Tuesday, July 12, 2011
The Good, The Bad and the oh so very Ugly
I've just finished watching The Good, the Bad and The Ugly on Blu-ray and I have to say it was pretty disappointing, while MGM chose not to restore the first two of the Dollars films for Blu-ray I'd heard a lot of complaints about The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, apparently they used extensive DNR to remove the film grain, I didn't notice it much, there were a few times when the picture looked a little soft or the actors were wearing heavy make up but not the usual plastic looking people that is associated with that kind of heavy processing.
What really killed the movie for me was the re-dubbed audio, I have the 2003 ( ? ) DVD edition where they restored scenes to the film that had been cut from the original US release and got Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and another actor to dub the late Lee Van Cleef's dialog, on the DVD release you could tell the difference but in HD audio it's painful especially when Eli Wallach is speaking as it's obviously a much older actor even if it's the same one speaking the lines and the changes in voice throughout the film are very distracting.
I've been told the Italian Blu-ray release is unrestored but doesn't have an English soundtrack, I wonder how hard it would be to make a custom Blu-ray using the Italian Blu-ray with the English audio from the original unrestored DVD release, I think I feel a project brewing.
For what it's worth A Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More looked and sounded fine for movies of their age.