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Universal’s triple-dip Dracula--the new 2-DVD “75th Anniversary Edition”--is the studio’s reply to fans who had complained that the earlier transfer was too dark (1999 “Classic Monsters” edition, re-issued in the “Legacy Collection” of 2004). However, it is a very unsatisfactory reply. Some background: the original negative of Dracula was over-printed in the 1940s and disintegrated, so all we have are the prints themselves. They do not look very good on the whole, and short of finding a duplicate negative, no real restoration is ever going to be possible. That didn’t deter Universal from using a print as mediocre as the previous ones and raising the brightness level--and the sharpness to a lesser extent--for their “75th Anniversary Edition.” The result is a glary, edgy picture in which the already high level of grain and serious print damage are so accentuated that the film is nearly unwatchable. Universal’s overly cautious anti-analog/anti-digital copy-protection makes matters worse: if one needs to play the signal through a VCR into a TV--and the VCR permits it, the glare, incessant grain, and damage become even more unbearable. Playing this Dracula directly into a monitor via component inputs yields results almost as unacceptable. Universal’s changes make it possible to see all the background details, but only because everything looks fluorescently lit; true focus is actually diminished amidst the glare and exaggerated print problems. A film which, more than almost any other, is about night and shadows, now has scant evidence of either, the added artificial brightness lending every detail equal weight and depriving the film of visual dimensionality. Most black levels are now more often gray, and whites can be overpowering; the effect is one of badly faded, deteriorated film stock. This was not the film-makers’ intent. One of the first remarks in the film, spoken fearfully as the carriage speeds toward the village near the end of the day, “we must reach the inn before sundown,” is now rendered ludicrous because it looks like noon in the desert. Dracula’s subterranean crypt now has a bright light source as does the carriage rendezvous at midnight; such brightened dark shots are especially undermined by the unremitting prominence of grain and damage artifacts.

(...)

Unfortunately, the sound elements used here are the worst I have ever encountered--even compared with the most degraded TV prints: all dialogue is muffled, weak, and has a thick layer of buzzing distortion, many lines completely unintelligible; even viewers with normal hearing will need the English subtitles. Earlier DVDs had better sound (particularly the 1999 disc), and it is puzzling that Universal would judge the current sound elements to be acceptable. The primitive sound for Dracula was never good, and viewers have commented correctly that the audio in the 2004 “Legacy Collection” release was much inferior to the initial 1999 release. The sound in the current offering is similar to the 2004 edition but more intensely distorted. Why Universal didn’t reuse the far preferable sound track from the 1999 DVD for both later releases, simply reinstating the few erased notes at the end of the theatre scene, is a mystery.

(...)

Universal has always been, and is still, confounded by the squarer 1.19:1 aspect ratio of early 1930s talkies. Criterion, on the other hand, dealt with the squarer frame elegantly in their 2004 restoration of Fritz Lang’s M--also a 1931 film, preserving the original shape and the visual information by shrinking the image very slightly and pillarboxing it (the R2 Eureka transfer is similar, perhaps even more successful). Until recently, Universal would simply enlarge the 1.19:1 picture to later Academy standard 1.33:1 (really 1.37:1) and crop the edges severely. While that was already a poor solution, their current practices are more damaging and interventionist: shots are actually reframed, zoomed, and cropped to differing sizes at the discretion of the telecine engineer (usually losing more information than previously, owing to a preference for larger images)--in essence, making a pan-and-scan version of a non-widescreen film. The frame is occasionally shrunk as well as reframed to keep its contents intelligible: e.g., the newspaper clipping in Dracula, like the one in The Invisible Ray of “The Bela Lugosi Collection.” While a simple zoomed and cropped image already compromised the original appearance, the creation of continual new image sizes and placements is nearly a refilming: this Dracula goes farther than before in distorting the visual compositions of great cinematographer Karl Freund by inventing new relationships among shots.

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"Colorization" is a computerized video process whereby artsits add color on a frame-by-frame basis to a videotape transfer of a black-and-white film. Based on intuition, and perhaps a bit of historical research, the artists decide what colors are appropriate for the background, props, actors' and actresses' clothes, hair, eyes, skin, etc. The resulting "color" videotape is used for television and videocassette release, with the original black-and-white film sent unharmed to the film vault. It is likely that except for a few of the classics such as Casablanca, black-and-white video versions of colorized films generally will cease to be available.

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Like you, it seems, I have been fortunate to see a goodly number of old films in 35mm, occasionally in original prints, and I even have a few oddments of nitrate from the 1920s and 1940s (including some original camera negative trims from 1940s Universal horrors!) in my very small collection of cinemabilia. There is grain to be found in it all, yes, but nothing like what one is forced to endure in some vintage films on DVD. I would point particularly to King Kong, a film I have seen in 35mm a few times and in 16mm several more times (once, as the projectionist with Marcel Delgado in the audience) and which has never looked as harshly grainy as it now does on DVD. The scene in the ship's cabin is probably the nadir. That appears to be playing out amid a dense swarm of gnats -- exceedingly distracting and annoying. It seems that DVD encoding tends to exacerbate grain, much as MP3 audio encoding (something I actually have experience of) tends to exacerbate sizzle in transfers from noisy shellac discs.

I understand that there were outraged protests from some quarters about the virtually grainless (and to my eyes absolutely beautiful) image in the DVD release of Citizen Kane. I am all in favor of historical accuracy, but based on my theatrical viewing experiences I would contend that the grainless Kane is more faithful to what its original audiences saw than is the grain-amplified Kong.

After all, 480-line video, even on DVD, comes nowhere near resolving all of the detail, including grain, in a low-generation 35mm image, so if the video looks as grainy as the print, let alone moreso, then something is wrong. If the use of some degree of electronic grain reduction can correct that, then by all means it should be used.

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