Cleopatra Jones (1973)

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General		Extras
Category	Action	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1973
Running Time	84:58
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Jack Starrett
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Tamara Dobson Bernie Casey Brenda Sykes Shelley Winters
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$14.95	Music	J.J. Johnson Joe Simon

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes, it was the 70s!
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Arguably a highlight of the Blaxploitation era of American film in the 70s, Cleopatra Jones mixes the suave attitude of James Bond with the jive-talking street cred of Shaft and applies it to a strong female lead character, a formula that was unique in its time.

    Cleopatra Jones (Tamara Dobson) is an American special agent that spends most of her time overseas busting large-scale drug operations. When she torches a Turkish poppy plantation, the mobsters back home in the U.S.A. get rather p***** off and plot a scheme that will force her to return to her hometown and face retribution from the furious dealers.

    Cleo's local organised crime gang is led by the maniacal Mummy (Shelley Winters), an unpredictable character that dishes out punishment on her boys like it's going out of fashion. Mummy's thugs manage to get into plenty of trouble of their own, and with names like Pickle, Doodlebug and Snake what do you expect!

    This film is thirty years old this year, and a lot of the scenes that would have been intense back then are a bit laughable by today's standards, particularly the action and karate skills. This feature spawned a sequel that doesn't match the class of the original, but is worth watching for interest's sake. All obvious faults aside, Cleopatra Jones is a well crafted great bit of fun and is light and entertaining enough to stand up to many repeat viewings.

Video

    This is a good video transfer for a film of this vintage. Cleopatra Jones was shown theatrically in an aspect of 2.35:1, and the transfer to DVD is presented in the same ratio, complete with 16x9 enhancement.

    The overall transfer is a pleasure to watch and doesn't present any major problems. There is a good degree of sharpness present, with many examples of film-like detail. Black levels appear consistently solid and exhibit good shadow detail. I didn't detect any low level noise in this transfer.

    Colours appeared a little on the yellow side, but were consistent for their part. There were no signs of bleeding or oversaturation in this transfer.

    The film itself has been nicely restored and is generally artefact free, apart from some small positive and negative specs of dirt that seem to be concentrated around reel changes. All of the film artefacting is kept well within a tolerable level in my opinion, and is not overly distracting. There are some slight instances of aliasing and small reel change marks to be found, but these are similarly unobtrusive. I didn't notice any MPEG compression issues with this transfer.

    I watched the film for more than half an hour with subtitles enabled and didn't come across any problems at all. The English subtitles are accurate to the spoken word and are paced well with the dialogue of the film.

    This is a single layered disc, so no layer transition is present.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The original English audio is presented as it was many years ago - Dolby Digital 2.0 mono.

    Dialogue is almost always easy to understand, although there were a couple of occasions where I needed the subtitles to help me understand some of the 70s-style jive. The film's ADR work and audio sync is spot-on at all times and doesn't present any real issues. There is one scene in the film that utilises some location audio (50:09) and the vocal delivery comes across a bit crackly and distorted, however this is only brief.

    The music of the film is wonderfully retro, with funky bass-lines and wah-wah guitar that plant the film firmly in the 70s era. The action scenes use some different rhythms such as Indian tabla and percussion to help build tension, and work very nicely.

    The mono soundtrack performed well throughout, but was generally unimpressive and showed a limited dynamic range. There was certainly no surround activity or subwoofer usage present.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    Absolutely nothing, I'm sad to say. The menu system is static, silent and includes 16x9 enhancement. The main menu graphics feature a large, tacky Warner Bros. logo.

    The video transfer is good for a film of this age and has been nicely restored.

    The audio transfer represents the original mono soundtrack well, but doesn't go any further.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall