Yesterday Joseph McBride, author of the forthcoming “Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge” (Columbia University, 10.26), announced on Facebook that he’d just recorded a commentary track for a forthcoming Kino Bluray of Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (’59).
The Bluray is 4K UHD. This will be the first time that SLIH has been released in this format (3840p x 2160p). Your standard Bluray resolution is 1920p x1080p, of course. The Kino transfer will be the same beautiful version that Criterion released in November 2018.
And yet there was a problem with the Criterion Some Like It Hot, and that was the 1.85 aspect ratio. It needlessly and nihilistically slices off the tops and bottoms of the image, which has been 1.66 since the beginning of time.
Very slight slicings, agreed, but why chop off perfectly good visual information? It’s nothing short of perverse and diseased, but that’s the occasional way of Criterion eccentricity. They can be serious jerks when they feel like it.
Open message to Kino Lorber: “Why not differentiate your SLIH release by offering more than just a 4K UHD version? Why not give Billy Wilder‘s film more height by using a 1.66:1 aspect ratio? That’s the a.r. that everyone went with before Criterion came along with their completely unnecessary 1.85 version. Aspect ratio obsessives like myself would be deeply grateful if you would oblige.”
Before the handsome Criterion Bluray version came along the entire civilized world had agreed that Some Like It Hot is a 1.66 film.
That included Kino Lorber itself, which released a Some Like It Hot Bluray with a 1.66:1 a.r. in May 2011.
An old ’90s Criterion laser disc of SLIH, released in the early ’90s, used either a 1.66 or 1.37 a.r.
Look at any non-Scope United Artists release from the ’50s or ’60s; they were all mastered at 1.66 on laser discs and DVDs.
Look at these DVD Beaver screen capture pairings — the higher 1.66 versions are obviously above, the 1.85 versions below.
