7.2 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Bruce Campbell is a young Englishman who believes himself incurably ill. He travels to Canada to take up his grandfather's inheritance, Campbell's Kingdom, a valley high in the Rockies. Here he intends to spend the last few months of his life. When he arrives in Come Lucky, an old ghost town which has lost the prosperity of its gold rush days, he is greeted with hostility by the men in the "Golden Calf” saloon because, as Owen Morgan, a contractor for Henry Fergus, tells him, his grandfather's death ended a deadlock in Come Lucky. King Campbell the old man, believed there was oil in the valley. Therefore, he prevented Morgan from completing a dam and flooding the valley as part of a new hydro-electric scheme which would bring back prosperity.
Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Barbara Murray, James Robertson Justice, Michael Craig (I)Western | 100% |
Drama | 7% |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Video codec: VC-1
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.69:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: Dolby Digital Mono
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
My how times have changed. It’s simply one measure of how differently we think about things nowadays that Campbell’s Kingdom posits the oil driller as the good guy and the hydroelectric dam builder as the bad guy. Of course both might be the bad guys in today’s green energy world, but chances are the oil driller is going to come off looking worse, one way or the other. That’s only one of several odd elements of Campbell’s Kingdom, a film that tries to be something of a British Western, with rugged Canadian Rockies settings taking the place of a Fordian Southwest United States. Based on a well regarded novel by Hammond Innes, Campbell’s Kingdom tells the story of Bruce Campbell (Dirk Bogarde), a supposedly Scottish man who thinks he’s mortally ill and comes to survey land left to him by his grandfather. The rather dilapidated cabin and valley are ironically called Campbell’s Kingdom, a grandiose title made even more absurd by the fact that Campbell’s grandfather had long insisted the land sat atop valuable oil fields, despite surveying reports to the contrary. That potential goldmine (black gold, Texas tea) is about to be a moot subject, though, for local contractor Owen Morgan (Stanley Baker) is determined to finish a local dam project which will flood the Kingdom and make any oil deposits unreachable. That drama plays out against a rather soap operatic backstory of Campbell’s grandfather’s business dealings which left several of the local townspeople bereft of funds, something Bruce is determined to set right. And of course there’s the requisite love interest for Bruce courtesy of local hotel worker Jean Lucas (Barbara Murray), a woman who initially probably just feels sorry for Bruce, due to his illness and his soon to be soggy inheritance, but who ultimately falls in love with him and aids him in his mad (mad, I tell you!) attempt to halt the dam project and find oil on his property. Campbell’s Kingdom is one of those films that probably played much better to its late 1950’s British audience than it does today. It’s certainly scenic and colorful, but it’s dramatically turgid to the point where several lines are potentially laugh out loud funny for the more jaded, modern day cynics who will be viewing this new Blu-ray release.
There's both good news and bad news in terms of Campbell's Kingdom's VC-1 encoded 1080p transfer in 1.69:1. The good news is the source elements are in really good shape and the sometimes problematic Eastmancolor looks surprisingly spry, with little to none of the age related devolution that sometimes hobbles this process. Reds are especially impressive in this film and they make it to high definition with sometimes eye popping saturation, without any of the skew towards brown that is Eastmancolor's tendency (as well as Warner Color, strangely). Clarity is good to very good, and the film's location photography looks excellent. What will probably turn off some videophiles is, yes, you guessed it, some fairly aggressive digital noise reduction. It's certainly nowhere near as aggressive as VCI's first foray into Blu-ray territory, Romeo and Juliet, but it's much more apparent than in the other recent (and newer vintage) Bogarde-Rank film released by VCI, Agent 8 ¾. The film actually looks a good deal better than some of these screencaps would suggest, with at least acceptable fine detail, but DNR-phobes are warned that they will probably not like the shiny smooth appearance of Campbell's Kingdom.
VCI hasn't started offering lossless audio with their Blu-ray releases, and so Campbell's Kingdom is presented with both its original mono track delivered via a Dolby Digital 2.0 mix and a repurposed Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix. Both of these tracks sound good, with some excellent low end (especially well rendered in the final climactic sequence which features several big explosions and the collapse of the dam). Dialogue is crisp and easy to hear and the overall mix is quite good. The surround mix is well handled, with some good discrete sound effects placed well around the soundfield, though generally this mix simply tends to spread the entire mix around the soundfield, creating a kind of generalized surround ambience that isn't especially mindful of discrete channelization.
Theatrical Trailer (HD; 2:34)
Campbell's Kingdom is a sort of British equivalent to a United States B-movie oater, a middling film with decent production values, generally good cast, and patently ridiculous storyline. The film evidently is very well remembered by a certain generation of British filmgoer, many of whom probably saw the film when fairly young and were most impressed by the film's nice use of location photography and its then still unusual use of color. For those fans, this Blu-ray, despite some DNR issues and the lack of lossless audio, will probably rekindle fond memories which will probably help to keep those rose colored glasses firmly intact. For the rest of you, this is probably best sampled as a rental first.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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