6.7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
A veteran returns to his bleak Maryland hometown and takes a job as an occupational therapist at Poplar Lodge, a private mental institution for the wealthy, where he cares for and falls in love with the beautiful and enigmatic Lilith.
Starring: Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg, Peter Fonda, Kim Hunter, Anne MeachamDrama | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 2.5 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Lilith was director Robert Rossen's last film, and its reception by critics and audiences was the exact opposite from that of Rossen's previous film, The Hustler, which everyone loved and is now regarded as a classic. No one liked Lilith, despite the presence of glamorous stars Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg, who is said to have regarded the film as her favorite among her performances (and this was the actress who made Breathless for Godard). Far from becoming a classic, Lilith is almost forgotten today: barely seen, seldom discussed and stubbornly resistant to easy consumption, despite attempts to decipher it by reference to Rossen's troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which has too often served as a "key to all mythologies" for writers, playwrights and directors of the era. Lilith might be easier to take in, if it were an obscure subtitled foreign film starring an unfamiliar young man with an ordinary face instead of Beatty in his pretty boy youth. Despite the Maryland setting taken directly from J.R. Salamanca's novel, the film plays out in a surreal universe that resembles no tangible neighborhood anywhere in America. This sense of detachment from reality doesn't just result from the story's setting among patients at a mental asylum. It persists even when characters leave the grounds to visit "normal" places. Despite Rossen's well-known preference for filming in a documentary style in real locations, his last film leaves the overwhelming sense of the world dissolving and flowing through one's fingers. (Water imagery recurs throughout.) Oddball films like Lilith are catnip to cineastes but poor stepchildren to the studios that own them, because they don't sell. Lilith is part of the catalog array that Sony licensed to Mill Creek, which has crammed it onto a double-feature disc with Stanley Kramer's Ship of Fools. The two films have little in common other than being mid-Sixties releases in black-and-white that have something to do with insanity. (The term "ship of fools" derives from a medieval allegory about madmen adrift on a ship.) But Kramer's film was showered with Oscar nominations, and it operates in an entirely different world of filmmaking. Like it or not, you know what it's about. Lilith remains a puzzle.
Lilith's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray presentation is by far the weakest I have seen from Mill Creek, and it's considerably worse than that of the accompanying Ship of Fools, despite having a higher bitrate (19.10 vs. 15.00 Mbps), which just goes to show that numbers aren't everything. Plagued by weak detail and frequent video noise, the film's B&W cinematography by Eugen Schüfftan, an Oscar winner for The Hustler, is deprived of the clarity necessary for a sense of depth. The copious noise (which may not be obvious in still screenshots) interferes with the delineation of fine shades of black, white and grey, robbing images of their texture. The likely culprit here is an older transfer performed with less-than-ideal elements; even with the same elements, a new scan with current equipment would probably produce better results. Some degree of digital manipulation is also at fault, because the grain pattern does not show the natural movement of film grain. Instead it jumps back and forth in the jarring pattern of what has sometimes been called "hanging grain". I have seen claims of "DNR" applied to this transfer, but that is clearly the wrong criticism. If noise reduction had been applied, there wouldn't be so much noise. The problem is a poor image capture and, probably, some electronic sharpening in an effort to overcome its limitations.
The film's original mono soundtrack is presented on the disc as DTS-HD MA 2.0, and it's certainly adequate. Voices and effects are properly balanced, and the dynamic range for such elements as galloping horses and rushing rivers is surprisingly broad. The Hustler's composer, Kenyon Hopkins, provided the incongruously upbeat score.
No extras are included. Sony's 2004 DVD also provided no extras.
I doubt that Lilith will ever be anything other than a cult film, a curiosity known primarily to fans of Rossen or Seberg. For that reason, unfortunately, this Blu-ray version from Mill Creek is unlikely to be supplanted anytime in the near future. It isn't unwatchable, but it's far from the best of which Sony (which provided the master to Mill Creek) and Blu-ray are capable. I am not offering a recommendation, but simply presenting my observations.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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