The Bob Hope Collection (Lemon Drop Kid/Road To Bali/Road To Rio/My Favorite Brunette/Seven Little Foys/Shout! Factory DVD Set)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Films:

 

 

Shout! Factory continues to roll out Bob Hope feature film classics the entertainer apparently was able to retain despite a major studio like Paramount making and distributing them.  Before BCI Eclipse folded, they were starting to cover the titles, but Shout! is now catching up in the reissue department.  We covered four of the previous five films in earlier releases, with notes after the links below:

 

Lemon Drop Kid (1951) C+

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/10455/The+Lemon+Drop+Kid+(1951/Shout!

 

This is the same exact DVD we just covered from Shout!

 

Road To Bali (1947)/Road To Rio (1951) each B-

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6572/Road+To+Rio/Road+To+Bali+(Bob+Ho

 

This is from the out of print version of HD-DVD, a now defunct format.

 

My Favorite Brunette (1947) B-

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6773/My+Favorite+Brunette/Son+Of+Palefac

 

This is also from the out of print version of HD-DVD, a now defunct format, though Shout! has not issued Son Of Paleface yet.

 

Seven Little Foys (1955) B-

 

This is a backstage musical about widower Eddie Foy and how he takes his family into the show business world of vaudeville.  Semi-comical with its voiceovers, it is a familiar story and a well done film directed by Melville Shavelson (Beau James, Houseboat, It Started In Naples, The Five Pennies) that is typical of the A-level product Paramount was making when they made any release in large frame VistaVision.  The actual Charley Foy narrates, James Cagney reprises his famous performance as George M. Cohan from his 1942 hit Yankee Doodle Dandy and the result is an underrated Hope outing.  George Tobias, Milly Vitale and Angela Clarke (the 1953 Vincent Price 3-D remake of House Of Wax) also star.

 

 

The 1.33 X 1 image on all looks good, but Brunette and Bali (the only other color film here besides Foys) looked better in High Definition, while Rio has a print that needs some fixing up as the low definition DVD image hides problems the HD-DVD showed.  Lemon is the same DVD, so that leaves Foys, which is a big disappointment.  Why?  Because this was the first of four feature films in a row Hope made with Paramount in their large frame format VistaVision, a great format whose productions include White Christmas, The Desperate Hours, The Ten Commandments and Funny Face, plus several Alfred Hitchcock films.

 

Therefore, this should be 1.85 X 1 and not butchered to 1.33 X 1.  Director of Photography John F. Warren (Anything Goes, The Country Girl, Colossus Of New York, Beau James, Zero Hour!) used the format very effectively several times in his career and delivered top rate work here.  You can see how good the color must have been, but compositions are ruined here.  Hope Shout! does a Blu-ray with the correct aspect ratio.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on all are just fine for their age and oddly, Brunette, Rio and Bali sound better there than on the surprisingly compressed HD-DVD versions.  Foys was monophonic in all of its prints, though I wonder if stereo recordings exist somewhere in this case that would allow for a 5.1 upgrade.  There are no extras.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo