Holy Year (L'Année Sainte)

Rating:
Summary: Another botched job from Vanguard?
Review: There is nothing wrong with the movie: the 1970s were not easy on the eyes, but for who likes kitsch, good dialogue, a nicely tight plot , the amazing Jean Gabin and the ever charming Danielle Darrieux, L'Annee Sainte holds its own beautifully in the French soft gangster genre. BUT but but: where on earth did the producers of this DVD get their print? The thing looks picked up straight out of a badly pirated TV screen, complete with fuzz and shaky images, and as for the the "English subtitles" (that cannot be turned off, by the way), they are hideously laughable (when they are present at all: sometime, entire bits of dialogue are left untranslated, and sometime the translation comes in... ohmigod: Spanish!). Hello: this is a DVD, not your dad's old VCR copy frenzy!