6.2 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright star in this comedy, which also features a fine supporting cast that includes Frank Morgan. Cooper stars as Casanova Brown, a small-town professor who steals his own baby when he learns his estranged wife (Wright), who is planning to remarry, is intent on putting the child up for adoption.
Starring: Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Frank Morgan (I), Anita Louise, Edmund BreonComedy | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.37:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Thomas Mitchell remains one of the most instantly identifiable character actors from the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, having created such memorable characters as Doc Boone in Stagecoach (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor), Gerald O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, and Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life. Some indication of Mitchell’s versatility can be measured by the fact that he was the first actor to get three of the four “EGOT” trophies, an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony, missing out on a Grammy only perhaps because those awards came along toward the tail end of Mitchell’s life. (His beautiful and rather nicely varied speaking voice certainly could have qualified for a Grammy in my estimation had he made a spoken word album.) But maybe just a little hidden in Mitchell’s long list of credits is the fact that he was also a successful playwright, with one of his most notable hits being a 1928 farce he co-wrote called Little Accident, which ran for several months on Broadway and which not so coincidentally also employed Mitchell as one of the performers in the cast. Little Accident was itself based on a novel by Mitchell’s co- writer Floyd Dell entitled An Unmarried Father, a title which may remind some of a rather famous farce coming out of Paramount Pictures in 1944, Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. Little Accident was enough of a hit on the Great White Way that it was quickly optioned for a cinematic adaptation, though kind of oddly the first outing was apparently a French film called A Father Without Knowing It. The American film industry caught up a few years later with Little Accident, a low budget Universal opus starring Hugh Herbert in a farce that retained the play’s title but jettisoned at least some elements of its plot. Paramount, the studio that pushed the (kinda sorta) unmarried parent conceit with the aforementioned Betty Hutton - Eddie Bracken film, had also long been the studio home of Gary Cooper, but Cooper, perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall, had not re-upped his “tour of duty” with Adolph Zukor’s organization in that same year of 1944 that The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek came out, and had instead set out as more of a freelancer, entering into a quasi-producing role with a nascent production entity called International Pictures. International decided to try another “at bat” with the Little Accident source material, with screenwriter Nunnally Johnson tasked with trying to tailor the material specifically toward Cooper’s singular talents. The result is a fitfully amusing farce which casts Cooper as the oddly named title character, who, like the male version of Hutton in the Sturges film, is supposedly an unmarried parent.
Casanova Brown is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of ClassicFlix with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. This is another great looking restoration from ClassicFlix, which is repeatedly proving that "little" niche labels can handle vintage fare with care. I noticed no major instances of any age related wear and tear (though I wonder if the opening production company credit and closing The End card may have been recreated for this release). This is just a tad soft looking at times as can be seen in some of the screenshots accompanying this review, and there are a number of slight variances in clarity and sharpness (aside from expected moments like optical dissolves), but generally speaking detail levels are quite pleasing, and elements like some natty herringbone patterns on some costumes resolve with commendable precision. Contrast is solid, and both blacks and gray scale look great. The one qualm I could see some videophiles having with this release is a relatively fine grain field, which is organic looking but a little hard to spot at times.
Casanova Brown features a nice sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track that isn't going to blow any audiophile's mind but which still delivers some surprisingly robust sounding music while having no problems delivering dialogue. The sonics of the track are just slightly boxy sounding, as befits its age, but there are no actual problems with dropouts or damage.
There are no supplements on the Blu-ray disc.
Most of the big laughs in Casanova Brown come from Frank Morgan's inimitable delivery of his curmudgeonly lines (there's a great opening scene where you just hear the character savagely berating someone, and then the door opens and it turns out to be his very young grandson). The rest of the film is (not to pun too horribly, given its emphasis on a baby) labored. Fans of the cast may get a kick out of this nonetheless, and technical merits are strong for those considering a purchase.
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