The Four Feathers

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General		Extras
Category	War	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1939	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	110 minutes	Other Extras	Production Notes Cast & Crew Biographies
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Movie
Region	4	Director	Zoltan Korda
Studio Distributor	Magna Pacific	Starring	John Clements Ralph Richardson June Duprez Sir C. Aubrey Smith Allan Jeaves Jack Allen
Case	Magna/Carlton
RRP	$29.95	Music

    John Clements stars as Harry Faversham, a Lieutenant in the British Army. His regiment is about to be sent to Egypt to fight in the Sudan, but he elects to resign his commission on the eve of their sailing for Egypt. This is viewed as an act of cowardice by his three closest friends and by his fiancé, who send him white feathers in contempt.

    Harry travels to the Sudan to redeem himself.

    The IMDB, and the back cover of this DVD, give the running time of this movie as 130 minutes. This DVD is 110 minutes long, and even allowing for the 4% speed-up inherent in PAL encoding, the running time is still 15 minutes shy of what it should be. There doesn't appear to be anything specifically missing from the movie, but I am not at all familiar with the original movie, so I cannot specifically say.
[Addendum 25th May 1999: The disc label gives the running time of this movie at 110 minutes. Magna Pacific state that this is the correct running time.]

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced. Being made in 1939, this presentation is in the original aspect ratio. The transfer appears to have been taken from a print, since reel change markings are clearly evident in the upper right corner of the transfer.

    On my DVD player (Pioneer DV-505), the movie paused at 33:04, which is the transition from Chapter 7 to Chapter 8. Skipping to the next chapter with the remote made the movie continue. This appears to be a glitch with the encoding of chapter information, since skipping from the pause to the next Chapter actually made the movie go back a few seconds to the start of Chapter 8. The transition between Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 was not recognized by my player, with the counter pausing a few seconds before the movie does.
[Addendum 25th May 1999: This glitch has been confirmed on my player with two separate discs, so it appears to be a mastering glitch.]

    The transfer was variably sharp. At times, it was surprisingly clear, and at other times it was very blurry. Shadow detail was quite poor, with most dark scenes simply being dark with little detail in the shadows. Low level noise was not a problem with this transfer.

    The colours were generally surprisingly well rendered. There were a number of scenes which showed significant degradation of colour, but generally most scenes looked quite good colour-wise. Reds, in particular, were rendered quite vibrantly, even though there was a small amount of colour bleeding apparent.

    MPEG artefacts were spread throughout this transfer, particularly in some of the background scenes, where blockiness was clearly apparent. There was also a significant amount of MPEG motion artefact, which comprised of otherwise still images which wobbled from side-to-side. This was particularly apparent early on in the movie, where newspaper headlines wobbled significantly, with significant degradation in the resolution of the image.

    Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some overuse of edge enhancement, leading to ghost images around foreground objects which, whilst not particularly annoying, was certainly noticeable.

    Film artefacts were frequent, and in keeping with the age of the transfer. There were a lot of very large artefacts scattered throughout the movie. Surprisingly, these did not detract all that much from the overall movie experience.

Audio

    Dialogue, whilst being quite muffled in frequency response, was nonetheless quite clear and audible, helped no doubt by the clarity of diction of the English actors. There were frequent pops and crackles throughout the soundtrack, none of which were particularly distracting.

    The audio sync was slightly out during the early part of the movie, but this seemed to improve after the first 30 minutes or so.

    The music was suitably melodramatic and orchestral in nature, almost being stereotypical of this era of movie-making.

Menu

Cast & Crew Biographies

Production Notes

    The video quality is very poor at times, and acceptable at other times.

    The audio quality is poor but acceptable given the vintage of the movie.

    The extras present are very limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna
14th May 1999
Amended 25th May 1999