Arthur (1981)

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1981
Running Time	93:15
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Programme
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Steve Gordon
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Dudley Moore Liza Minnelli John Gielgud
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$24.95	Music	Burt Bacharach

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 1.0 (192Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 1.0 (192Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 1.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French Italian Dutch Arabic Spanish Portuguese English for the Hearing Impaired Italian for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, New York City street scene (?Park Avenue)

    His father, Stanford Bach (Thomas Barbour), thinks he is a spineless weakling and wants him to marry Susan Johnson (Jill Eikenberry), the daughter of self-made tycoon Burt Johnson (Stephen Elliot), in order to further consolidate the family's power and wealth. If Arthur refuses the marriage, he will be disinherited and he will lose his share of the family fortune - a cool $700 million (OK, maybe that's not a lot by today's standards, but remember this movie was made in the early eighties).

    The only person he truly cares for is his butler Hobson, played magnificently by the late Sir John Gielgud who deservedly won an Academy Award for his performance in this movie. We get the feeling that Hobson played the role of Arthur's father in a way that his real father never did, and therefore the scenes between Arthur and Hobson are particularly poignant towards the end.

    Just when Arthur has almost resigned himself to becoming respectable and marrying someone he can't stand, he meets poor, struggling waitress-who-wants-to-be-an-actress Linda Marolla (Liza Minelli) while she is shoplifting a tie at Bergdorf Goodman (birthday present for unemployed Dad played by Barney Martin). He starts to fall in love with her, but which shall it be - love or money?

    Arthur is a delightful comedy. The movie starts off with Arthur and his chauffeur cruising around the streets of New York trying to pick up a prostitute. Don't be put off by the world's most irritating laugh (coming from Arthur) at the beginning - if you stick it through you will be rewarded by some of the funniest one-liners ever, delivered with impeccable timing by a perfect ensemble cast. The humour works at several levels in this movie, ranging from straightforward slapstick and situational comedy to some very dry and sophisticated observations on life.

    I particularly liked Geraldine Fitzgerald as Martha Bach - the perfect example of a matriarch, combining gentleness and sweetness with absolute ruthlessness.

    I was initially introduced to Arthur not through the movie itself, but through the soundtrack, featuring music composed by Burt Bacharach and his then-wife Carole Bayer-Sager. I found the soundtrack album (yes, it's a genuine vinyl LP - they didn't make CDs in those days) in a record store and was so captivated by it I bought it. The title song sung by Christopher Cross deserves the popularity it received and is still vibrant and easy to listen to today, nearly 20 years after it was written.

Video

    The print used is fairly clean and devoid of marks. There is some grain present, but no more than what you might expect considering the age of the movie. The picture is a little soft, but exhibits reasonable detail. Shadow detail is below reference quality but probably about average for movies of the period.

    The start of the movie (when Arthur and his chauffeur are cruising the streets of New York City in Arthur's Rolls Royce) seems to suffer from poor black levels. I suspect this is present in the original film and not a result of the film-to-video transfer as the rest of the film exhibits very good black levels. The car and street lights exhibit minor posterization but I did not find the effect too annoying.

    Colour saturation is below the quality of a recent film but is actually quite good for a movie originally released in 1981. I suspect colour correction has been applied during the transfer. Liza Minelli's outfits in particular stand out and are vividly saturated with primary colours.

    The DVD comes with a reasonable selection of subtitle tracks. I turned on the "English for the Hearing Impaired" subtitles at the beginning of the movie to check them out. I would rate the selection of captions as below average in terms of completeness and accuracy for a "Hard of Hearing" track but probably about average if it was just a normal subtitle track. I apply a higher standard to the Hearing Impaired tracks as I expect non-verbal audio cues to be captured on the subtitle track in addition to dialogue.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The audio transfer appears to have been mastered at an extremely low level. I had to crank up the volume control all the way to reference level (0 dB) to get a reasonable sound level. Despite that, however, the audio transfer exhibits reasonable equalization and sounds rather natural.

    There are no obvious audio glitches such as audio synchronization problems. The IMDB reports that the music doesn't seem particularly synchronized to the band during the engagement party but I didn't particularly notice anything amiss.

    As the soundtrack is in mono, the subwoofer and surround speakers are not engaged during the feature.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

• Pan & Scan version
• Production notes

• 16x9 enhanced widescreen version

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall