6.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Paul Newman plays a jaded disc-jockey who offers his services to WUSA, a right-wing hate station broadcasting from New Orleans. While struggling with his own apathy, he starts spreading hateful messages perpetrated by Pat Hingle, a power-mad master of WUSA. Joanne Woodward plays a working girl who arrives in town the same day as Newman and falls for the alcoholic disc-jockey.
Starring: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Perkins, Laurence Harvey (I), Pat HingleDrama | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.35:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Which came first, WUSA or Rush Limbaugh? Well, technically speaking, Limbaugh wins, for the conservative firebrand was born in 1951, almost two decades before this notorious flop film opened in 1970. It really wasn’t until around 1988, however, that Limbaugh began making national waves as one of the leading spokesmen for the so-called New Right. Had Limbaugh been the force in 1970 he later became, my hunch is WUSA would have been a much more successful film, for in its own way it presciently depicts the rise of conservative talk radio. No one had ever even heard of this idea in 1970, or at least not considered it very seriously, and so the film seemed like the left wing rantings of a cadre of ultra-liberals. Looking back now from the vantage point of the post-Limbaugh landscape (which is not to imply that Limbaugh is a done deal, only to indicate what has followed in his wake), WUSA is almost frighteningly accurate in its portrayal of agenda driven broadcasting. The left complains about outlets like Fox News, while the right laments the efforts of outlets like MSNBC, but the fact is this “new” politically motivated world of radio and television is by far the most successful “news” offered on the fragmented worlds of cable television and corporate controlled radio. WUSA is not a completely successful effort for reasons which will be discussed below, but those who dismissed the film during its brief theatrical exhibition in 1970 as completely ludicrous were obviously about as wrong as they could be. A couple of the subplots in WUSA could in fact have been “ripped from the headlines” of today’s newspapers—if in fact in this modern day world of mass media there still were newspapers.
WUSA is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Olive has been on quite a roll the last little while with some really nice looking Paramount catalog titles, and WUSA is another solid entry from the label. Colors are nicely saturated and don't appear to have faded much if at all. The image is quite well detailed most of the time (some of what I assume was the second unit photography looks slightly fuzzy by comparison). Contrast is strong and fine grain is completely in evidence. Damage is negligible enough to barely mention.
WUSA features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track that offers excellent fidelity which ably supports the dialogue and Lalo Schifrin's score. There are some slight amplitude problems which may in fact be due to how the actors actually spoke their lines rather than any recording issues, making things occasionally just slightly hard to hear. Otherwise, though, things sound fine, with some decently wide dynamic range, to boot.
No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray disc.
WUSA is not a totally successful enterprise, but it probably plays much, much better today than it did back in 1970,
when no one had ever heard of Rush Limbaugh or the many other conservative commentators who would follow in his
wake. The film is a bit too fragmented for its own good, and it's also maddeningly discursive at times, refusing to actually
come right out and say what it's hinting at, but even so, there are some striking (even frightening) parallels to today's
media landscape contained in this film. WUSA disappeared pretty quickly back in the day and was considered an
outright failure at the time. The film deserves a second look, and this Blu-ray offers that with excellent video and audio.
Recommended.
Note: In the unintentional irony department, there have been several entities using the call letters WUSA in the
years since the film's release and there's actually a WUSA broadcasting now, in our nation's capital of Washington ,
D.C.
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