7.2 | / 10 |
Users | 5.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.1 |
A vaudeville duo agree to reunite for a TV special, but it turns out that they can't stand each other.
Starring: Walter Matthau, George Burns, Richard Benjamin, Lee Meredith, Rosetta LeNoireComedy | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Almost twenty years before he became a Grumpy Old Man, comic treasure Walter Matthau played even older and grumpier as one half of an estranged vaudeville team in The Sunshine Boys, the filmed version of Neil Simon's bookend to The Odd Couple. Matthau's feuding partner wasn't his usual foil, Jack Lemmon, but a stoically deadpan George Burns, returning to the big screen after an absence of thirty-six years. When he accepted the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance, Burns declared that, for good luck, he would wait another thirty-six years before making another picture. (He didn't.) Screen chemistry is a matter of luck (or possibly fate). After The Sunshine Boys finished its successful Broadway run, the film was initially cast with two former vaudevillians, Red Skelton and Jack Benny, but Skelton dropped out (various reasons have been claimed). After considering several replacements, including Phil Silvers, whose audition is included in the extras, producer Ray Stark and director Herb Ross settled on Matthau. Then Benny had to withdraw due to severe illness (he died in December 1974) but recommended his close friend Burns as a replacement. The accidental pairing clicked, and both actors were nominated for Oscars, but Matthau lost the Leading Actor statue to Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Simon lost the screenwriting Oscar but won the Writer's Guild Award. Among Neil Simon's works, The Sunshine Boys is one of the most filmed. In Germany it has been adapted for television an astonishing four times (go figure), and twice in America, most famously in 1996 with Peter Falk taking Matthau's role and Woody Allen stepping in for Burns. There's something oddly fascinating about the story's combination of antic, off-the-wall comedy with the heart-tug of watching two elderly men make each other miserable after a lifetime of bringing laughter to others. Youth-obsessed PR departments don't know how to market such a catalog title, which is no doubt why the Blu-ray comes to us from the Warner Archive Collection.
The Sunshine Boys was shot by David M. Walsh, who would re-unite with director Herb Ross and writer Neil Simon for The Goodbye Girl and California Suite. The Warner Archive Collection has created a new master for this Blu-ray release, sourced from a recently generated interpositive. The results are beautifully textured and richly colored, providing a wonderful display of the film's Oscar-nominated art direction. Willy Clark's apartment, littered with show biz memorabilia, can be seen in all its dilapidated glory, in contrast to the tidy suburban home where Al Lewis resides with his daughter. The bright lights and over-illuminated soundstage of the TV studio expose the overdone makeup on Lewis and Clark, in contrast to their normal appearance in the daylight of the New York streets. Clark's first appearance as he walks past George M. Cohan's statue in Times Square is like a page from a history book recording a bygone era. The exceptional detail in these and many other sequences helps create a believable world in which the extreme behavior of the two battling ex-partners is all the more absurd. The film's natural grain pattern is well rendered and appears undisturbed by untoward digital manipulation. Consistent with WAC's usual practice, the disc has been mastered with a high average bitrate of 35.00 Mbps, ensuring an uncompromised encode.
The Sunshine Boys' original mono track has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, with identical left and right channels. The track is remarkably lively when you consider that the film has no score except for occasional bits of source music. Its "score" is the rhythm of comedy, and Matthau in particular hits so many notes across such a wide range that he might as well be his own orchestra. The dialogue is always clear, and there are subtly mixed sound effects appropriate to each locale.
The extras have been ported over from Warner's 2004 DVD of The Sunshine Boys.
The competitive spirit wasn't limited to the fictional characters. In his commentary, Richard Benjamin relates how George Burns reported to the set with the entire script memorized, prompting Matthau to joke that the eighty-year-old wanted to make the rest of them look bad. Even though Al Lewis is the more contained of the two partners, Burns's portrayal has a zest to it that bespeaks the actor's enthusiasm for this unexpected opportunity to revive his career. He lands every line with the precision timing well known to fans of the old Burns & Allen TV show. Burns and Matthau make it easy to believe that their characters were comedy legends, and just as easy to believe that they drove each other crazy. Highly recommended.
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