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Topic: Sunset Boulevard (UK rerelease)
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-15-2003 02:08 AM
Dunno if this belongs here or is now in the realms of the afterlife, but as the film is currently being distributed on 35mm in British cinemas, I'm going with here.
This print is a massive improvement on any copy of this film I've seen before, both in terms of completeness and visual quality. In particular, the version put out by the BFI about 5-6 years ago on prints blown up from a 16mm interneg was fuzzy, flat and generally unwatchable.
Sunset Boulevard was the last Hollywood studio feature to be shot on nitrate, and someone told me that the camera negatives had decomposed within 20 years. All the releases since have originated from second-generation elements at best. I can't believe that the sharpness, lack of any visible grain, incredible depth of field and deep contrast can have been achieved by traditional optical printing. I don't know for sure, but would almost put money on this having been done digitally, and at very high resolution too. However, given that the Academy frame is magnified that much less than 1:1.85 or 'scope, I guess they might have got away with 2k.
The complete absense of any visible negative dirt or scratching, and of any hiss whatsoever on the soundtrack made the film a bit disconcerting to watch at times, I thought.
As for the film itself, I thought it drew interesting parallels in the combination of the Hollywood immigrant workforce (e.g. De Mille and Erich von Stroheim, not to mention Billy Wilder) and the indiginous managerial and industrial talent (e.g. Jay himself, and the Nancy Olson character) which led to the rise of the studio system and, as this film is implicitly arguing, its post-war decline.
It certainly has a lot more interesting points to make on the issue than Singin' in the Rain, which covers similar subject matter but dumbs it down relentlessly.
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