The Man with Two Brains Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

The Man with Two Brains Blu-ray Movie Review

Return of the Pointy Birds

Reviewed by Michael Reuben September 9, 2017

Carl Reiner turned 95 this year, and it's a fitting tribute, among the many already received by the comedy legend, that the Warner Archive Collection is releasing The Man with Two Brains on Blu-ray. The 1983 film is the result of a fruitful collaboration between Reiner and Steve Martin that also produced The Jerk, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and All of Me. Those three are Universal titles, but Warner has the good fortune of owning the project that Reiner has pronounced to be his personal favorite among the films he's directed. Still, the studio hasn't always treated Two Brains with the care it deserves. The film was unceremoniously dumped onto DVD in 1999 in a full-frame VHS-era transfer without so much as a trailer to accompany it. The same disc was reissued in 2004, and it wasn't until ten years later that WAC began to rectify the situation with a remastered DVD restoring the film's original aspect ratio. Now WAC has commissioned an all-new transfer for Blu-ray, presenting Two Brains' inspired silliness with a clarity never before seen on home video.

Like his friend and former standup comedy partner, Mel Brooks, Reiner had his comic sensibility forged in the creative fires of Sid Caesar's Fifties TV program, Your Show of Shows (and its successor Caesar's Hour), which schooled an entire generation of American humorists. Movie parodies were a staple of Caesar's routines, and they've been a fertile source for many who survived working with him. Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein are Brooks's best-known offerings, and Reiner's Two Brains stands right alongside them. Having recently completed Dead Man Don't Wear Plaid, a demanding formal experiment that mixed new footage with excerpts from black-and-white classics, Reiner and Martin (and their Dead Men co-writer George Gipe) went in the opposite direction, lampooning multiple genres with the apparent randomness of a Monty Python episode. But Reiner is too disciplined a craftsman to let the story get completely out of control, routinely pulling back from the brink of narrative collapse and surely steering Two Brains on its roundabout path to a ridiculous but satisfying conclusion.

Martin plays Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, whose name challenges everyone with its spelling and pronunciation in one of Two Brains' numerous running jokes. Dr. H. is a world-famous neurosurgeon, acclaimed for his technique of "cranial screwtop surgery", which is just as improbable as it sounds. Outside the operating room, however, he's a vainglorious dunce, which makes him a perfect target for gold digger Dolores Benedict (Kathleen Turner), whom Dr. H. runs into (literally) as she is exiting the scene of her most recent husband's fatal heart attack. After the doctor saves Dolores in the operating room, she seduces and marries him from her hospital bed. But it's not a complete seduction, because Dolores keeps postponing actual sex, telling Dr. H. she has a "headache". All the while, she secretly beds every attractive man who catches her eye.

In an effort to jumpstart his marriage, Dr. H. takes his new bride to Vienna, where he encounters Dr. Alfred Necessiter (David Warner), a modern-day Frankenstein with a gothic laboratory retrofitted into his flimsy condo, where he keeps a collection of brains preserved in jars—and they're alive (alive!). As Necessiter seeks Dr. H.'s help to perfect his technique for resurrecting great minds by transferring an entire consciousness from a preserved brain into a new body, Dr. H. finds himself making an unexpected telepathic connection with one of Necessiter's specimens, Anne Uumellmahaye (voiced by an uncredited Sissy Spacek). Realizing that he's finally found his soul mate, except for the inconvenience of her being a disembodied brain, Dr. H. begins a frantic quest for a suitable body into which to transplant the woman of whom it can be truly said that he loves her for her mind.

Reiner gleefully juggles this demented amalgam of sci-fi, medical drama, romantic comedy and film noir, and he even manages to work in a murder mystery, as Europe is stalked by the mysterious Elevator Killer, who kills his victims with an injection of window cleaner. The resulting deaths leave the brains preserved for harvesting by Dr. Necessiter, which makes the mad scientist a likely suspect, except that the Elevator Killer's victims all seem to know and like him (or her). Who among the film's extended cast of characters could be so widely and favorably recognized?

The film is filled with comic grace notes, like the cat who keeps invading Dr. H.'s operating room, and Reiner isn't afraid to interrupt a scene for goofy asides like the doctor's diagnostic debate with a precocious kid ("Three years of nursery school and you think you know it all!"). He's also willing to incorporate broad slapstick, much of it arising from the cheap construction in Dr. Necessiter's condo, and he takes full advantage of the film's R rating without the now all-too-familiar crutch of loading up the dialogue with cursing. (There's a scene from Dr. H.'s quest for a replacement body for Anne Uumellmahaye that I'd love to include in screenshots, but it would violate Blu-ray.com's no-nudity policy.)

Dr. H. is an ideal role for Martin, who draws on a familiar comic persona from his manic standup routines, one that would continue to serve him well in future performances like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Three Amigos and the reincarnation of Inspector Clouseau. Martin can do serious drama with the best of them (see, for example, Pennies from Heaven, Leap of Faith and The Spanish Prisoner), but he's never better than when he's playing someone who remains utterly certain about everything, even as he's making a complete fool of himself.

The Man with Two Brains Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Man with Two Brains was shot by Michael Chapman, who had previously worked with Reiner on Dead Man Don't Wear Plaid and is probably best known for his work with Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. The film was made during a period when film stocks were notoriously problematic as a result of Kodak's efforts to reduce its use of petroleum products following the Seventies' surging oil prices. The company's experiments led to numerous problems with such fundamental properties as color reproduction and grain texture, and it wasn't until the late Eighties that Kodak yielded to pressure from filmmakers and the industry to return to more stable formulations.

For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, the Warner Archive Collection commissioned a new scan, which was performed by Warner's Motion Picture Imaging facility at 2K, using a recently struck interpositive. MPI has done fine work mitigating the graininess of the film stock without sacrificing detail, but the result won't be anyone's idea of demo material, because the image is inherently soft. Still, the transfer is remarkably clear and sharp, given the source, and it accurately reproduces the look and feel typical of Carl Reiner's films, where script and performance take priority over cinematography (it's worth remembering that Reiner came from TV—and small-screen NTSC TV at that). The film's palette varies from naturalistic to stylized and surreal, with a notable example of the latter being Dr. Necessiter's collection of brains, which shine with many hues of candy-colored light. Black levels and contrast appear to be accurate for the most part, with just a few instances of overbrightness (e.g., in the black uniform of Dr. Necessiter's butler, which occasionally shades toward gray). Because Two Brains is only 90 minutes long, WAC has opted to place the film on a BD-25, resulting in an average bitrate that is somewhat lower (at 29.49 Mbps) than their usual target rate in the mid-30s, but the encode is capable and the image doesn't seem to have suffered from the slightly less generous compression.

The Man with Two Brains Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Two Brains' original mono mix has been taken from the magnetic master, cleaned of any age-related defects and encoded in DTS-HD MA 2.0. It's a lively mix for a single channel, with deliberately exaggerated sound effects carefully chosen to accentuate comic highlights ("Get that cat out of here!"). Fidelity and dynamic range are consistently good, and the dialogue is always intelligible and well-prioritized. The film's nutty electronic soundtrack is the work of Joel Goldsmith, son of the legendary Jerry, who, by the time of his untimely death at the age of 54, had established himself as a specialist in sci-fi, scoring Roland Emmerich's Moon 44 and supplying the musical voice of television's Stargate universe.

The Man with Two Brains Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only extra is a trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 1:48), which is more than was provided on Warner's original DVD.

The Man with Two Brains Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Reiner will probably always be best known as the creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show, but his comic résumé is long and varied, and much of it is overdue for rediscovery. WAC's Blu-ray of The Man with Two Brains is a good start. Recently interviewed for WAC's monthly podcast, Reiner revealed that he himself watches the film when he needs a good laugh. I know just how he feels. Highly recommended.