Doll's House, A (1973/I) (Force) (1973)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Menu Animation & Audio Notes Biographies-Cast
Rating
Year Of Production	1973
Running Time	95:11 (Case: 105)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Patrick Garland
Studio Distributor	Beyond Home Entertainment	Starring	Claire Bloom Ralph Richardson Anthony Hopkins Denholm Elliott
Case	Brackley-Trans-No Lip
RPI	$18.95	Music	John Barry

    "…The scene is set in a Norwegian town in the 1870s and portrays the lifestyle and ethics of a middle-class family consisting of Nora Helmer (Clare Bloom), the mother of three young children, her husband Torvald Helmer (Sir Anthony Hopkins), newly appointed manager of the local bank, and their very old friend Dr. Rank (Sir Ralph Richardson).

    The villain of the piece is Nils Krogsad (Denholm Elliott), a bank employee and scheming blackmailer, whose hold over Nora eventually wrecks her marriage…"

    For me, this movie just reinforces my rule to never watch any movie that was made before 1980. There are of course some notable exceptions to this rule, such as Alien, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Jaws, but as a whole I find it is a pretty good rule that serves me well.

Video

    Foreground sharpness is good when the picture is perfectly still. Background sharpness is reasonable when the picture is perfectly still, but whenever there is any movement on the screen it takes a dramatic nose-dive for the worse and dissolves into one big blur in most instances. Truly awful and very distracting, to say the least. The shadow detail is pretty good. Some excessive edge enhancement can be seen around many of the strongly contrasted objects, and some subtle brightness level changes also occur throughout the film - the opening scene is a perfect example.

    Overall, the colour isn't too bad, especially when you take into account the age of this film. I feel most of the limitations here were caused by the original film stock rather than the transfer. Skin tones look good for the most part.

    MPEG artefacts are rife, with this transfer suffering from just about every known MPEG artefact problem there is. The biggest problems occur where there is movement on the screen. These problems include large chunks of the background picture information trailing behind where it should actually be, ringing around the edges of objects, background detail disappearing and even severe macro-blocking - one particularly bad example can be found at 6:57. Put all these artefacts together and the picture becomes almost unbearable to watch. After watching the video bit rate meter for some time, I can understand why this disc looks the way it does - there simply is not enough bandwidth given to the video stream, as it rarely if ever goes above 5Mb/s and usually hovers around the 3.75Mb/s mark.

    With the age of this film we have to expect some film artefacts. There were some whoppers, but overall they were pretty reasonable in both size and quantity.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The overall sound is hollow and tinny sounding, which is undoubtedly due to the original soundtrack not the transfer.

    Dialogue was easy to understand throughout the entire movie, but rarely in sync - more on that shortly.

    There are some minor clicks and pops, but these are rare. What is not rare however, is the constant hiss that can be easily heard throughout the entire film. Compounding this is the atrocious audio sync, which has a lot to do with the large amounts of looped dialogue in this film. Occasionally the audio sync is correct, but mostly it is either marginal or totally out. I'd estimate that no more than 30% of the entire movie even comes close to having correct lip sync.

    John Barry's musical score can only be described as bland, repetitive and eventually irritating.

    The surround channel usage is rather odd, which can be explained by the fact that this is an artificially created Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix that was created from either the original mono or stereo soundtrack. The surround channel use in most cases is over-loud and filled with sounds that should be coming from the front soundstage instead of the rear. In the end, these inconstancies just detract further from a terrible soundtrack.

    There must have been some signal going to my subwoofer as it did not turn off during the movie, but I cannot say that I ever heard or felt its presence. This, however, is not surprising considering the film's content and its age.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The Scenes menu is just another way to get to seven particular chapters, and is of no real use whatsoever.

Facts & Trivia

Biographies

Awards

    The video quality is by far the worst on DVD that I have ever seen. MPEG artefacts are rife right from the opening scene to the end.

    The audio quality is very average, but this is mostly to do with the original film's soundtrack rather than the transfer itself.

    The extras are very limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall