DVD Times has announced that Glass Key DVD are releasing 54 films noir starting in March. There are some terrific films among them, including Night Train to Munich and Black Book. I have never heard of Glass Key. Anyone know anything about them?

Nope, but the fact that these are all PD titles doesn't bode well.

At least they named themselves after a pretty good Noir film

Here's a review on the quality of the first batch of releases, by Michael Brooke in Sight and Sound.


Not that surprising, but you have been warned.

Actually, I'd be quite pleased if some of these titles were as good as my 25 (and 30) year-old off-air VHS recordings - most of which are neither grey nor smeary - but I get the message. It sounds like they are what I'd call "Alpha quality" which in my experience is usually well below a good VHS recording of any vintage.

Reviewing Glass Key's Woman on the Run, DVD Beaver agrees with Michael Brooke's view and confirms my own surmise (above) about "Alpha quality":

Well, my 25-year-old VHS recordings were generally taped in long-play mode off an unamplified indoor aerial...

I disagree with the Beaver that Woman on the Run is "totally unwatchable", for the simple reason that I did indeed watch the whole thing, and actually managed to enjoy the film despite the DVD's many, many failings. So it's not quite as bad as World Video's Ashes of Time, which is still my worst-DVD-ever benchmark (and I really really hope it stays that way!) - but it is gobsmackingly abysmal nonetheless.

And, some of us were not around 25 years ago to record these treasures on VHS.

I own the Ashes of Time DVD, Michael, and lord it is awful! But I remember being thrilled to be able to see the film, back when it was released. Yes, I could tell that it was not the best the new medium of DVD had to offer, but the film won out in the end, and the reality is that until this year, I would not have had the opportunity to see the film otherwise.

Alpha does not have a great track record when it comes to quality of transfers, but again... How would I have seen little gems like Negulesco's highly interesting Three Came Back with Claudette Colbert in a Japanese war prison camp, or Lupino's brilliant The Bigamist, or the excellent early Anthony Mann film The Black Book (thankfully, now released in much better shape by VCI), or the terrific Lewis Milestone war film A Walk In the Sun, and several others. The first and last of the ones mentioned in passable transfers, the Lupino and Mann films in something much less than that. Still, those Alpha releases excited me more than most other releases at the time when I picked them up.

Interestingly, my first stop on the internet with respect to film was the Beaver, and it set me back 2-3 years in terms of film viewing experiences, as I struggled with the notion that the discs I was purchasing were in most cases of hopeless quality. Today I hardly ever look at the site, because I know that the interest of Beaver is completely opposite to my own. I am interested in film, not in the quality of digital representation as anything but the most incidental of issues relating to seeing the films. Naturally, it adds another level of joy to viewing a film on DVD, when the presentation is superlatively great. However, I am always simply most excited about the films.

So, I guess I will be picking up a few GlassKey DVDs.

You could always have bought the Mei Ah DVD - still pretty terrible, but at least you got to see more of the picture.


Well, I still have to watch a lot of stuff on timecoded VHS at work, as that's the format that most film archives still tend to favour (hardly surprisingly, given the cost and logistics of converting hundreds of thousands of tapes to digital media!). But the crucial difference is that they're not pretending to be commercial products.

The outrageous thing about Glass Key and Facets (the other distributor you defended in similar terms a while back) isn't so much that they release such abysmal discs in the first place but they charge you through the nose for the privilege. Granted, £10 (the RRP of Glass Key discs) isn't a bank-breaker, especially if you live outside the UK and can exploit the weak pound (Facets' prices are much worse), but considering that you're getting something that looks like a highly-compressed torrent file slapped onto a DVD-R, that's approximately £9.95 of pure profit. For what?

Your choice but they are all in the PD and have been out for years via other, equally as weak, distributors. A cheaper choce would be to download - they are all over the Net. I find supporting these profiteers, who are giving us nothing, is a total waste of funds. I don't know what it's like where you live but go to a local Walmart here are get a dozen similar quality (yes plenty of 'Alpha' Noir DVDs) for the same price as one SRP Glass Key.


Perhaps we have different standards.

Well clearly, because my definition of "totally unwatchable" would be a transfer that is quite literally unwatchable - a bit like an old VHS I tried to play the other day where the tracking was all over the place and the picture jumped around as if stricken by a particularly virulent palsy. Or a Facets transfer where the subtitles are so out of sync that it's impossible to appreciate what people are saying without making a disproportionate amount of mental effort.

The Glass Key transfer of Woman on the Run is certainly appalling - I'm not for one second attempting to defend it per se - but you do at least get to see the film in the correct aspect ratio, you can hear the dialogue, and you can follow the plot. In fact, you can also appreciate that there's a damn good film buried under the murk, and I'd never seen it before.

DVD Times.

The first word of the paragraph assessing the transfer quality is "Yikes".

Revelation Films regrets to inform customers that the Film Noir label Glass Key DVD will be drawn to a close as a result of the quality of the source material available for the titles planned for release.

Revelation has a best of breed policy, and unfortunately with the size of the universe for this genre, the level of investment required to ensure an enjoyable consumer experience has meant that unless higher quality source material can be located, we will be unable to proceed any further.

We are very disappointed that we are unable to bring to market these unreleased Film Noir classics, but after careful consideration we feel this is the most responsible course of action given the expectations of the consumer for high-quality viewing experiences.