Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett
and the Silent Era Company.
All Rights Reserved. |
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Wild and
Woolly
(1917)
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Douglas Fairbanks stars in this comedy-drama from the John Emerson-Anita Loos team of a rich, eastern dude who longs for the western life and copes with different circumstances than he expects in Arizona.
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 Flicker Alley
2008 DVD edition
Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer (1916-1921), color-toned black & white, color-tinted black & white and black & white, 760 minutes total, not rated, including Wild and Woolly (1917), color-toned black & white, 72 minutes, not rated.
Flicker Alley, FA0011,
UPC 6-17311-67359-7, ISBN 1-8939-6735-2.
One single-sided, DUAL-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD disc (five DVDs in the set); 1.33:1 aspect ratio picture in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at ? Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to ? fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 2.0 stereo sound encoded at ? Kbps audio bit rate; English language intertitles, no subtitles; 11 chapter stops; five slimline DVD keepcases in cardboard slipcase; $89.95.
Release date: 2 December 2008.
Country of origin: USA
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This is the best available edition of Wild and Woolly available on DVD home video, despite the coarsely transferred Wild and Woolly and When the Clouds Roll By, with their coarse (vertical!) pixels easily detected and distracting on high-definition monitors.
Included is a 32-page booklet with an essay by Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta. The supplemental material includes productions stills and pressbook reproductions, an audio essay for A Modern Musketeer, and a reproduction of Fairbanks’ first film contract. This boxset collection won an award at Il Cinema Ritrovato in 2009 for excellence.
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USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
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 TeleVista
2007 DVD edition
Wild and Woolly (1917), black & white, 65 minutes, not rated.
TeleVista, no catalog number, UPC 0-29502-41917-2.
One single-sided, single-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD disc; 1.33:1 aspect ratio picture in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at ? Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to ? fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 2.0 mono sound encoded at ? Kbps audio bit rate; English language intertitles, no subtitles; 12 chapter stops; standard DVD keepcase; $19.95.
Release date: 9 October 2007.
Country of origin: USA •
Ratings (1-10): video: 4 / audio: 5 / additional content: 1 / overall: 4.
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This DVD edition has been mastered from a fair-to-good 8mm reduction print, that was originally prepared by Blackhawk Films, with a few sections that are flat and grey. Some care has been taken in the video transfer to center intertitles than were presented off-center in the source print. Still . . . for the money . . . lousy, lousy, lousy.
The film is accompanied by a combination of prerecorded music segments that includes a small emsemble of violin, viola and piano, woodwinds and piano, full orchestra, and synthesizer and electric guitar, among so many others. The supplemental material is nothing more than a series of still frames from this substandard source print. Ridiculous.
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USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
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Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
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Other silent era DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS films available on home video.
Other WESTERN FILMS of the silent era available on home video.
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Douglas Fairbanks filmography in The Progressive Silent Film List
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