Search - John Wayne: The Early Years Collection on DVD

Film quality is decent compared to what else is out there

Mr. Get Real | Long Beach, CA USA | 08/15/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This review is for the Roan Group issued DVD; John Wayne "The Early Years Collection."



The Roan Group is known for very good DVD film transfers of old movies. I have seen a few of these early John Wayne movies on other DVD collections and I can say that the film transfers on this Roan Group collection are not any worse than some others and in some cases quite a bit better.



None of the films in this Roan Group collection are pristine by any standard, but it may be as good as it gets for these old public domain prints. "Blue Steel" looked to be one of the sharpest looking prints in this collection. All of the movies in this collection are certainly watchable and enjoyable - yes, the picture is often a bit fuzzy and without details and there is generally a loss of highlights and fine detail much of the time, but it's not bad enough to distract from the enjoyment of the movie - the quality is generally just a notch below a marginal VHS tape in terms of clarity. And I have not noted any severe problems with the sound, it's generally clear and easy to understand everything. Just don't expect too much in terms of picture quality and remind yourself that this may actually be as good a quality print of these films as you will ever find.



One additional comment - initially I could not get any sound out of this disc on my DVD player. The sound was fine when played through my computer. After some experimenting, I found that for my set-up I had to go to the DVD player "initial settings" and switch off the digital setting and turn on the analog setting for sound. Maybe you will not have to do this on your set-up, but until I changed the setting on my DVD Player I could not get any sound. I have never had to do this on any other DVDs that I own. I'm not sure why this disc was the exception.



The five films included in this collection are:

Blue Steel (1934)

The Lucky Texan (1934)

West of the Divide (1934)

Hell Town (1936)

Paradise Canyon (1935)

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