The Miracle Worker Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

The Miracle Worker Blu-ray Movie Review

Shout Select has reissued Arthur Penn's The Miracle Worker (1962) as part of the boutique label's eight-disc box set, The Anne Bancroft Collection. My colleagues Neil Lumbard and Dr. Svet Atanasov have covered the 2017 Olive Films BD-25 and 2020 Eureka Classic BD-50 editions. To read their impressions of the film and respective discs, please refer to the linked reviews.

The Miracle Worker Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Shout has pressed a carbon copy of the Olive disc that Neil examined last fall. I don't know for certain which ratio Cinematographer Ernesto Caparrós framed it in and the picture is presented here in 1.66:1 on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-25. The image boasts excellent grayscale and terrific black levels but does reveal an array of film-related artifacts. I spotted speckles and thin tramlines from time to time. The feature sports an average video bitrate of 25919 kbps. My video score is 3.75.

The 106-minute feature comes with Olive's usual nine scene selections.

The Miracle Worker Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Shout supplies a DTS-HD Master Audio Dual Mono mix (1880 kbps, 24-bit) that sounds remarkably good for its age. I'd also rate the lossless audio a solid 3.75.

The disc comes with optional English SDH.

The Miracle Worker Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Absolutely zilch.

The Miracle Worker Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Miracle Worker is a highly dramatic and theatrical character study adapted from William Gibson's stage play with exceptional care and skill by the great director Arthur Penn. Shout's disc is a direct port of the Olive Films release from a few years back. While the same source material is also used on the UK disc that Svet reviewed, the video encode is technically superior as is the LPCM audio. Eureka also added an audio essay, the original trailer, and a leaflet with essays about the film. Olive's discs generally are priced mid-level to relatively expensive ($15 to $23) so there's some good value to be able to have it in this box set (even though it's a bare bones). I would prefer to see some additional restoration work done to expunge the film artifacts that periodically creep up. RECOMMENDED.