7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Just after she has said "I do," Betty learns that her new husband, Bob, has left his white-collar job with plans to raise chickens on a rustic farm located miles away from civilization. Betty tries to make the best of her situation in their ramshackle house but never-ending repairs, a malevolent wood-burning stove, rain, ornery livestock and a seductive neighbor do not make it easy!
Starring: Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray, Marjorie Main, Louise Allbritton, Richard LongComedy | Insignificant |
Romance | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Maybe the film should have been titled The Egghead and I. That's got to be what was running through Betty MacDonald's (Claudette Colbert) mind when her husband Bob (Fred MacMurray) suddenly uprooted her from comfort for an anything-but-simple life on the farm. The film, directed by Chester Erskine, is a Comedy of misadventure and misunderstanding down on the farm, where a focused, dedicated husband reinvents himself, and by extension his wife, when he suddenly fancies himself an egg farmer and a man with a plan to live off the land. Things go haywire, of course, often to delightful comic effect for the audience and painful reminders for a subservient wife yanked from her creature comforts so her husband might pursue some hybrid of fascination, dream, and career path. Will their scuffles in the strange land bring them closer together, will Bob realize the foolhardiness of the venture and quit, or will the increasingly frustrated (and jealous) Betty finally say "I'm through!" and give up on her man and his dream?
Roughin' it.
The Egg and I's 1080p image comes framed at about 1.33:1, essentially preserving its original projection aspect ratio and placing "black bars" on either side of the 1.78:1 HDTV frame. The image, which was "digitally remastered and fully restored from high resolution 35mm original film elements," looks very nice. Grain is retained with an evenness of distribution. Detailing is very good, including at the MacDonald home in its broken-down state where old woods, dust, cobwebs, muddy terrain, tools, vehicles, or any number of other interesting odds and ends present as textural delights. Contrast that with the more finely appointed furnishings, luxurious fabrics, clean woods, and perfectly deigned accents in and around Harriet's home, which are also very sharp and present handsomely. The grayscale is pleasing and accurate. Light macroblocking is sometimes evident if one gets very close to the screen. Several softer-focus edges are present. Some headache-inducing judder interferes during a pan shot at the 1:20:35 mark. The image's various maladies are light and far and few between. Overall, this is a very good presentation from Universal.
The Egg and I features a middling, but net-positive, DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless soundtrack. The opening music is loud but lacks clarity. It's harsh-edged, shallow, a little scratchy, both at the film's start and during a big action scene in chapter eight. Various animal sounds over the opening titles are scrunchy, too. The track does present less intensive, less demanding sounds well enough, like raindrops falling into collection buckets in chapter two as the MacDonalds settle in for the first night in the new home. A ringing alarm moments later, signaling the first full day in the new digs, is adequately clear and sharp. Much of the track clears up beyond the first few moments, though, with various elements, like peeping little chicks in chapter five, sounding better defined than previous animal noises. Dialogue images well enough towards the center and presents with suitable definition.
The Egg and I contains two featurettes and a trailer. No DVD or digital copies are included. No top menu is included; extras must be selected
in-film via a crude pop-up menu.
The Egg and I is a funny escape about a man, his dream, and the woman who stands by him through thin and thinner, though she slowly unravels to a breaking point. It's a film of comic misadventure with a fair bit of heart flowing through. Universal's Blu-ray offers very nice 1080p video, a decent but occasionally struggling two-channel lossless soundtrack, and a couple of tangentially related extras. Recommended.
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