On 4K HDR/DV - David Hare welcomes a restored ANATOMY OF A MURDER (Otto Preminger, USA, 1958) & TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese, USA, 1976)

This is the second big six picture collection boxset from Sony of their “Columbia Classics”, all totally new updated restorations executed in 4K with HDR/DV. Grover Crisp who has personally curated these sets (and much more) through Sony’s still flourishing physical media arm makes a particularly strong case in some of the copious restoration notes on each title in which he really promotes the complete revelation HDR and it’s much wider color gamut, wider dynamic range and more has to seriously sell the superority of the new format over all and any earlier Home Vid platforms.

I won’t take much more space here but to say the movies I’ve sampled so far are breathtaking in these UHD 4K discs, even better than a first 35mm viewing of a revival print of Anatomy of a Murder at Sydney Uni Film Group in 1968. By then (only ten years after it was made) the O-neg had been intefered with after wear and tear leaving ten no less lab shots re-inserted from an inferior later gen neg. Even the very beautiful master Criterion used for its own Blu release a few years ago is still stuck with the dupe shots, although Crisp’s team did an almost total restoration on that occasion. 

For the new release they restarted the elements harvest and in the process found a third gen but extremely high quality neg which yielded clean optical shots which now seamlessly meet the rest of the print’s image quality for grain, grayscale and density.

The new 4K of Taxi Driver is from just a few years ago but Crisp and his team are now able to use HDR to really push saturation and the emphasis on grain and texture in this new disc which is quite frankly, gobsmacking, and once again the image quality once again surpasses the 35mm I first saw in opening week at the old Town Cinema in Pitt Street, Sydney. Another bonus is the discovery of multi track stems of Herrmann’s score for which they’ve added a five channel Dolby track with the score isolated on the rear channels. You’ve got to hear this to believe it. They also preserve the original legacy mono track.

I understand the new 4K of the Preminger was amongst the “rediscoveries” at this year’s Cannes event. This boxset, with marvellous liner notes from Julie Kirgo for the Preminger, and Glenn Kenny for Taxi Driver is worth every cent. The remaining four titles (Oliver, Stripes, Sense and Sensibility and The Social Network) are yet to be plundered by me.