Prince Valiant

Prince Valiant

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DVD Reviews of Prince Valiant

DVD Review: Grand old-fashioned Cinemascope entertainment
Summary: 3 Stars

Fox has done a decent job of restoration on this 1954 Technicolor film. While the look is dated and the film stock is more grainy than we're used to today, the majority of it looks remarkably good. I suspect much of it was newly struck from the black and white color separation masters, but the frequent lap desolves have the second generation look of excessive grain and poorer color fidelity. There's one bad anomaly in the transfer at 24min.15sec., a 15 second shot that looks to be third generation. It's soft, grainy and blocked-up. Except for a couple rear projection shots elsewhere in the movie, nothing else in the transfer looks this bad. Otherwise this is a fine looking 16X9 anamorphic DVD of a vintage Cinemascope film.

Originally this movie was presented in some theatres in 1954 in 4-track magnetic stereo. Here, what survives of the stereo tracks is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 (not 5.1 as stated in another review here). I'd have preferred if Fox had gone to the efforts of doing a proper 4.0 transfer, but the stereo still sounds good, with the directional dialogue of the era intact, though it can be a bit distracting when left and right speakers are too far from the screen (in theatres the speakers would of course be behind the screen). I found I had to raise the dB level of my rear surrounds to +10 in order to bring out the ambient sound of the film, mostly reserved to the music, but at 1:27min.21sec., when pig fat is used to light fires during the siege of the castle, the mono surround did come alive with fire noise and that was fun.

I'm only giving this DVD three stars because Fox didn't have enough faith (and they may be right) in this library title's marketability to include a commentary track by star Wagner, or a least some feature on the film's production history, and because the sound wasn't remixed for 4.0, but if you're a fan of such films I highly recommend this DVD.

Description of Prince Valiant