While the City Sleeps - OAR?

[Frankie]

As some of you might know, Fritz Lang's While the City Sleeps will be released in the UK on August 23rd by a relatively new company called Exposure Cinema.

A couple of days ago I stumbled across the official press release in which the movie was announced with a aspect ratio of 1.33:1. After checking the IMDb, I wrote a mail to the company and got the following response:

Regarding the aspect ratio, the film will be presented in 1.37:1. Although widely advertised as being an 'RKO-Scope' picture (which equates to about 2:1), the film was in fact shot in the academy ratio (1.33) and post-converted to 'scope in cinemas at the time, effectively cropping the 1.33 picture to widescreen. This means thatour decision to release the 1.37 print is closest to the director's original intention.

I hope that this answers your questions.

True or false?

PS: Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt will probably be released by Exposure Cinema as well.

[Steve-O]

I'm sure the original intention was to screen the movie cropped in widescreen. I do understand why they shot it that way -- so it'd look good on TV with no letter box. But today, we have wide TVs and it should screen like it did in theaters. My opinion. Who knows what Fritz Lang intended.

[noirguru]

I'm sure the original intention was to screen the movie cropped in widescreen. I do understand why they shot it that way -- so it'd look good on TV with no letter box. But today, we have wide TVs and it should screen like it did in theaters. My opinion. Who knows what Fritz Lang intended.

Fritz Lang, once said,"Scope is not good for humans, only for snakes and funerals", which he repeated in Jean-Luc Godards, Contempt(1963), playing himself!

[Ned]

TCM premier on November 1st!

Ned

[Steve-O]

Unfortunately it has aired on TCM before... and always in 1.33:1. Even their technical specs says the movie screened in theaters in 1.66:1

A recent screening at the film forum in NY was is 1.33:1 as well.

[Frankie]

Received the Exposure Cinema disc today. Posted my thoughts over at the Criterionforum, too:

Some technical specs first:
The disc comes with a normal keep case and features an inlay with a poster reproduction on each side (Italian & US poster)
DVD is locked to region 2
It's a DVD-9 (approx. 6GB were used)
Runtime: 95:39 Min. (PAL)
Audio is DD 2.0 Mono and the disc features English hard of hearing subs.
Besides the Poster,stills and pressbook gallery the disc does feature the Original Trailer.

Now to the picture quality and I would say it was worth waiting. Took some screencaps with WinDVD and converted them to .jpg at a quality of 100 with GIMP:

[Davidmk]

thanks for the dvd review .

[Mandrakegray]

Those screencaps look great!! I should admit that I have never seen the film (holds head in shame), so this certainly has my interest.

Thanks for the specs info Frankie!!

[Ashirg]

Here's what Exposure Cinema sent to me Re: aspect ratio. You can also find it in the review of the disc at DVD Beaver. Apparently, all SuperScope prints were too soft to use because they are actually enlargements of cropped full screen image.

[Steve-O]

thanks Ashirg.

Still, I'm not convinced this was the filmmakers intention to have so much wasted space on the top and bottom of the screen. The intention was to screen the movie cropped so it appeared wide screen to the viewing public- and shoot it by cropping the viewfinder so the photographer would know how the movie would look on movie screens eventually (they obviously couldn't foresee the future of TV... with everyone having a wide-screen home theater system in their homes)

With digital transfers getting better and better (see The Maltese Falcon on Blue Ray) you could conceivably transfer the film to a digital copy so the cropped version wouldn't look "blown up" or blurry. Blue Ray DVDs are high res so the picture line count is doubled. So you could transfer a movie with a higher resolution and then crop it for 16X9 and put it on a regular DVD. Even from that one shot you provided shows the film framing looks more correct cropped. Rogue Cop is another one. The TCM airing make George Raft and Robert Taylor look like leprechauns.

Just my 2 cents.