MovieChat Forums > The Guns of Navarone (1961) Discussion > Corrected sound effects

Corrected sound effects

posted 10 years ago by hobnob53
15 replies | jump to latest

I watched The Guns of Navarone again yesterday (Sept. 13, 2014) when it was shown on TCM and noticed that a glaring error in the sound effects on the prints used over the past 20 years has suddenly been removed. Bear with me:

Right after Peck and Niven drive into the fortress before the climax, there's a shot of the two German sentries walking out of the gun cave. This cuts to a scene inside the bunker where the gun crew is getting dressed. The men hear something, fall silent and look at one another before one whispers something to the effect of "What's that outside here?" (I don't speak enough German to recognize his precise words but as with all the German dialog in this movie the gist is clear.) A gunner looks outside the window, sees the sentries, and as another soldier asks "What gives?" (that one's obvious), the guy at the window replies "No one but a --" something I can't quite get, but which obviously refers to the sentries he's just seen.

The important thing to note is that all the men are clearly reacting to the sound of the sentries walking past. This is why they initially whisper, not wanting to alert whoever may be outside, why they don't move and why their reactions are very quiet. Once they learn it's the sentries, they just proceed to calmly get dressed, not hurried or anxious or alarmed about anything...definitely not men under imminent attack.

However, in the version of this film that had been the only one shown since the early 1990s, just before the first soldier asks what it is he's hearing, there's the sound of several massive explosions. Now, neither the dialog, the men's manner of speaking, their reactions to what they hear or their subsequent actions indicate that they're hearing any explosions. Plainly, on all the evidence, they are reacting to the sentries' footsteps. If the men had heard massive explosions they would have acted loudly, in some alarm and confusion, moved about and been more anxious to get to their battle stations.

This is also the only way this scene makes sense because of the confluence of Peck and Niven driving up and the sentries' walking out of the cave past the bunker. The audience is momentarily led to believe that the gunners may have heard Mallory and Miller. Hence their quiet reaction, not wanting to alert whoever's outside.

I don't know who decided to loop in the sounds of guns and explosions in this scene, or when. I've seen this movie many times since I originally saw it in theaters as a kid and those sounds were never there. I first heard them when U.S broadcasts switched to using the British print of the film. (You can tell the difference because at the beginning of the U.S. print, the producers thank "the British Admiralty and War Office" while in the UK version it reads simply "the Admiralty and War Office".) At first I assumed the sounds of these explosions were looped into British prints back in 1961, but in listening to them over time I began thinking they were put in in the 90s, probably by some halfwit who didn't understand what the men were reacting to and decided to "fix" the scene. That they've now suddenly disappeared -- and this is still the British print -- presumably indicates that someone at last realized these were not part of the original soundtrack and removed them.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad this flaw has been rectified, as it was not only added in long after the movie was filmed but screwed up the plot point being made.

And just to be clear, I am not referring to the sounds of the distant machine gun fire and occasional explosions heard shortly afterward in that scene, when one of the sentries is at the top of the wall looking out. They're in the original film and make sense. The huge, banging explosions supposedly heard by the men in the bunker were not there to begin with.

[–] Trax-3 8 years ago

Different sound may be part of different mixes. Maybe the mono mix didn't have the sounds and 4-track mix did.

The German solder says: "Keine Ahnung, es war eine Grosse".

"No idea [what it was], it was a big one.

[–] hobnob53 8 years ago

I've thought about whether these explosions are the result of a remix, or the four-track audio. Possibly, but nothing was heard before, even dimly, and the men's reactions don't jibe with the noise they're supposedly hearing (whispering, no startled looks, etc.). Surely they'd speak aloud and more excitedly, and be obviously startled by a sudden, massive explosion, none of which they do.

[–] scottylans 8 years ago

Very good observation, I noticed that myself and thought it was strange.
In the trivia for the film, there's some entries about reel damage and difficulty recovering proper prints.

[–] hobnob53 8 years ago

Thank you, scottylans. I've since seen the film run on TCM a couple of times and indeed the soundtrack has been restored to what I'm sure is its correct, original form (i.e., no latter-day looped-in and inappropriate explosions, etc.).

The film did suffer some deterioration in the first 30 yeas after its release before being restored, but it seems to me those "new" sounds were either added by some clod technician in the 90s, or may have been put in at some point in its initial release...though if this were so, why it would be done to some prints and not others is mysterious, quite apart from the fundamental wrongness of those sounds.

[–] Doghouse-6 8 years ago

From the "If You Really Wanna Know" files: it isn't actually all that mysterious.

By the time a film had been around for a number of years, the amounts of separate picture and sound preprint elements that accumulated could be staggering, and it was not at all uncommon when I was in the business for either the copyright holders or distributors in assorted media/markets to have lost track of exactly what the inventory consisted. After a title had been through original and second-run release and multiple domestic/foreign broadcast/cable/video releases, various generations of those elements could be stashed at film labs, sound houses and vaults all over town, the country and the world.

If GON's sound efx had indeed been remixed or rerecorded with latter-day embellishments - for its first home video release in stereo after a previous mono one, for example - that "stem" (and likely multiple copies thereof) would simply have become part of that accumulation. When you consider video distribution alone (network/cable, original mono videocassette, stereo videocassette/LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray/HD), a film like GON could have been newly-mastered well over a half-dozen times.

So at some point, multiple masters could have been made from the original sound elements, a later remix or rerecord or a "restoration" of the original, and even a single outlet like TCM may have ordered multiple masters over a period of time, and it could merely have been a matter of them having been made from different sources, depending on what assistant pulled which mag track from whatever shelf for the task.

Poe! You are...avenged!

[–] hobnob53 8 years ago

D'h, now it sounds even more mysterious! Understandable -- but still mysterious.

No, I know all this, but my more basic point is that I know the effects of the explosions, etc., were added in at some point, many years after the film's original release; they were never part of the original soundtrack (it isn't simply a matter of "raising" or remixing a sound that had previously been less audible). This was an arbitrary and indefensible addition, a decision by some clueless technician intent on changing the original film. The appended sound effects make no sense in their overall context. My issue is why technicians do things like this. Just leave the goddamned films alone.

I'm just happy that, for the present anyway, the current TCM print doesn't have this ridiculous alteration.

[–] Doghouse-6 8 years ago

My issue is why technicians do things like this. Just leave the goddamned films alone.

I'm afraid ya got me there. Maybe for the same reason people carved graffiti into the walls of ancient caves or tombs: to leave their mark on something that preceded them.

I recall some controversy about 20 years back when Vertigo underwent "restoration," and newly recorded sound effects - gunshots in the opening rooftop pursuit, for instance - were substituted for those previously existing. Robert Harris explained at the time that the original efx stems had been junked years before, and that what was extant had degraded to unusability for the project.

Which brings me to a question: I know you're an opponent of colorization (I have no personal objection to those who wish to view films that way as long as good copies in the original form remain available), but out of curiosity, where do you stand on the more or less recent trend of remastering in stereo the soundtracks of films originally released in mono? Latter day DVDs and Blu-rays of films such as North By Northwest and Chinatown, for example, have stereo music tracks (the scores may very possibly have been recorded that way, but the films themselves were released only in mono); Bullitt has not only a stereo music track but "swinging" sound efx as well.

I remain undecided; your thoughts (as Chris Matthews likes to say)?

Poe! You are...avenged!

[–] hobnob53 8 years ago

Well, you see, anything that alters the look or sound of a film from what it was is something I find unacceptable.

Of necessity, in most cases this involves not merely the intervention of an "unelected" technician free to do his worst, but to substitute his judgment for the people who made the film. Colorization is the most obvious example: rarely does anyone know the actual colors of the things in a scene, so the colorizers just make arbitrary decisions about what to color things. (This is separate from the fact that colorization cannot remotely duplicate nature, even when they know what an object's color was, or that the technical aspects of the process require further tampering with the original image.)

In the late 70s some techie was working on making a new print of Gigi and decided that the film quality of the sequence where Louis Jourdan is singing the title song was not in good shape, so rather than improving it he substituted, on his own bat, still photos of Leslie Caron from elsewhere in the picture. This print ran for years until the film was rescued.

The same thing happened decades ago, when pan & scan prints were made for TV. It was of course a p&s technician who made the decision what to show and what not to show.

I've long noticed that gunshot sound issue in Vertigo, and now thanks to you I know what happened. The shots used to be clear and sharp. Now they're muffled and unreal -- like a police lab technician firing a gun into a tank of water for a ballistics test. I've already noted the several alterations made to Shane -- the initial restoration so changed the soundtrack at the end that Brandon de Wilde's final cry, "Good-bye, Shane" was entirely eviscerated beneath the music track, which had been raised throughout that finale so loud that even the rest of Brandon's calls were nearly inaudible. This has since been partially rectified by a subsequent remastering.

So to answer your question, yes, I have mixed views about, shall we say, over-manipulation of the soundtrack -- just as I dislike tampering with the image. There are two negative issues: one is simply remixing, remastering, restoring sounds and images in such a way that previously unseen or unheard flaws become evident (the strings holding up the Martian machines in The War of the Worlds, for example); the other, more egregious problem is a technician taking the film and remaking it outright: adding or subtracting sounds or images, or altering them into something they were not...not as a side-consequence of genuine restoration work, but as a deliberate change made up by the techie.

I can deal with a sharper picture or a soundtrack remastered in stereo so long as they don't fundamentally alter the look or sound of the original. When it becomes something else, of the kind of things I cited above, that is not acceptable. It can be a fine line, though, can't it?

Just recently someone asked me on the Friendly Persuasion board how, as a film purist, I could countenance changing film credits to put in the names of blacklisted writers, which as you know has been being done since the 90s. I said he had a point -- that the originals were not only, well, original, but that they reflected the realities of the blacklisting era. While I do tend to make an exception on this one aspect I also have been troubled by the very point this poster made, because I do object to changing anything about a film -- even its flaws. In this case my preferred, Solomonic, solution would be to either show the film as it was but add a new, separate coda to it with the actual credits; or change the credits but add a coda showing the original credit. I actually have copies of some films with the "wrong" credits along with the changed ones, just to show that once there was another story.

I don't know if all these ramblings have been of any help on or even address your question, but we seem to have similar dilemmas. And frustrations about having to accept changes we had no say in!

Now, if you were really emulating Chris Matthews, you'd say, "Your thoughts?" and just as I was about to reply, interrupt to say "'Cause I'll tell ya how I see it...." Somebody really needs to inform Chris that one doesn't hear with one's mouth.

[–] Doghouse-6 8 years ago

I'll begin at the end: your final paragraph gave me an honest to goodness belly laugh. Touché! As exasperating as ol' Chris can be, I'll give him this: he'll hammer away at an interview subject until he gets some kind of an answer, long past the point where others will have let the double-talking-points fly by and simply move on for the next non-answer.

And still moving backwards, yes, your comments did indeed address the question, as well as provide context and amplification (honestly, no pun intended). In the final analysis where multi-channel conversion is concerned, we're at least hearing no more and no less than what was originally recorded: Goldsmith's Chinatown score is still just as it was; it's simply that the strings are now heard in the left channel and the piano in the right, instead of emanating from the center along with the trumpet and everything else.

And that's true about "dilemmas." On a somewhat tangential matter, we both participated in the recent CFB thread about aspect ratios. A couple or so years back, I treated myself to a new The Caine Mutiny disc, which was available in both 1:33 and 1:78 versions. I chose the latter and subsequently realized I'd made a mistake. There's a moment during Queeg's "breakdown" testimony - "I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt and with...geometric logic that a duplicate key did exist" - when Bogart gestures with his hands, barely visible above the bottom of the frame, that really sells the line and conveys Queeg's halting frustration at convincing the board.

The framing of Bogart's closeup is so tight that those gestures are cropped out of the 1:78 disc. A tiny thing, but something I now miss whenever I watch it.

Poe! You are...avenged!

[–] hobnob53 8 years ago

Well, to continue the pattern of being bored backwards ceaselessly into the past, which is the story of my life, yes, unfortunately many DVDs that say "enhanced for 16x9 widescreen" crop out elements of the original picture at top and bottom. I've long noticed this. (I think the first time was watching the DVD of, of all things, George Pal's Conquest of Space!) This happens primarily among films made in 1953-55 and thereabouts, when transition to "proper" widescreen (e.g., CinemaScope and the rest) was taking place. Some films were released, not in 1.37 but in some modified w/s AR, such as 1.78. Caine is one, but I've seen this in other films, such as On the Waterfront, and even a film made as late as 1959, Anatomy of a Murder. (Criterion solved the debate in its release of OTW by including three prints of the movie in different AR's.) Although such things take place literally at the margins, they are still noticeable in situations such as you describe. Personally I favor offering viewers a choice between presentations in such cases.

Of course, when you're dealing with true w/s AR's such as 2.55 or 2.35 or even 1.85, cropping becomes pretty much a non-issue. Is all this another example of geometric logic?

And taking this to the bottom, yes, Chris does hammer at people who don't answer him directly, but the problems are, first, that he usually doesn't even allow them to get anything out of their mouths before he starts interrupting them -- give them a moment before you assume they're evading -- and two, that even when asking other panelists (not pols) their "thoughts" (a term with which it often seems Chris is unfamiliar) he immediately interrupts just as they're starting to reply, usually simply to restate his same question in another way, as if they're too stupid to understand what he was asking in the first place.

Your thoughts? I mean, what I'm asking is what you think, because when I worked for Tip O'Neill he was always asking people what they thought, and even he and the Gipper used to get together for a drink and to exchange thoughts, and not in some Orwellian sense where they had, you know, what'd he call it, the Thought Police, a-HA!, oh my God, great book by the way, great movie, well not so much the first one, the second was okay but I wasn't sure about having the Eurythmics do the music, I don't know, did you see that, I'm not sure the music did justice to the dark -- the DARK, the great darkness!, HA!, y'know, I like Edmond O'Brien, he was one of the best, the BEST, back in all those terrific film noo-wahhs, HA!, that they did in the old Hollywood, that's when this country really stood for something, when the whole world looked up to America, and everybody had the same job in the same factory and his son got one in the same factory, or aww-fice or business or whatever, some of those, whaddoo they call 'em, sandhogs!, you know, those guys building those enormous water tunnels up in New York and wherever, generations of 'em, these were the people who built this country while their wives stayed at home making lunch and, I don't know, doing laundry, doing the wash -- I mean the dishes, remember, this is the country we grew up in, and now they're flipping burgers at Taco Bell or someplace, it's really shameful -- shameful! -- you know, it's really just, just a slur on the honor of our nation that we don't solve this, we talk and talk, but no one ever, you know, just shuts up and gets down to work, and by the way, it's pronounced Chee-ney and he lives two states away from Nev-EHH-da, not "Nev-AH-da", two or three states, I can't remember, I was never good at geography, a geography whiz! if you will, trust me, this is what I do for a living, thanks, you're a great panel, the brilliant -- brilliant! -- Halle Barry, I always say Halle Berry, but you know who I mean, HA!, we'll be right back after this, and this is Hardball, the place -- the place -- the place! -- for politics, we'll be right back.

[–] Doghouse-6 8 years ago

That's sure some spot-on Matthews channeling. If he ever loses his ability to extemporize, there could be work for you furnishing text for his Teleprompter (unless you're secretly doing it already).

Uh, what was the question?

Poe! You are...avenged!

[–] hobnob53 8 years ago

I think Chris goes through teleprompters like the rest of us go through Kleenex.

You know, his wife, who he's had on and is a far better interviewer than he, had announced last year that she was running for a vacant Congressional seat in Maryland. But I never heard what happened to her campaign. I suspect she may have dropped out, but the primary was last week and I'm certain that if she was still running she lost the Democratic race. I'll have to check it out. Obviously, married to Chris, she felt the need to get out of the house and into the House. Some improvement!

ELECTION BULLETIN!

I checked her Wiki bio and Politico. Kathleen did indeed run and lose her primary in MD's 8th CD. The results (top three only; the rest were marginal):

Democratic

100% Reporting

J. Raskin -- 33.7% (38,902)
D. Trone -- 27.3% (31,529)
K. Matthews -- 23.8% (27,401)

She had the endorsement of The Washington Post, which called Raskin one of the farthest-left members of the Maryland legislature, and said not only was she extremely talented but could actually pass legislation on the issues where she and Raskin share the same basic views. I don't know who this third person was who placed second, but obviously Katleen faded despite her advantages.

[–] Doghouse-6 8 years ago

Obviously, married to Chris, she felt the need to get out of the house and into the House. Some improvement!

You said it. If she was hoping to escape garrulous companionship, she could have chosen better. Moot now, though, huh?

I don't know who this third person was who placed second...

D. Trone: ain't dat wut dey did ta Mary Queen a'Scots?

Poe! You are...avenged!

[–] hobnob53 8 years ago

I taut dat wuz whut dey sat her on foist.

Geez, talk about sound effects needing correction.

[–] Trax-3 8 years ago

. Some films were released, not in 1.37 but in some modified w/s AR, such as 1.78. Caine is one, but I've seen this in other films, such as On the Waterfront, and even a film made as late as 1959, Anatomy of a Murder.

There is no way that American studio product would have been intended for 1.37 in 1959.

Criterion solved the debate in its release of OTW by including three prints of the movie in different AR's.)

Which is pointless because only one aspect ratio can be the correct one.

And as for the sound effects - the explosions must have been there in one of the original mixes for the simple reason that the German soldier reacts to them in dialogue as I pointed out in the translation above.