7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
A series of misunderstandings leaves an advertising executive with a campaign for a product which has not been invented yet while he romances his rival in the guise of its inventor.
Starring: Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, Edie Adams, Jack OakieRomance | 100% |
Comedy | 33% |
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, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Note: This film is available as part of the Doris Day and Rock Hudson Romantic Comedy Collection.
Despite their reputation as the “it” couple of late 50s and early 60s romantic comedies, it’s perhaps surprising to note that Doris Day and
Rock
Hudson actually only made three feature films together, the trio assembled in Doris Day and Rock Hudson Romantic Comedy Collection. Pillow Talk (which was released as a standalone Blu-ray in
2012
as a Digibook and then again almost exactly a year later in this
edition) was one of the most overwhelming box office sensations of its era, ending up with an Academy Award for Best Screenplay and
several other nominations (including, rather incredibly, the sole nomination for Best Actress that Doris Day received over her long and varied
career). The film world moved slower back then, and it took a little over two years for a follow up of sorts to appear in the form of Lover
Come Back, a film which pretty much simply retold large swaths of Pillow Talk’s tale of bickering folks who can’t see the clear truth
that they’re actually madly in love with each other. Lover Come Back wasn’t anywhere near the smash that Pillow Talk had
been, but it still raked in considerable dough and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Three years after the second
pairing of Hudson and Day, their final film together, Send Me No Flowers, came out. This one departed rather radically from the
precedent set by the first two films, with Hudson and Day not contentious singles but instead a seemingly happily married couple who then
get
entangled in a farcical set of circumstances due to the Hudson character’s incipient hypochondria.
Lover Come Back is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Universal Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. This "middle" film of the three Day-Hudson pairings also falls in the middle video quality wise. It's not at the generally excellent levels of Pillow Talk, but it doesn't have quite as many issues as Send Me No Flowers does. Elements are obviously aged, with typical signs of wear and tear. The palette has faded, though perhaps a little weirdly more toward a kind of peach color than the typical brown one tends to see. That slightly skews the entire color spectrum, leaving some of the film's nice production design looking "off" at times. Still, given a bit of slack cutting in this regard, things pop reasonably well, and detail levels are generally acceptable to commendable, especially in close-ups. The film only temporarily engages in the split screen antics of Pillow Talk, and opticals like that are understandably softer and grittier looking. The typical bane of older Universal catalog releases, namely aggressive noise reduction, is not on display here, and there's a healthy grain field in evidence throughout the presentation. There are occasional signs of what look like minimal sharpening, but they're never at really problematic levels.
Lover Come Back features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track which encounters a few stumbles along the way, typically in musical moments. There's some recurrent changes in reverb that almost sound like phasing in Day's warbling of the title tune, and another musical moment later has a bit of the same anomaly, though not to the same degree. Dialogue fares better, but the track sounds fairly narrow and shallow a lot of the time, with a somewhat boxy ambience. All of this said, there's really no overly problematic damage and there's no problem in hearing anything at any time.
Lover Come Back simply can't quite escape the looming shadow of Pillow Talk, though it's more than obvious that no one associated with the film really wants to. The performances are bright and brisk, and the film provides its fair share of laughs, but it often feels like a "do over" that never quite does enough to erase the memory of the iconic first pairing of Day and Hudson. Technical merits are good to very good, though there's room for improvement in both the video and audio departments. Recommended.
1964
Universal 100th Anniversary
1959
1964
1978
Warner Archive Collection
1966
1937
2019
2003
1996
1953
2013
Arrow Academy
1942
Remastered
1937
2010
10th Anniversary Edition
2006
Warner Archive Collection
1960
1962
2018
Director's Cut | Special Edition
2006
1946