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Title says it all. Which version of Orson Wells' The Stranger and The Trial are the best? I narrowed the search to a few on amazon (links below) but need some help deciding which ones to buy.

The Trial
The Trial #1
The Trial #2

The Stranger
The Stranger #1
The Stranger #2
The Stranger #3

Sonny

I have the Milestone "The Trial" and am happy with the pic etc. I recommend that one.

Boba Fett

The Milestone Edition of The Trial and the MGM edition of The Stranger are likely your best bets.

Those other links are cheap public domain releases.

nitin77

MGM for Stranger.

If you have a PAL compatible player, R2 version of Trial.

R. Hilton

Ditto on both.

big e

Looks like the MGM version of The Stranger and the Milestone version of The Trial are the ones to get. I wasn't sure which version of The Trial to get, but I had The Stranger narrowed down to #2 and #3. I liked #2 because it was in a Film Noir set that had 8 other movies with it, and from the reviews I read it seems like the set had decent picture quality. (Side note: Does anyone on these boards have this collection? If so, could you comment on its PQ?) I was thinking about #3 because it also included The Trial and Wells' short film Hearts of Age, but almost all the reviews I read said it didn't have very good PQ. Does anyone know of any other DVDs that include Hearts of Age? From what I read on IMDB, it sounds like it's not really that great, but I'm still interested in seeing it.

ResIpsa

I have the collection you reference in #2. I would rate the PQ for The Stranger as below-average, maybe 2 stars out of 5, but it is watchable so long as you are not extremely picky about PQ. Certainly, the MGM release of The Stranger would be superior in PQ. Most of the other titles in that collection are well-worth picking up, especially at about $1 per title. The PQ for some of the other titles dips to barely acceptable and there are no subtitles on any of the titles (which becomes an issue when the audio occasionally drops out or otherwise becomes problematic) but you get what you pay for....

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Another question. I found this film noir collection on Amazon that also includes The Stranger and was wondering if anyone could give me some opinions on it. I ran through the movies and it seems like the only ones in that set that received remastered editions were The Stranger, He Walked by Night, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and Kansas City Confidential. I could only find other PD copies of the other movies. Could anyone tell me how much of a difference in PQ there is between this set and the remastered versions of the four I mentioned? Would the PQ be any worse than what could be seen on internetarchive.com?

Johnny Zhivago

St. Claire Vision is PD recycled transfers... I'm not going to the link to watch. PD is what it is. Not much.

The best version of The Stranger is the MGM... Ditto on He Walked By Night and Kansas City Confidential. Not even close based on the PD transfers that I have seen of those titles.

Same with Martha Ivers... But, the Paramount disc is OOP.

If you're serious about grabbing these noirs for your library, and not just curiosity, then spend the money on the real deal.

The Trial... ALL R1 versions are meh. I would wait and see.

profondo rossi

MGM's release of THE STRANGER is the one to go for!

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I'm interested in seeing D.O.A. and Detour and just thought that if I can get those two and The Stranger in a collection with a few other movies for $20, I may as well grab it. I'm curious in seeing the other films in that set, but it doesn't look like the other ones got restored editions, which made me think this is as good as it's gonna get for some of these movies and since there are 18 movies in that collection, the price tag isn't too bad.

Johnny Zhivago

As long as you're willing to approach it like that... Then go for it. I started my adventure into film noir with the same approach and then replaced most of my PD titles with studio versions whenever possible.

On D.O.A. and Detour... The Image version of D.O.A. is the best that I have seen. Detour... I have the Image DVD but there's not really a solid transfer of that title available. Great film but I think it is probably lost to the ages at this point...

The Milestone IS the best version of The Trial available in R1 but it still has issues (16X9 enhanced perhaps?)... I've been hoping, for too long now, that Criterion can get the rights and the film elements needed for a rocking transfer.

Still waiting...

big e

Ok, I just bought the Film Noir set in the Stranger #2 link a little over a week ago and after skipping through the chapters on each film, I must say the PQ doesn’t look that bad. Granted it doesn’t look outstanding, but it does look good, especially on The Stranger.

The only movies that had bad PQ were The Man Who Cheated Himself (looked decent for a public domain film), The Hitchhiker (the image itself looked fine, but the film had some weird window boxing), Detour (it looked bad in the beginning with a lot of visible dirt and scratches, but as the movie went on, the image seemed to get better), and D.O.A. (looked alright, but had a lot of dirt and scratches).

I haven’t had a chance to watch any of the movies yet, although since I’m on Christmas break I should have plenty of time to get them watched.