The Gang's All Here (Busby Berkeley, 1943)

[viciousliar]

New York City's Film Forum whips up a delicious Technicolor camp extravaganza this month, and that Cobra Woman is in on it.

[viciousliar]

Here's a review of the laserdisc (which was available only very briefly) apparently the only home video format in which it's been released -

I wonder if the rights to this film is caught up in some legal issues...d'ya read me, flixyflox?

[viciousliar]

The color is good - similar to Fox Channel titles like Down Argentine Way. It could be even better, but I am not really happy with a lot of Fox' color restorations - say Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - which end up too dark after the restoration work. (Pity this as Fox is maybe just behind Warner in the care it takes with classic material.)
Anyway a transfer of this print would look just fine (as does my DVDR of the LD)

Thanks for responding, Flixy. I agree that Fox's Technicolor DVD transfers register too dark. In that respect, Leave Her to Heaven wound up losing some of the splendor and lushness of its original colors. I guess Fox could claim that the blacks look "rock solid" by doing this, while masking inherent flaws in the source materials in the process. But I don't like that strategy; duller colors and less detail is a steep price to pay for these "improvements." The R2 version is in fact preferable, despite it being a bit more noisy. Also, the untampered-with trailer on the R1 disc more closely resembles what LHTH should have looked like. Just see for yourself: Brighter, more saturated colors. I've heard that Fox is the studio that has the least well-preserved film library among the "big five," so they have lesser elements to work with from the start before the transferring process. MGM, Goldwyn and Disney(and a great portion of Warner's prints and original elements) have been stored and looked after much more conscientiously through the years. That gives them a head start, and this is more often than not shown to advantage at the end of the road. [/b]

[viciousliar]

Carmen and the erectile bananas:

"some people say I dress too gay
but every day I feel so gay
and when I'm gay I dress that way
is something wrong with that?"

You just can't go wrong with Carmen going absolutely bananas at full blast on coke, can you?

[Michael Kerpan]

forgive my ignorance of American geography - it's Paduca.

Paducah

;~}

[viciousliar]

This one's for you, flixy (and perhaps Criterion, Matt) - there IS one, just one perfect print of The Gang's All Here in existence, and it's NOT the one shown in NYC this week.

[Jaime_Weinman]

Insane as it is, TGAH is exactly the kind of thing that Fox should have been doing with its musicals in the '40s -- something really lavish, vulgar and visually spectacular to match that lavish, vulgar and visually spectacular Fox Technicolor. So many of the Fox color musicals were handled by abashed directors like Walter Lang and choreographers who weren't about to do anything really weird; Berkeley, on the other hand...

Of course, this was the end of the road for his style; MGM was just about to take over the movie musical, and their way of doing numbers was to stage them semi-realistically, with long takes and few flights of insane fancy. Berkeley did a few movies for Arthur Freed, but you could tell his heart wasn't really in that "respectable" style.

[Tom Peeping]

The Gang's All Here has just been released by Fox France (Region 2 DVD) under its French translation (sic) : Banana Split.

I didn't expect much from the quality of the DVD but had a fantastic surprise : the transfer is gorgeous, the sound pristine, the subtitles removable & the price very decent. The cover art of the DVD is better than the wrap box. As must go for anyone who has a taste in the tutti-frutti...

[Lino]

I don't suppose it has any extras...?

[Tom Peeping]

Alor! Il'y a une legende? (url)

David, you want the url of a retailer ?

Lino, there are no extra features. The quality of the transfer alone is worth the prrice, though.

[Matt]

This has to be coming from Fox in R1 soon, doesn't it? What could possibly be the delay?

[Lino]

I'm not sure but I think that the Betty Grable set's underperformance in the sales department (i.e. they didn't sell that many) may be one of the causes why another batch of Fox Marquee Musicals has not yet been announced.

I'm torn. In France, The Nanny, a Sonja Henie title and now the holy grail of Miranda fans have all been released by Fox in stellar transfers and I'm feeling very tempted to push the "achetter" button...

Have all the December titles by Fox R1 been announced yet?

[Tom Peeping]

Oui David, absolument. Je viens de regarder le film et les couleurs de Natalie sont fantastiques. Il n'y a pas un point blanc ou un scratch sur tout le film : c'est impressionnant. Whether the film went into a major restoration, whether they found a clean as new print somewhere in the vaults of Fox.

[Lino]

Tom, if you're reading -- do you have this french edition of Sonja Henie's Sun Valley Serenade? If you do, would you be so kind as to post some screen caps?

I've been dying to get my hands on some Sonja (Fox R1, where are you, goddamit?!) and would love to know if the A/V quality of the above disc is worthy of spending some Euros.

[Tom Peeping]

Lino, I haven't got Sun Valley Serenade nor any Henie movie. I don't even think I ever saw one (is it a film of hers where there is skating on black ice ?). If you say SVS is a watchable film, even a good one, I might go get it and post caps though.

[Lino]

Yes, there's skating alright! Sonja Henie's movies are terribly unpretentious good fun (as are most of Fox's musicals from the 40's -- and that's why I love them!).

But I was thinking that you might want to rent it first (if such a thing is possible chez toi) and save yourself the trouble of wasting your precious Euros!

By the way, The Gang's All Here is also available from the UK but only as part of a boxset. Amazon UK link. The other movies in the Collection are: ON THE AVENUE, SUN VALLEY SERENADE, DADDY LONG LEGS, SECOND FIDDLE, ORCHESTA WIVES, DOLLY SISTERS, PIN UP GIRL.