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By
NICK ZEGARAC
"High Society" is the musical remake of "The Philadelphia Story." In this version we get Grace Kelly playing the perfectly spoiled Tracy Lord. Her previous marriage to C.K. Dexterhaven (Bing Crosby) being a thing of her past, Tracy embarks on engagement number two to George (John Lund) and an affair with tabloid journalist, Mike Connor (Frank Sinatra). The score by Cole Porter is elegant and hit filled with tunes like "Now You Has Jazz," "Did you Evah?" and the immortal, "True Love."
Unfortunately, this Warner Brothers DVD isn't looking quite so spiffy, via a transfer riddled with excessive edge enhancement, aliasing and fine detail shimmering. Now, no one has more respect for the efforts put forth on this DVD than I. Previously issued VHS and laserdisc versions have yielded results that were "bad" to down right "awful." So, what are the pluses of this DVD? For starters, its color has been well balanced. Previous versions have suffered from an incredible amount of color smearing and jaundice flesh tones that, on this DVD, have been, if not wholly corrected, at least greatly tempered. Flesh tones remain somewhat pasty or too orange in spots. Also, fidelity of background detail is superb. The minuses -- plenty of them -- unfortunately: After some pristine opening titles, we get excessively grainy and digitally harsh exterior shots of New Port. Every exterior scene in the film is marred by these problems as well as a hint of tiling to be found in background details and an excessive amount of pixelization in all exterior shots. The color is also terribly off. Foliage on trees appears either brown or gray but never lush green. Check out the chapter where Tracy comes from the garden to welcome George home. Trees and shrubs are in a constant state of movement and not from any natural breeze that might have been blowing during the film shoot!
I have a widescreen television and in 99% of anamorphically enhanced DVD's (this being the only exception) my viewing mode is set to "Theater One" for an appropriate picture aspect ratio. However, when I put this DVD in, the image is compressed so that the cast appears unusually narrow and thin. This problem, for those with similar television displays, can be solved by viewing the DVD with your television set to its "Full" mode (usually reserved for watching full frame movies in a 1:85:1 aspect ratio, without having bars on either side of your screen -- go figure!)
The audio has been remixed to 5.1 and during the musical portions of the film is nicely presented. However, within the context of the film's dialogue, musical portions sound unnaturally vibrant, leaving no doubt in the listener's mind that dubbing was utilized long after principle photography on "High Society" had been completed.
In terms of extras we get an all too short featurette on the making of the film, hosted by Celeste Holm (who really should look after that throat!) some featurettes that are not anamorphically enhanced and the original theatrical trailer.
Over all, this is a very disappointing and unsatisfactory visual experience and definitely not worthy of Warner Brothers previous sterling commitment to DVD. One can only hope that this effort is a blip rather than a prelude of what we can expect from the studio in the months to come. |
