6.9 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
A movie producer conceives an outrageous plan to rescue his expensive flop by transforming the wholesome musical into a sexual adventure and persuading his actress-wife, famous for her wholesome image, to appear topless.
Starring: Julie Andrews, William Holden, Richard Mulligan, Marisa Berenson, Larry HagmanComedy | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Blake Edwards' S.O.B. is best remembered for the scene in which Julie Andrews bared her
breasts for the camera—an eye-popping departure for the G-rated star of Mary Poppins and The
Sound of Music. On the Tonight Show, host Johnny Carson famously thanked Andrews for
showing the world that "the hills are still alive", but S.O.B. is notable for more than just its star's
bosom. Edwards was a peerless director of physical comedy in such projects as the Pink Panther
series and the romantic farce 10. With S.O.B,
he was trying something new, melding his
gift for slapstick lunacy with the savage eye of a satirist. The result is unique in Edwards'
filmography and, until it runs out of steam in the final act, exhilarating.
S.O.B. marked the fourth collaboration between Edwards and Andrews, who were married in real
life and whose experience of making the 1970 flop Darling Lili inspired
S.O.B.'s tale of a pricey
musical gone awry. Having exorcised the ghost of Lili with S.O.B., the couple would go on to
make a highly successful movie musical, Victor
Victoria, which S.O.B. now joins in the Warner
Archive Collection's library of Blu-rays.
Once upon a time in a wonderful town called Hollywood there lived a very successful motion picture producer named Felix Farmer. He owned three beautiful houses, he had two lovely children, and he was married to a gorgeous movie star. The people who ran the studio where he worked loved him and admired him because he had never made a movie that lost money. Then one day he produced the biggest most expensive motion picture of his career . . . and it flopped. The people who ran the studio were very angry at Felix because they lost millions of dollars . . .
. . . and Felix lost his mind.
S.O.B. was shot in anamorphic widescreen by Harry Stradling, Jr., who was Oscar-nominated for
the widescreen photography of 1776 and The Way We Were. For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray,
the Warner Archive Collection commissioned a fresh scan, which was performed at 2K by
Warner's Motion Picturing Imaging facility using a recently manufactured interpositive, followed
by the usual color-correction and cleanup. S.O.B. joins the recent spate of exceptional Blu-ray
presentations from WAC, featuring superior sharpness, clarity and detail while preserving the
film-like quality of the source. The grain is exceedingly fine, except in the opening "Polly Wolly
Doodle" sequence, where it is accentuated by the optically superimposed titles, and even there
the grain is well-resolved and unobtrusive (see screenshot 10).
The film's palette favors the light earth tones of Seventies California decor, broken by darkness
and deep reds that signal the disguised passions underneath. The brightest colors occur in the
opening Night Wind sequence and then reappear in the ridiculously stylized nightmare created for
the sexy reshoot, which concludes with Sally's breast-bearing. Bright colors also feature in the
late sequence involving Sally's guru, for reasons that can't be discussed without spoilers. But
perhaps the greatest virtue of the transfer is how faithfully it reproduces Edwards' most
complicated frames, with figures arrayed from one end to the other and overlapping
conversations and interactions being played out simultaneously. Such scenes are among the
highlights of S.O.B., and this transfer renders them vividly. WAC has mastered the disc at its
usual high bitrate, here 34.99 Mbps.
S.O.B.'s original mono soundtrack has been taken from the magnetic master and encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. The track has good fidelity and dynamic range, and it provides the requisite impact for the sound cues that punctuate Edwards' sight gags. The dialogue is so clearly rendered that you can actually make out all the words in Felix's extended rant to Sally about his new vision, which ends with Sally screaming (for reasons unrelated to anything Felix says). The words still don't make much sense, but you can hear them clearly, and the rest of the dialogue is equally intelligible. The main score is by Edwards' frequent collaborator, Henry Mancini, who also orchestrated a memorable version of the traditional American ditty known as "Polly Wolly Doodle", which is hard to hear the same way after you've watched S.O.B.
The sole extra is the film's trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:51). Warner's 2002 DVD of S.O.B. was similarly bare.
Among the many pleasures of S.O.B. is its sly subversion of Julie Andrews' antiseptic image
through the lens of Sally Miles. When we first meet Sally, she's so modest that she excuses
herself if so much as a "damn" passes her lips. But as the pressures mount, both personally
and professionally, she swears up a storm, rants about her "boobies" and betrays the man she
loves for what she believes will be financial gain. (It is, albeit for others.) By the end of the film,
Sally has become just another show business flake with an image in tatters, a private life in
shambles and a shady spiritual leader telling her what to do next—and Andrews has become a
deeper and more layered screen presence, ready for her closeup as the sexually ambiguous star of
Victor Victoria. Despite its flaws, S.O.B. remains a unique and memorable achievement for both
its director and its star, and WAC has given it a first-rate Blu-ray treatment. Highly
recommended.
1967
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2016
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Limited Edition to 3000
1967
Paramount Presents #36
1961
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2022
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Warner Archive Collection
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