John Wayne and James Stewart star in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a 1962 John Ford directed, western, that despite being a IMDB top 250 film, isn’t available in Blu-Ray in the US, but is available on ITunes in 1080p HD. Taking a look at the it from a purely quality perspective.
1962 makes this a pretty late black and white movie, and there have been several reasons put forward for this. Director John Ford said that he wanted to distance the film from the Technicolor epics, and that shooting in black and white added to the tension. Others have suggested that since both Stewart and Ford were playing characters thirty years younger than their real age, black and white helped sell them both as younger men.
In terms of picture quality this is a good-news/bad-news situation. The bad-news is that this has definitely been given a large dose of DVNR. The good-news is that at least to my eye it doesn’t look terrible. Similar to Sabrina, a more complex optical flow algorithm appears have been used to more accurately determine noise from detail, and although there are rough patches. The image does generally look pretty good.
The transfer used is the same as used for the Centenary edition DVD and the German Blu-ray. If you want to see more natural grain then it would appear the original and now out of print Paramount 2001 DVD
By the Numbers
The 1080p download clocks in at 5.15GB, which is pretty good for a 123 minute movie. The total bitrate including a Stereo Dolby Digital track is 5.9 Mbps.
Comparison With 2001 DVD
Looking at the comparison below, it’s clear that both the grain, and detail in the coil of smoke has disappeared. In general the motion-adaptive noise reduction does a good job and throwing away noise and keeping the detail. But there are few scenes when it gets confused, especially when the camera starts moving in three dimensions, and a few smoke filled bar scenes.
Itunes on the left. Original 2001 DVD on the right Look at the coil of smoke – the motion adaptive DVNR is having trouble with it.
Conclusion
Fair: 3/5. DVNR aplenty here. But it’s the smarter kind, and the image is very watchable. However watching a 1960s black and white movie that looks like it was shot on HD video is a bit odd, and the 2001 DVD more accurately represents the experience of watching the film in a theatre in 1962.
Since this is unlikely to be fixed in any upcoming US Blu-ray release, so if you want to see the movie in HD, ITunes is a worthwhile place to do it.
1080p Itunes HD Screenshots
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