Deserves a Return to DVD


At the Library of Congress' Packard Campus, where I saw the film late last summer, I was told that the colors of its gorgeous photography had been tweaked, but that further restoration had not been done. That's too bad, as the Library's print needed, and deserves, it. I've not seen MM on DVD, but I'd suspect that the same could be said for that version, now out of print for some years. It's an unusually charming film, both in its time and even more so today, and deserves availability in its best guise.




"Believe not what you only wish to believe, but that which truth demands."

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it also deserves to be re-released to whatever / whomever is in charge of getting it on TV. I haven't seen this movie since the 1970s I think. I'd love to see it again, in spite of some of the characters being miscast.

Any idea why it's still in hiding?

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I have no idea, other than that Warner's has had a long "tradition" of undervaluing and neglecting its films (and of course, it's not alone among studios in that respect). Think of Judy Garland's "A Star is Born", an hour of which was tossed FOREVER when Jack Warner decided it was overlong in the first week of its release, and then there's a lovely film, an A-list production called "The Dark at The Top of the Stairs", that's never seen the light of day in ANY video format. You'd think that any film like the latter could have a risk-free test run on TV, as on TCM, but no.... And then there are many films that do reach TCM, which tries to show them in their purest form, but what it gets is only the pan-and-scan version, which doesn't capture the full image or the sweep of the widescreen one. Very frustrating, when restoration possibilities are so miraculous today, and the hunger for classic oldies is so roused by the fallen quality of so much of today's fare.

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I do have to disagree with you, leader-7, about "some of the characters" being miscast. The only one that springs to mind for me is Gene Kelly, who as Noel Airman, had by 1958 a look a bit too old for that part, but still a charming sensitivity and vulnerability that fit the role, and I think that the ethnic element of the story was remarkably well served by the sometimes offbeat casting.

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