Rating: 
Summary: Not Perfect, But Excellent DVD
Review: You will read dozens of reviews of the movie, I'm sure, so I'll leave my review of the movie to two words: "LOVED IT."DVD quality is really quite good; of course, leaps and bounds beyond ANYTHING available to the home market EVER before. Nice, clean packaging with a thin-looking but richly written booklet included inside. The disc has the photo from the front imprinted, with almost a purple tint... for nighttime I suppose. As I understand, this restoration was done a number of years ago, and was not digital... I believe it, although I will say I believe the restorers squeezed every square inch of detail out of their source material possible in the analog domain. First, the flaws: there are still occasional nicks and scratches, although not many more than I see in my DVD of "It's A Wonderful Life." The sound has some low-level hiss, and there is occasional pop and crackle, only occasionally (once? Twice?) of any significant volume. About 18 minutes in there appears to be some minor damage, possibly the degrading of the nitrate print they were working from? Additionally, there are about three places in the film where a single frame appears to be warped, creating a "blip" in the flow of the motion on the screen. Also odd was my first playing: when it came to the end of the 9th chapter, instead of going on to the 10th it jumped back to the beginning of the 9th! This might have been my player, as I was unable to reproduce this either by scanning back or by playing through the movie from the beginning. One other oddity is that in multiple places the background seems to "pulse," usually getting slightly darker, and it appears to be two "pulses" per second. Perhaps the processor was averaging contrasts, or perhaps it was the DVD compression, slowly filling in the right computations... I am not sure, I have never seen it before, and it seemed to not at ALL affect the main action / elements on the screen. I also was not aware of it when the camera was in motion, only when we were stationary observing somebody or something. A minor annoyance was the darkness of the train before we go "inside" to see Holmes & Watson... I'm guessing this was stock footage, a condition of the original print and not something from a historical standpoint that you would WANT to correct.. But the train looks like it's going at night yet the window in Holmes & Watson's car shows a midday countryside passing by. Just odd. Now, the plusses: this print is beautiful! The detail makes it look like a high-quality print from the 50s or 60s, from Holmes' clothes to the lace on the headrest of the train seats. This is not an easy film to reproduce, with filming having started at the end of '38. The blackest blacks to the whitest whites are there, almost always perfectly balanced. Some shots with the right combination of light and shadow truly are breathtaking. So much fog, combined with pipe smoke and low lighting... an ultimate stress test for DVD compression to reproduce, yet it looks very good here. I cannot imagine you have EVER seen this film look this good, seriously. The soundtrack, despite its minor low-level noise, is amazing for the time, with the noise present being so low, apparently without any artificial-sounding noise gates or expanders. Crank up the volume in quiet scenes and you will hear the papers being rustled, or the crickets in the distance, of the rustling of clothes. 30s soundtracks often sound HORRIBLE on music, and while the opening 20th Century Fox fanfare sounds like a copy of a copy, the music in the body of the movie itself appears to be clean and undistorted. I noticed it most on the closing credits, which genuinely surprised me with its lack of harshness or square waves. The ending music is downright enjoyable to listen to! The dialog is both crisp, clear, and with respectable lower tones. You are not going to get earth shattering bass here, but if you are expecting typical thin 30s audio, you are in for a pleasant surprise. Every word is perfectly audible and in balance... I did not feel like I had to turn the volume up and down, nor did it sound "squashed." No "pull-up" of the noise floor, either, indicating no automatic gain controls! VERY nice. For you audio nuts, I didn't put a spectrum analyzer on it, but to my ears, I was hearing undistorted highs over 5KHz, likely over 6K, maybe over 7, and it MIGHT be making it to 8K. I think it's gone by 10K, but STILL... I was amazed to hear the high frequency harmonics on paper rustling, metallic objects rattling together... and crisp "ch"s and "Th"s and the like! One more comment, on the audio commentary: outstanding. Really, really good and absolutely worth the time to listen to and watch. A good balance of history, biography, and literary info. Hats off to Mr. Davies! You did a great job. IN CLOSING: if you have ever wanted to own this movie, even if you already own another copy of it, BUY THIS ONE (from MPI Home Video). I cannot imagine you being disappointed. For me, this is my first purchase... if the first movie from 1939 looks and sounds this good without the advantages of digital restoration... what do the others look like! Wow, I can't wait to order them!!! :)
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