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Category:    Home > Reviews > Drama > Gangster > Depression > Prohibition > Gambling > Murder > Crime > Cable TV > Drugs > Biography > Music > Boardwalk Empire: The Complete Series (2010 - 2014/HBO Blu-ray Box Set)/GoodFellas: 25th Anniversary Edition (1990/Warner Blu-ray)/The Frank Sinatra 5-Film Collection (1945 - 1964/Anchors Aweigh/On Th

Boardwalk Empire: The Complete Series (2010 - 2014/HBO Blu-ray Box Set)/GoodFellas: 25th Anniversary Edition (1990/Warner Blu-ray)/The Frank Sinatra 5-Film Collection (1945 - 1964/Anchors Aweigh/On The Town/Guys & Dolls/Ocean's 11/Robin & The Seven Hoods/Goldwyn/MGM/Warner Blu-ray Set)/The Long Good Friday (1980/HandMade Films/Arrow U.K. Region B Import Blu-ray)


Picture: B/B+/B/B Sound: B/B+/B-/B- Extras: B/B+/B/B Main Programs: B/A-/B-/B-



PLEASE NOTE: The Long Good Friday Import Blu-ray Set is now only available from our friends at Arrow U.K., can only play on Blu-ray players that can handle Region B Blu-ray releases and can be ordered from the link below.



Now we revisit some film and TV favorites, all connected by the Gangster genre including two classic films with nice upgrades...



Boardwalk Empire: The Complete Series (2010 - 2014) has wrapped up after a five season run that was richer than it might have been, but the show quit while it was ahead and did what it could do. I felt it lost track of a few things, but this new HBO Blu-ray Box Set brings it all together with a bonus disc. Here are the five season repeated in this set, including all extras and the same top rate picture/sound performance...


One

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/11412/Boardwalk+Empire:+The+Complete+First+Season


Two

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/11763/Boardwalk+Empire:+The+Complete+Second+Seas


Three

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/12298/Boardwalk+Empire+%E2%80%93+The+Complete


Four

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/13019/Boardwalk+Empire:+The+Complete+Fourth+Seaso


Five

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/13263/Big+Driver+(2014/Lionsgate+DVD)/Boardwalk+Em


The new extras on the bonus disc, all in HD, include The Final Shot: A Farewell To Boardwalk Empire (a half-hour long), Anatomy Of A Hit, Building The Boardwalk, Shooting The Series, Designing The Series and Visual Effects, the latter of which are shorter clips.



Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas: 25th Anniversary Edition (1990) is back and finally in a new edition that has the long-overdue upgrade sound and picture serious fans have been waiting for. We first reviewed the classic years ago at this link:


http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3690/GoodFellas+(1990/Warner


Nice to see it return, influential and enduring as ever, appreciating in value and power a quarter-century later in a new edition wit a letter from Scorsese, a new hardcover mini-booklet and a repeat of extras done for later releases of the film on home video including two feature-length audio commentary tracks: a Cast and Crew Commentary and a Cop and Crook Commentary, plus featurettes Getting Made, Public Enemies: The Golden Age Of The Gangster Film, Made Men: The GoodFellas Legacy, The Workaday Gangster, Paper Is Cheaper Than Film and the Original Theatrical Trailer. The new featurette offers new interviews and called simply Scorsese's GoodFellas. Nice, but could have been longer and richer at only a half-hour.



The Frank Sinatra 5-Film Collection (1945 - 1964) collects The Chairman Of The Board in two films from MGM, two from Warner and one from Samuel Goldwyn. Three are new to us.


George Sidney's Anchors Aweigh (1945) is the first of two Sinatra Navy Musicals with Gene Kelly looking for fun and women in Los Angeles and includes the famous dance between Kelly & Sinatra where Sinatra had to keep up with Kelly. Not bad and has some good moments, though supporting actors like Kathryn Grayson, Dean Stockwell and Edgar Kennedy add dimension to the film. Sidney could handle the Musical genre well, but it can be uneven at times despite what works.


Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly co-directed On The Town (1949) is considered a bit more successful critically and commercially, though they are not playing the characters from Aweigh. This was considered groundbreaking for its outdoor Technicolor shooting in New York City and Jules Munchin becomes part of their team looking for fun and women, here played by no less than Anne Miller, Betty Garrett and Vera-Ellen. Though I am not the biggest fan of this one either, it has more energy and chemistry going on throughout. Still, it is also worth a good look.



Guys & Dolls (as noted before) is one of the great triumphs of Samuel Goldwyn in his reign as an independent one-man studio producer. He paid then big bucks for the stage musical, hired Joseph L. Mankiewicz to write and direct, retained the original score, had Michael Kidd's great choreography, shot the film in CinemaScope (here in its original, wider 2.55 X 1 early configuration, looking good enough for an older video master) and the result is one of the most interesting and beautiful of all Hollywood widescreen musicals. Marlon Brando, Vivian Blane, Jean Simmons and a great supporting cast join Sinatra for a film about hustling, surviving and making it big in New York. Though it does not get enough credit for this, this early hit helped make widescreen filmmaking legitimate and permanent. The film is not perfect, but it is ambitious and worth seeing.


Ocean's 11 is here in its original version and is the same Blu-ray edition as the 50th Anniversary Blu-ray we reviewed at this link...


http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/10532/Love+Ranch+(2010/NEM/E1+Blu-ray)+++Ocean%



Gordon Douglas' Robin & The Seven Hoods (1964) is also a musical, but a wacky comedy where the Robin Hood set-up has been turned into a Depression-Era Gangster Musical with a great cast that includes Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Bing Crosby, Peter Falk, Victor Buono, Barbara Rush and some fun, uncredited turns by Edward G. Robinson, Tony Randall, Hans Conried and then-choreographer, actress and future hit singer Toni Basil. The film is silly obvious, one-note and rightly the last major 'rat pack' film.


It has some good moments, but is too much and for fans only. The songs are not even too memorable.


Extras include a hardcover mini-booklet inside the slidecase, while we get trailers, live action shorts and animated cartoons (usually in standard definition) across all five films. Aweigh adds a clip about adding Jerry Mouse with Gene Kelly in a classic live action/animation moment, Guys repeats its DVD extras, Ocean's repeats its Blu-ray extras and Hoods adds a feature length audio commentary track by Frank Sinatra Jr. and a vintage featurette on the making of the film in What They Did To Robin Hood.



Neil Jordan's The Long Good Friday (1980) has been issued plenty of times on home video worldwide and we have covered it three times before, but finally, it has been upgraded with a ton of extras and looking better than I have ever seen it before. We've had writers here who loved it, as in this coverage of an older U.S. DVD...


http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3644/The+Long+Good+Friday+(Anchor+Bay


And in my case, thinking it is good, if not always great in this Australian DVD import...


http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9256/The+Long+Good+Friday+(1980/Umbrel


...or this U.S. Blu-ray version that was underwhelming...


http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/10258/Long+Good+Friday+(1980)+++Mona+Lisa+(1986


Extras include a new booklet with informative text, while Blu-ray #1 adds two Original Theatrical Trailers, Hands Across the Ocean has five scene redubbed as some people (including U.S. audiences) cannot understand Cockney accents, 3 brief Interviews clips with Producer Barry Hanson, Screenwriter Barrie Keeffe and Director of Photography Phil Meheux, vintage Bloody Business: The Making Of The Long Good Friday documentary featurette and a feature-length audio commentary track by Director by John Mackenzie.


The second Blu-ray is actually only in the Arrow Limited Edition Blu-ray Box Set with Mona Lisa (also needing a serious upgrade that we hopefully will see soon; see older coverage elsewhere on this site) including the interesting short film Apaches (1977, 28 minutes), Phil Meheux doing an introductory piece on the short film, vintage Q&A with Bob Hoskins and John Mackenzie form March 2000 and five brand new interviews with Barry Hanson, Barrie Keefe, Phil Meheux, First Assistant Director Simon Hinkly and Assistant Art Director Carlotta Barrow. Diehard fans will want to get the double film set.



The 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image across all five Empire seasons looks nice, though I sometimes thought while some shots looked great, a few here and there did not work for me as much as they did for my three colleagues. Still, this is a top rate presentation per the usual high standards of HBO and their Blu-ray releases.


The 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on GoodFellas is another solid 4K upgrade of a Martin Scorsese film (see Taxi Driver elsewhere on this site) by Scorsese himself that very much improves on the older HD master used on the obsolete HD-DVD we reviewed that was recycled and later lightly cleaned up for the several Blu-ray releases of the film to now. This time out, we get better detail, depth, definition, color (Video Black and Video Red in particular) though I still think the disc is holding back the master a bit. Still, this is the best since I saw a brand new 35mm print of the film in 1990 bringing out the brilliant Michael Ballhaus cinematography.


Though passable, I found issues with all five transfers for the film on the Sinatra set from the 1080p 1.33 X 1 digital High Definition image transfers on Aweigh and Town (the dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor could look better overall despite some good shots), 1080p 2.55 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Guys (EastmanColor is uneven and the film needs some restoration despite also having some nice shots) and the 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfers in Ocean's (as already discussed in the older review) and Hoods (a little rough at times for a dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor release). All can show the age of the materials used, but these are actually is far superior a transfer to all previous releases of the film on home video. Warner and company need 4K upgrades for all of them down the line.


The 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Goodnight is a new 2K upgrade that even annihilates the U.S. Blu-ray with the best playback and palpability of the images I have ever seen of the film. This includes some demo shots.



In the sound department, the DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on the Boardwalk episodes are pretty consistent throughout with some great moments throughout the shows where the sound really kicks in, though the show knows how to use silence as well. GoodFellas has the same audio strategy (Scorsese involved in both) and has been nicely upgraded from its poorer lossy Dolby Digital DVD, HD-DVD and even older Blu-ray releases. Having the film in lossless sound is a revelation from the hit records to nuances in the dialogue delivery and the advanced mix itself. All the hard work gives a new edge and impact to a film that was already a classic on arrival.


The Sinatra set has a mix of mixes including a DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix upgrade on Dolls that is better than the DVD with traveling dialogue and sound effects, but could use some work. The rest of the films are DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 1.0 Mono lossless mixes that are good, but sometimes can be shrill in parts to the point that 2.0 Mono would have been better, especially in the case of Hoods.


That leaves Goodnight with a decent PCM 2.0 Mono presentation that shows the age and budget of the film, but sounds better than it ever has and it needed the help.



You can order The Long Good Friday Import Blu-ray, double film set with Mona Lisa and more among other exclusive offerings at...


http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/



- Nicholas Sheffo


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