies and THE GODFATHER - and I know I don't want them to be f**ked with.
But it does beg the questions:
1) Are there movies the studios are more likely to f**k with because of their peceived value without giving a thought to consulting the original filmmakers?
and
2) If I'm old enough to remember the initial release of some of these pictures (and I am, and not only that, I was fortunate enough to meet Don Siegel at a couple of UCLA screenings of the first DH movies in the early 1980's), then what's the standard we're using? Should it be my memory? Just because you can make an old movie "look better" per current standards (see Ted Turner's color versions of B&W classics), does that mean you're supposed to?
Clean them up - but don't f**k them up.

comment #3

TheVicuna says ...

Take a look at this interview with Vilmos Zsigmond because it's germane here:

http://www.cameraguild.com/interviews/chat_zsigmond/vilmos_conversation.htm

The key quote:

" The other day I was interviewed for the DVD of The Long Goodbye, and I told them that I don’t remember being called to supervise the transfer. They said they would see what they could do because the DVD was coming out pretty soon. They showed me the transfer, and it was absolutely terrible. They didn’t know that The Long Goodbye was flashed, so they took all the flashing out of the movie, and made it very contrasty and dark like some movies are today. I volunteered to supervise a new transfer. I must say the people involved did everything necessary to produce the best possible transfer. This is a very important issue for all of us."

The problem is that you get mastering guys and digital colorists who take it upon themselves to make artistic decisions about the look that often run totally counter to what the original director and cinematographer may have wanted. Their job should be to reproduce not to reinterpret. In the case of DIRTY HARRY, neither Siegel nor Surtees are alive, obviously, but I'm surprised Clint didn't speak up.

I went to see the "new print" of DH at the Aero last month. It was clean and unfaded, but it didn't look right. It had been timed all wrong. Every scene was keyed to whatever bright color was in the frame. For instance, if there was a blue mailbox on the street or a red curb, it was bright vivid blue or red, like something out out of Baz Luhrmann's MOULIN ROUGE, at the expense of the skin tones, which is what color timing is SUPPOSED to be keyed to.

It was clear to me that this was a botched retiming during one of the police office scenes, with overhead flourescent lights, where the skin tones were all a sickly green due to the color temperature. This was not an aesthetic choice -- no movies in the 70s did the "let the flourescents go green" thing -- that's a look that didn't come into play until late '90s music videos. Instead, it's the result of inept guys in the lab and at the studio who didn't bother to read the original timing notes, don't know better, or worse, don't care. And this, presumably, was the "digitially remastered" print from which they made the Blu-Ray.

Maybe this seems too wonky an argument for you, but this trend is just as bad, if not worse, than what Turner tried to do with black and white movies in the 80s. Future generations are not going to be able to have a feel for what these movies actually looked like, It's a big deal, Jeff. Don't fall into the "what's the big deal about grain" camp. Moustaches are being painted onto Mona Lisas every day and the few people who give a shit are being called crazy.

comment #4

BurmaShave says ...

You boys get me excited when you talk about your picture quality. More projection/transfer porn, please!

comment #5

D.Z. says ...

Oh, well, more Lucasfying means another reason not to upgrade. But greed tends to do that, I guess.

comment #6

jse33 says ...

Dirty Harry is from Warner Brothers, who are known to use DNR (digital noise reduction) on their titles to smooth them out. However, the films in the Blu-ray set look pretty damn good and are leaps and bounds above dvd. The upcoming Godfather set should look fantastic as well. It has been completely restored under the supervision of Robert Harris. The grain will be intact on that release.

comment #7

Spacesheik says ...

Jeff, keep these Blu-ray transfer posts coming, this is good stuff, especially the PATTON review.

comment #8

JD says ...

Sounds like he needs to adjust the settings on his TV. When I watched this Blu-ray last week, it looked terrific... and accurate (those night exteriors were still indecipherably pitch black, for example). There are cases where minimizing grain and increasing detail could be a problem -- imagine Traffic without grain -- but this honestly didn't seem to be the case with Dirty Harry. Watching it on BR, I felt like I was getting the same feelings I got from the old DVDs (I have both), but with a bit more potency and precision.

comment #9

corey3rd says ...

The need to include color bars on all discs so folks can tweak their sets accordingly.

comment #10

mutinyco says ...

There were tons of movies shot in the '70s that had green fluorescent light. It's very noticeable. Only, unlike the '90s, the fluorescents weren't being used as the primary source.

What they did was to maintain the fluorescent ceiling lights in offices or banks or police stations or whatever, because they were built-in fixtures -- but then they'd actually light the scene separately with standard tungsten. So the light would look mostly normal, but sometimes you could see these greenish lights above, and sometimes there'd even be a subtle green rim on the actors.

comment #11

corey3rd says ...

You swap out the bulbs when you have flourescent action.

What you also have is Kodak's 70-80s films that couldn't handle the darkness. Andy Lazlo talked about having to go with Fuji stock on Streets of Fire. but even that film had flaws.

comment #12

Undercover Brother says ...

I watched one of the previous Dirty Harry DVDs on my 56 inch Samsung and the quality of the transfer was horrifying. Unwatchable. NOthing but distortion, noise and visual mud. The BR disc is an amazing piece of work. If making these old films look stunning on BR is the equivilent of f*&king them up, then let the f*&king up begin.

comment #13

Mr. Peel says ...

Not at all the same thing, but I like how each of the films on this set preserves the correct vintage Warner Brothers logo. It always bugs me when they attach their newer, crappy "As Time Goes by" logo onto older films.

comment #14

bluefugue says ...

> If making these old films look stunning on BR is the equivilent of f*&king them up, then let the f*&king up begin.

This is a false dichotomy. There ought to be a way to clean them up while preserving, insofar as it can be ascertained, the intent of the director and cinematographer.

comment #15

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