King Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.0

King Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 20, 2015

Should award nominations be quota-fied (for want of a better word), a la Affirmative Action? That’s been a real debate over the past few days, after the Academy Award nominations displayed what some saw as a shocking lack of diversity among the nominees. Nowhere was umbrage more pointed than in the omission of Ava DuVernay from the ranks of the nominees for Best Director for Selma, despite the fact that movie itself received a Best Film nomination. There have certainly been odd disconnects between the Best Film and Best Director slate of nominees for untold years, but DuVernay’s omission seems to have really struck a chord, since she would have been the first African American woman nominated in this category. That very umbrage has in turn struck some as patently odd in an awards ceremony that after all depends on votes, not specific “requirements” like gender or race in order to become a nominee. Perhaps an unwitting argument against any need to somehow weight votes to include minority nominees is a made for television film with a few obvious links to Selma, the 1978 miniseries which aired on NBC and which went on to rake in a pile of Emmy nominations that year. King was only one of a number of high profile miniseries that appeared in the still redolent wake of Roots, and in fact it ended up losing all of its major nominations to one of the best remembered miniseries of that era, Holocaust, an effort for which Michael Moriarty and Meryl Streep ended up trumping King’s Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson for that year’s top acting prizes. One of Dr. King’s most famous statements might therefore be twisted a bit to suggest that performing artists be recognized for the content of their work rather than for the color of their skin, though that said, some elements of King have not aged especially well, with the miniseries’ almost hagiographical approach toward its subject sometimes getting in the way of a really solid understanding of King as a living, breathing human being. Instead the miniseries tends to play out in a series of decades spanning vignettes, giving fleeting voice to a generational struggle that many blacks would still insist is ongoing, even if advances have been made.

Writer-director Abby Mann’s social conscience was well on display in most if not all of his vaunted works, which included his Academy Award adaptation of his original teleplay for Judgment at Nuremberg. Mann wears his progressive heart rather proudly on his sleeve throughout King, articulating a perhaps slightly guilt ridden trip through the manifest injustices that African Americans were beginning to rise up against within a new understanding of the so- called “melting pot” in the post World War II era.

King tends to rely on what would have been its 1978 audience’s familiarity with the subject matter, tending not to detail some of the bigger historical context in favor of more intimate, and ostensibly lesser known, material dealing with the courtship and ultimate marriage of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Paul Winfield) and Coretta Scott (Cicely Tyson). King’s home life with his parents Martin Luther King, Sr. (Ossie Davis) and Alberta (Frances Foster) is also portrayed. That may actually divorce the story at least slightly from its more epochal elements, though big movements like the sit ins, marches and push toward Civil Rights legislation are certainly dealt with, albeit almost as part of a pageant, to the point that some aspects are given little more than “montage” treatment.

The chief performers do very well in iconic roles, though Tyson has to weather some unfortunate hairstyles which are presented in a sort of tonsorial shorthand to indicate what year it’s supposed to be. Some of the very large and varied supporting cast is a bit problematic, including William Jordan, who doesn’t quite capture the mystique (or idiolect) of John F. Kennedy. There’s also surprisingly short shrift given to some of the United States government’s suspicions of King, though FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Dolph Sweet) is pugnaciously on hand.

King probably offers too much of a CliffsNotes version of these incredibly important events to satisfy real students of history, but Winfield and Tyson help to make Martin and Coretta relatively believable “characters.” It’s the personal side of the Kings that makes the biggest impact here, certainly an ironic outcome for a miniseries meant to champion the efforts of King out in the world.

King Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

King is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. That aspect ratio may prove to be a bugaboo for those who will remember the miniseries' original broadcast presentation in 1.33:1, but as with so many domestic American made for television outings, King had at least a Belgian theatrical release (according to the IMDb), and my hunch is it probably screened in other European locales as well. It's also my hunch that theatrical screenings were probably (emphasis on probably) around 1.85:1 (I do agree it's at least a possibility that some venues may have screened this closer to Academy ratio, but considering the vintage of the film, I think it somewhat unlikely). All of this is to say that King was (again probably) framed with "safety" measures in mind so that the image would work (most of the time, anyway) in either 1.33:1 or 1.85:1 (which is "translated" here to 1.78:1). While there are occasional oddities to the framings (you can see some missing tops of heads or even bottoms of jaws in a couple of close-ups in the screenshots), there's nothing overly problematic here. Colors are also decent looking, if not overly vivid. As with most Olive releases, there are no signs of intrusive degraining or sharpening. However, there are some very strange anomalies in this presentation which can fairly easily be seen in some of the screenshots. These can probably best be compared to ghosting in video, but I'm wondering if perhaps this could stem from a deinterlaced master, though since virtually all of this phenomenon occurs in midrange shots, perhaps it's a sign of a malfunctioning, slightly refracting, lens. If you look at screenshot 13, for example, focus on Frances Foster's face on the left of the frame. You can clearly see a slight ghost image of her profile to the right of her face. This recurs intermittently throughout this presentation. There's not a whale of a lot of existing data online about the old DVD issue, but it's entirely possible this issue existed on that release, too. It's distracting but probably won't prove to be a completely fatal flaw to those who love the miniseries.

King Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

King's sole Emmy Award was given for its music score by Billy Goldenberg, and while it's an enjoyable enough set of cues it, like some other elements of the miniseries, hasn't aged particularly well, sounding a bit too "1970s" for its own good at times. Fidelity is fine on the DTS- HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track offered on this Blu-ray, with dialogue and Goldenberg's score presented very cleanly and without any problems.

King Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This is a rare Olive Films Blu-ray release with supplemental material.

• Recreating History: The Making of King (1080p; 15:31) features some excellent interviews and is full of archival footage of the real Dr. King.


• In Conversation with Abby King and Tony Bennett (1080p; 19:00) finds a bit of a fawning Mann talking to Bennett.


• The Struggle (1080p; 19:58) includes snippets of Winfield as Dr. King, with a brief but compelling overview of the Civil Rights struggle.


• The Civil Rights Movement (1080p; 19:29) is a companion piece to The Struggle, offering more homilies from Dr. King with a look at the movement Dr. King helped to spearhead.

King Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A mere ten years from the time of Dr. King's tragic assassination may simply have not been quite enough time to process the full meaning of this man's life, as well as to assess some of his peccadilloes. In any case, while it's obvious Mann wanted to offer up a personal side of a legendary public figure, it's also obvious that there was not a serious attempt in King to confront any issues which would significantly detract from King's heroic struggle. King is a flawed film (and/or miniseries), but it offers some well measured performances from Winfield, Tyson and Davis, and it certainly gives a generalist overview of why we celebrate this great American every January. While the miniseries is generally laudable, fans should carefully peruse the screenshots included with this review before making a decision whether or not to purchase.