Woman's World Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		2.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Woman's World Blu-ray Movie Review

Executive bittersweet.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 21, 2017

The Warner Archive Collection has been one of the perhaps unexpected pleasures of the mature Blu-ray era. This “manufactured on demand” line debuted without an overabundance of press and with a kind of unlikely assortment of films which included such disparate titles as Deathtrap, Gypsy, The Hudsucker Proxy, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes , Billy Rose's Jumbo and Fearless (along with perhaps even more unlikely efforts like Batman: The Brave and the Bold: The Complete First Season and Green Lantern: The Animated Series), but it has become increasingly popular in the intervening years, providing a wealth of at times underappreciated but (at least in some cases) important films that otherwise would have probably never seen the high definition light of day, at least in disc form. The Warner Archive efforts have had generally very high technical merits, something else that has commended them to home theater enthusiasts. In the “better late than never” category, 20th Century Fox is now aping Warner’s MOD strategy by offering a new Fox Cinema Archives line. Somewhat similarly to Warner’s kind of quiet roll out of their line, Fox hasn’t really marketed these in any hyperbolic way, and in fact their PR firm wasn’t even able to provide Blu-ray screeners (hence the somewhat delayed reviews of the first films in the series). So, how is this first selection of Fox Cinema Archives titles? Read on.

While many astute viewers will notice an unmistakable similarity between 1954’s Woman’s World and another 1954 opus, Executive Suite, for some reason (perhaps the fact that both films share director Jean Negulesco) Woman’s World repeatedly reminded me in some tangential ways of Negulesco’s 1959 film The Best of Everything. While both Woman’s World and Executive Suite posit the death of a “big makher” in a successful corporation which then leads to a drama surrounding who will succeed him, Executive Suite in its own way presages The Best of Everything by offering up a female candidate, a sign that the post World War II social structure was slowly but surely allowing women to at least get a bit closer to that oft mentioned glass ceiling. While The Best of Everything was actually focused pretty exclusively on women struggling to get ahead in their career paths, Woman’s World twists that formula into the more traditional (for 1954, anyway) idea that men are the “workers” and their women are addenda who are there to handle the social graces and similar things.

Negulesco had a rather far ranging filmography which included everything from Jane Wyman’s Oscar winning title role of Johnny Belinda (for which Negulesco himself achieved his sole Academy Award nomination for directing) to glossy CinemaScope fare like How to Marry a Millionaire, but many of his 1950s outings especially tended to traffic in somewhat sudsy accounts of aggregations of characters in shared circumstances, as in his other 1954 film Three Coins in the Fountain. That’s certainly the case with Woman’s World, a film laden with marital vignettes shared between the three couples where the husbands are vying for the newly vacant General Manager job at Gifford Motors, run by the imperious but basically kindly Ernest Gifford (Clifton Webb).

The three couples are a varied group, and include Bill Baxter (Cornel Wilde), whose wife Katie (June Allyson) is a bit of a hayseed, lacking both those aforementioned social graces and (as is disclosed later) even an appropriately fashionable wardrobe to attend a formal dinner at the Gifford mansion. Next are Jerry Talbot (Van Heflin) and his sexpot wife Carol (Arlene Dahl), who seem to be happy despite Jerry’s early urging to Carol to let him handle the interview aspect of their trip to the Big Apple, which is what experts in the screenwriting trade call “foreshadowing”. Last up is the most clearly antagonistic couple in the film, Sidney Burns (Fred MacMurray) and his wife Elizabeth (Lauren Bacall), though it quickly becomes apparent that much of the Burns’ marital discord stems from Elizabeth not wanting Sidney, a Type A personality if ever there were one, to work himself to death.

While there’s the supposed “suspense” of “who’s gonna get the job” underlying the narrative momentum of Woman’s World, the film is really just a series of more or less soap operatic interchanges between the couples and of course between the entire group, or smaller subdivisions of them. This is glossy, somewhat emotionally distant, fare that is beautiful to see (especially if you’re a lover of cars, since there are a number of fanciful mockups of ostensible Gifford show models) but which rarely totally engages on a gut level. This is probably nowhere more evident than in the denouement regarding the Talbots, where a final showdown between the spouses is weirdly tamped down.

That said, the film is never less than entertaining and Negulesco, an early proponent of CinemaScope (How to Marry a Millionaire reportedly beat The Robe to the punch in terms of actual filming, though it was released after the Biblical epic), and he frames his otherwise fairly intimate tale extremely well for the widescreen canvas. Those who love “archival” footage will no doubt enjoy some of the vistas of mid-fifties Manhattan, though some of the aerial shots may prove to be an unwitting example of why the Environmental Protection Agency could well be a good idea.

Woman's World Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Woman's World is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment's new Fox Cinema Archives imprint with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.55:1, the first time to my knowledge that this film has been released in its proper CinemaScope aspect ratio. This is by and large a stellar looking presentation, one that preserves the crispness and excellent detail levels of the CinemaScope experience while also rendering the grain field naturally and without any compression issues. (For those wanting a great—if brief—example of some of the "stretching" that those original CinemaScope lenses provided, pay attention shortly after the 9:00 mark when the camera pans across a Manhattan location, and you may think you're underwater for a second.) The palette is almost uniformly excellent looking, something that helps to support the film's often pretty lavish production design elements (especially with regard to some of the very colorful outfits the women wear). That said, while certainly not at the more variable levels I mentioned in our Coney Island Blu-ray review, there are some transitory moments where to my eyes it looks like things tip just very slightly toward the brown side, making some of those vibrant reds just a little on the rust colored side at times.

Woman's World Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Once again as with Coney Island Woman's World features only a lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 mix, something that may be the biggest letdown for potential consumers in this first batch of Fox Cinema Archives releases (especially since according to the IMDb at least some theatrical exhibitions of Woman's World had 4 track stereo audio). The lossy track supports the film's dialogue well enough, but the boxiness and lack of a really full low end is most evident in the music, including the patently sexist theme song warbled by the Four Aces (for those who thought the Bacharach-David opus Wives and Lovers was almost laughably archaic in its summation of gender roles, just listen to the equally dated lyric by Sammy Cahn for this tune).

Woman's World Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Photo Gallery (1080i; 2:21)

Woman's World Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Woman's World had a substantial number of writers, including famous playwrights Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay (the original stage versions of State of the Union and The Sound of Music), as well as then real life married couple Richard Sale and Mary Loos, niece of Anita. (A couple of others are actually credited as well.) You'd think all of that talent could have come up with something a little bit less histrionic and soap operatic than what ended up on the screen, but for a 1954 production there are some interesting allusions to marital discord, and the film kind of comically doesn't shirk from showing gorgeous women in their negligees or even underwear (in a couple of scenes). Dramatically a little turgid, Woman's World is still undeniably entertaining and it looks great on this new Blu-ray. Unfortunately, these first Fox Cinema Archives releases only have lossy Dolby Digital audio and not a ton of supplementary material. Otherwise, though, Woman's World comes Recommended.