Michel Hafner (19 June 1999):
If you have had the privilege to see a 70 mm print of "West Side Story" in good shape you know how splendid this film looks. How sharp the images are and how gorgeous the colors, how the music and choreography sweep you away and the drama touches your heart. And you are painfully aware that there is no satisfying substitute for this 70 mm version. No 35 mm print will come close, no HDTV version will and lower resolution formats like DVD or laserdisc better not even try. Right? Well, I guess so.
DVD by its technical specifications has about 10 times less lines of resolution than a 70 mm show print, HDTV has 5 times less and 35 mm has half the resolution. In addition DVD and laserdisc lack the contrast range and color resolution of film. So how big a 'disappointment' is this DVD for spoilt people like me? The answer is, surprisingly, that the disappointment is minor.
Yes, there is no comparison concerning sharpness, but in all other aspects the DVD, while inferior, holds up well in comparison and delivers the goods. The film master used was in good shape. Some sequences are practically mint. Others suffer somewhat from speckles and dirt particles. It is never bad though, and for a film this age it is actually stunning how good the master looks. Better results would have required cost intensive digital paint jobs. The images are sometimes a bit less than rock steady (as in the opening overview shots of New York). Image sharpness is mostly very good and comes close to the best we have seen from films of the 90s. The use of 16:9 enhancement is crucial here. Films with aspect ratios above 2.00 : 1 desperately need every scanline they can get on DVD to provide an image that comes close to the theatrical experience, or at least does not look totally inadequate in comparison, or is riddled with artifacts. Even with 16:9 enhancement there remain problems with medium and wide shots filled with people and objects. They always lack definition. Highlights on people's faces and their teeth look unnatural and fuzzy, for example. This DVD is no exception here, but this is about as good as it gets with DVD.
Grain and noise level are low and never distracting. The transfer is so good that you can see the subtle image quality change when a scene with optical effects is coming up (optical effects require additional image generations which raise the noise level and reduce sharpness somewhat) (an example is the start of chapter 10). A couple of overview shots in chapter 10 seem to come from a lower quality master since image quality is clearly worse than in the rest of the film, by the way.
Color and contrast reproduction are first rate. There are video artifacts in the form of occasionally some aliasing (for example watch the police car in chapter 16: 2:38 ...) and some overenhanced edges (as in chapter 4: 2:26 ...). It is never distracting, though. I have not seen artifacts from digital noise removal. Finally compression by DVCC has been handled with a good eye for detail, it seems, since annoying artifacts are absent. There is some I-frame pulsing which is invisible under normal viewing conditions (example at start of chapter 9). A job well done.
So is the DVD as a whole. Without any doubt this is one of finest DVDs MGM has issued so far and especially one of the finest examples of a DVD version of a classic movie made several decades ago (unlike MGMs DVD of Gone with the Wind (1939), but that's another story). It can not replace the wonder of a 70 mm print, but in its own right it stands up very well, and is often outright spectacular and well capable of making your jaw of the 90s drop in awe for this movie of the 60s. And isn't this all we ultimately can expect and want from our home theatre, the impression that we had an authentic look at the film in question and got an idea of how it cast its magic spell back then, when it was playing on the big screen?
There are no supplements except for a trailer which looks as if it were mastered from a xth generation VHS tape: horrible. It serves as a reminder of how the whole DVD might have looked if one of the 'crap labels' had done it on a bad day. The trailer claims that "West Side Story", unlike other classics, grows younger. I agree.
