FYI -- airing on TCM this month June 29th 2015
Set your DVR--June 29th The Emigrants is scheduled to air on TCM.
Too many great films to see. Too short a life to see them all. -Me
It was on really late last night. I tried to stay awake for it all, but I didn't make it to 3:00 a.m. I'm hoping they'll show it again.
shareYou didn't miss much-- the print was in good shape, but definitely not restored. But worst of all, they showed the English dubbed version.
People believe what they want to believe. One term for this is Faith. Another is Delusion.
I'm a Comcast/Xfinity subscriber, and last night I found I could rent the version in Swedish with English subtitles for $2.99. I fast-forwarded through quite a bit and then watched the rest. What a difference!
The principal actors and their characterizations came through so much better (although there were gaps in the subtitles in quite a few scenes involving other characters).
It was not in a wide screen format, so I'm not sure what I may have missed there. But I really enjoyed watching this last night. :o)
My mother's ancestors came from Norway at about the same time. She told us something about the difficult trip that we can't quite find records to support, so I'd wondered if she had read or heard about some other people's voyage and was confused about the origin.
Anyway, the story that she told us is that one of the children of our family died on the ship, but another that was still being breast fed survived because of that.
Somewhat like this story ....
I'm glad to hear that the Swedish language version is at least out there for watching anyway, but sad to hear it's not in widescreen.
Warner Brothers owns this film, and they don't seem to put any real effort any more into releasing the best possible quality copies of older, more obscure films in their libraries (even though this film isn't obscure to anyone who knows anything about film history).
The Emigrants will probably get thrown onto Warners "Archive Collection" series of dvd-rs, which do no justice to films that really need some remastering, like this one. It's too bad Criterion doesn't try and get the license rights to release this...they'd give it a proper treatment.
People believe what they want to believe. One term for this is Faith. Another is Delusion.
I'm writing to TCM to let them know that I didn't watch the film simply because it was the dubbed version. If enough people let them know how they feel, perhaps they'll find the original and add it to their vault. And air it ... soon.
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