Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: 'They Made Me a Fugitive'

This is topic 'They Made Me a Fugitive' - Kino BD in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 12-02-2012, 06:56 AM:

This has been one of my favourite films since I saw an almost pristine nitrate print of it at the NFT in London around 15 years ago. Until Kino published a DVD in around 2009, the only copy I had was a deteriorating offair VHS with adverts in it. The DVD looked great, and although I am normally very reluctant to buy a BD of something I've previously bought a DVD of, I made an exception for this one when it came out earlier this year.

I just got round to looking at it last week, and it was a real disappointment. It was a single-layer BD with a relatively low bitrate throughout (15-20 throughout most of the running time), detail was missing from the midtones that really should be there in a BD, and there were even moire effects visible in one scene in which Sally Gray wears a top with a checkered pattern. It looked to me as if this had been upscaled from a digibeta (possibly the same one used to make the earlier DVD) rather than a whole new scan of the film. Add to that the absence of any extras, and the package as a whole was a disappointing one.

If you don't already have the DVD I'd still say get the BD, as it's is certainly better than none at all; but if you've already bought the DVD there really isn't much point. Personally I'm going to be cautious before buying other BDs from the same publisher from now on, and will probably only do so if they've had positive reviews from writers who know what they're talking about when it comes to evaluating the technical quality.

I do appreciate that small arthouse publishers do not have the same money to spend as the big studios do on their archive titles, but even so this could have been so much better. For one thing, so much research and writing has been done on 1940s British film that they could at least have found someone to do a commentary.