david hare wrote:What you said, and it's also my favourite Fuller.
Schreck I never mentioned privately but - thinking of Widmark - there's a terrific German BD of Night and the City. The PQ is altogether different and far better than either the Criterion or the BFI DVDs, much more authentic grayscale (no black boosting like the Crit) and the gorgeous fine grain image which is all extremely sympathetic to the fabulous exterior London photography which looks like most of it was done in magic hour, apart from the interiors. You still need to keep the Criterion SD if only for the wonderful 30 minute vid piece on the English and US scores and the slightly different cuts. I wish BFI would let the Brit version out of the damn cage. They hold the only 35mm copy I understand.
And what
you said: South Street has long been not only my favorite Fuller's but among my favorite noirs outside of that critical period of the 1940's. The film completely lacks the low budget lunacy of no-holds-barred-throw-the-viewer-through-a-plate-glass-window titles like The Naked Kiss or Shock Corridor (I am NOT a fan of White Dog, but I positively adore Shock and Kiss and Underworld and Park Row and Baron and Jesse James and...), and yet Fuller's personality is so powerful that it is just as much on display here despite pushing through the fit and finish of having made the film at Fox. His love of the seedy and the obscure, the off-to-the-side characters who lived on the fringes of NYC is just as authentic here despite the sets and glimmering surface. I love the man. When I first saw the film I wanted to live in Skip McCoy's shack.
As for Night and the City--another critical Wid, who never really got ongoing sustained attempts to demonstrate the breadth of his talent. Although he's playing a gangster/hustler and a loser, his character here is far more sympathetic and shows a heart in the unfolding. It's torturous listening to Dassin talk about the fact that he wanted to do Shakespeare with Wid . . . but never got to do it.
Authentic greyscale: this is turning into one of my biggest pet peeves nowadays, right up there with grain zapping. I was watching the restoration demonstration of Dracula on the Uni blu... they show before/after shots of the vintage nitrate lavender print which was struck from the original neg back inna day, and the "after" of the film after digital processing.
The difference is far beyond schnazzing the film up to make it look like it did when it was released: the blacks and the whites in the film now were simply not possible back in the early 1930's pan-chro. The slow lenses, the insensitive film stock . . . the absolute digital blacks and the pure, bleached digital whites are leagues away from what resided on original release prints. The kicker is the restoration manager sitting in front of the camera during his moment to be a star, saying "We have access to tools nowadays that the director did not have back when he made his film but almost certainly would have taken advantage of if he could," that's a paraphrase because I'm at work but very close . . . the gist is "we know the director would have used what we have used to erase filmic phenomena on the visual and audio plane, and enhance the image into unnaturally dark blacks to make the atmosphere Extra Creepy Freund."
Those modified greyscale palettes may be nice for atmosphere on a vintage horror film in general, but screwing with the contrast of a very carefully photographed film, which emerged from a very specific technological era--this is like "restoring" a van Gogh by applying a newly developed oil paint to the stars in Starry Night: "This kind of brightness in paint was not available to Vincent back when he painted the stars, but since we have access to technology he did not, we are going to use these brighter titanium and zinc whites available now, because we know he felt that technology fell short of his goal and would have used these tints if he could have."
Irks me. These "restorers" and "preservationists" are really servicing the juvenile general market who find any tramline or scratch unacceptable and any contrast short of today's standards a complete abomination. They're servicing sales, not the filmic history of the title. They say they're trying to bring the film back to the state of its original release; what they're actually doing is t
rying to make the film look like it was released yesterday, not eighty some odd years ago.
