7.2 | / 10 |
Users | 4.2 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Anthony John is an actor whose life is strongly influenced by the characters he plays. When he's playing comedy, he's the most enjoyable person in the world, but when he's playing drama, it's terrible to be around him. That's the reason why his wife Brita divorced him; although she still loves him and works with him, she couldn't stand living with him anymore. So when Anthony accepts to play Othello, he devotes himself entirely to the part, but it soon overwhelms him and with each day his mind gets filled more and more with Othello's murderous jealousy.
Starring: Ronald Colman, Edmond O'Brien, Signe Hasso, Shelley Winters, Ray Collins (I)Film-Noir | 100% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Crime | Insignificant |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono (48kHz, 16-bit)
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
There are some actors who so completely merge with their roles that the actor becomes subsumed by the character. Think of Marlon Brando is in heyday, or Meryl Streep in or out of a dialect, to give just two examples. On the other hand, some actors tend to portray themselves more or less in every role, and often serve mostly as types rather than full bodied characters, at least a lot of the time (Cary Grant—aside from rare roles like None But the Lonely Heart—springs instantly to mind). But some actors become so involved in their roles that they blur the lines between reality and artifice. Many of these actors are routinely pilloried in the press for “staying in character” between takes and the like, but A Double Life’s conceit is that its leading player (in every sense of the word), Broadway star Anthony John (Ronald Colman), has so confused playing with being that he can’t tell the difference any more on any meaningful level. A Double Life is a rather interesting film in director George Cukor’s oeuvre. As Martin Scorsese mentions in his brief but illuminating introduction to the film, Cukor was the quintessential “women’s director,” one of the reasons that Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland were so distraught when Cukor was yanked from Gone With the Wind and replaced by “man’s man” Victor Fleming (some say in an attempt to appease Clark Gable). That potentially devastating career setback was hardly a blip on the screen in Cukor’s long and lauded career, but few might have expected him to try his hand at a kind of noir-esque film set in the hoity toity world of Broadway. A Double Life wants to co-exist as both a darkly shaded mystery and a backstage drama illuminating the egos and eccentricities of actors. Due to some very smart writing by stage and screen icons (and couple) Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, against some considerable odds, A Double Life succeeds rather well.
A Double Life is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.35:1. This is another lustrous looking black and white transfer from Olive, one which for the most part offers a crisp and involving image, one with superior contrast, excellent (if sometimes quite thick) grain structure, and deep blacks, well modulated gray scale and bright whites. Cinematographer Milton R. Krasner bathes this film in shadows, with a lot of the film playing out in dim lighting, and the chiaroscuro effect is rendered with excellence and very good shadow detail here. There are a couple of head scratching moments, however, with a suddenly softer image and completely blown out contrast. A good example is captured in the ninth screencap accompanying this review of two women walking down a busy Manhattan street. This whole sequence is noticeably softer and with much poorer contrast than the bulk of the film. There are a couple of other very minor issues with the elements (see the tiny scratch over Edmond O'Brien's head in the screencap of him typing), but overall this is another fantastic release from Olive.
A Double Life features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track which sports decent fidelity but which unfortunately also has some minor distortion in the midrange, something that is especially unfortunate since it affects some of Miklos Rozsa's Oscar winning score, especially string cues that have sudden dynamic changes. Otherwise, though, the track sounds relatively nimble, with most of the dialogue presented cleanly and clearly (occasionally Colman tends to sound a bit jumbled for some reason). Other than the distortion issue, there really isn't any major damage to report.
A Double Life is a bit creaky at times, but it also has one elegantly menacing performance at its core which helps to elevate the film above its kind of B-movie ambience. The Broadway setting is not exactly realistic, and veers between being too glamorous or too silly, but Gordon and Kanin make some interesting points about an actor's life and those who escape reality by disappearing into their roles. This is certainly a kind of odd feature for George Cukor, but he invests the film with some requisite moodiness, if no real terror. This Olive release boasts exceptional image quality and at least adequate audio quality, and the Scorsese introduction is a valued, if awfully minimal, supplement. Recommended.
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