Great Prince of Foxes Movie Shortchanged By Cheaply Mastered Fox DVD

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	• Tyrone Power Collection (Blood and Sand / Son of Fury / The Black Rose / Prince of Foxes / The Captain from ... Tyrone Power, Rita Hayworth 20th Century Fox, 2007 average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Prince of Foxes Movie Shortchanged By Cheaply Mastered Fox DVD

I bought the Tyrone Power boxset for two of the five movies in it, Prince of Foxes and Son of Fury. After checking out these movies, 20th Century Fox's record of making badly mastered DVDs for its budget line of older releases continues, to judge by my experience. I previously had to return two lemon film noir DVDs, Where The Sidewalk Ends and I Wake Up Screaming. The two Tyrone Power movies I checked with DVDInfoPro showed read errors in the second layers, with Son of Fury being in the worst shape. A DVD player can compensate for some of these errors, but on my computer, I saw freeze frames when these mastering defects showed up. If my free software program shows these errors (a very rare occurrence for me), then Fox should also have the mastering software that also shows read errors in the finished product. The odds are that I wasn't the only one who bought DVDs from Fox with major defects in them.

On another subject, the Prince of Foxes DVD is supposed to be restored, but you could have fooled me. The image is loaded with grain, and there are scenes where the edge of the picture on my computer monitor, in the overscan area, shows wavy variations in brightness. Unlike Warner Bros., which runs most of their older classics through a 2K scanner to improve the image, Fox seems to think it can sometimes get away with boosting the timing and running a program to remove screen debris. That works fine with a movie like Son of Fury, where the negative is in good shape, but Prince of Foxes is another story.

You would think that Fox would expend a little more effort fixing up a movie whose title is Prince of Foxes, but Fox thought otherwise. I had a previous copy of this movie on DVDR, made from a VHS tape of the Cinemax broadcast in 1998. The image quality on that DVDR shows less grain than this new Fox DVD. I still think that most of Prince of Foxes was filmed on Technicolor film stock, whatever the studio records appear to show. Leon Shamroy was an ace Director of Photography for the studio who did great work with Technicolor (The Black Swan), so the too dark timing in many scenes could not be the fault of Shamroy, who was an experienced DP who did not make that sort of lighting mistake continuously, especially with a director like Henry King in charge. So, working with a print that was tough to master to DVD, Fox technicians took the cheap way out, making a transfer to computer without first fixing up the print material.

The Prince of Foxes DVD is a big disappointment for me.

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A long time coming, but worth it

Finally Tyrone Power has his own box set collection, and we fans hope it is the first of many.

Unfortunately, Power's best swashbuckling/adventure films, The Mark of Zorro and The Black Swan, have already been released. Nevertheless, this set has three absolute gems - Blood and Sand, Captain from Castile, and Son of Fury, all top-notch films. The latter film introduced the gorgeous Gene Tierney to audiences.

I'm not crazy about the outside cover artwork (from Captain from Castile), which doesn't resemble Power, but the artwork on the remaining individual DVD covers is stunning, and there is some wonderful film restoration done. I'll never get over not seeing Prince of Foxes in color. If there was ever a movie that deserves to be colorized (in a good way, like The Mark of Zorro was - I am NOT referring to the old colorization that Ted Turner did) - it's Prince of Foxes, with its authentic Italian surroundings and interiors. I hope Fox will eventually do that.

Power gives wonderful performances in all of the films. I admit my least favorite movie here is The Black Rose, in no small measure because of Cecile Aubrey, but the movie is pretty to look at. For brilliant direction, performances and cinematography, the Oscar-winning Blood and Sand is fantastic and is my favorite film in the set. It also has my favorite performance of Power's - in, not surprisingly, the best role - of the five films.

The other thing this set has is fantastic FEATURES - all of them are great, and one of them is a Power family reunion of sorts, with Linda Christian, her two children, and Tyrone Power Jr. This is a real treasure. There is also "The Leading Ladies" which features some of his living costars - Patricia Neal, Jayne Meadows, Terry Moore, Colleen Gray. A third feature is a Movietone about his fabulous wedding to Linda Christian, where 10,000 people mobbed the outside of the church (as opposed to the 1,000 when Tom Cruise married in the same place in Italy). The last feature is "Behind the Scenes" with some wonderful still photographs, clips, and interviews with Oscar nominee James Cromwell, whose father directed the film, and comments from a film historian.

Ty fans will love this. It is SO GREAT to have Captain from Castile, Son of Fury, Blood and Sand, Prince of Foxes, and The Black Rose out on DVD. Here's hoping Power gets the second collection he deserves.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4

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