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Bought this Warner Archive DVD when they released it a couple years ago. I have to say it looks like a 16mm print, and the sound (from disc) is terrible, you can hear needle noise, and the sound is very muffled. The Wikipedia article on this film says the sound was incorrectly transfered from Vitaphone discs in the 1950's. I wonder if we will ever see a better transfer of picture and sound??? The discs still exist, but at this late date weren't optical prints made also?

I know that sound from disc can be mastered to sound very good. Many other Warner subjects have sound mastered from disc and the sound is great.

Phototone wrote:Bought this Warner Archive DVD when they released it a couple years ago. I have to say it looks like a 16mm print, and the sound (from disc) is terrible, you can hear needle noise, and the sound is very muffled. The Wikipedia article on this film says the sound was incorrectly transfered from Vitaphone discs in the 1950's. I wonder if we will ever see a better transfer of picture and sound??? The discs still exist, but at this late date weren't optical prints made also?

I know that sound from disc can be mastered to sound very good. Many other Warner subjects have sound mastered from disc and the sound is great.

Both the existing prints of SUNNY and most of SALLY (the black and white material) fall under the category of "Damn lucky to be seeing anything at all", because the surviving materials are 16mm prints that AAP made for television distribution in the 1950's and are all there is at the moment. The sound on SUNNY was not "incorrectly" transferred, it was what they had to work with, which sounds like rather worn Vitaphone discs. Had these television prints not been made, these would most likely still be listed as " lost" films today. Once can hope for pristine 35mm nitrate originals to turn up sonewhere some day, but at least one can see the films in some form today until/when/or if that questionable possibility ever happens.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

Sally being among my top ten supreme favorites, & Sunny not far behind it, I'm enormously grateful these two survived in any watchable format, but...I do wonder why Warner's doesn't include a line to the effect that 16mm had to used because no better print is known to exist. Wouldn't doing so allay potential criticism of their product?

The print of Beauty for Sale shown a few days ago during TCM's Una Merkel birthday observance was so grossly inferior in image quality to others in the series that it had to have been 16mm . Again, it would appear to be in the network's own self-interest, as well as helpful to viewers, to explain the anomaly.

I don't have SUNNY but I have a copy of SALLY. I was expecting a lot worse before I got it. I was satisfied with what I got. It was quite a surprise though when towards the end a fragment in Technicolor and far better sounds suddenly appears during a musical number. Gives a fleeting look to how much better it could have been if more original material survived. I'm glad they went to the trouble of adding it in. I think most people who buy these films would be aware of the condition issues but it would be nice to have better product disclosure for the unaware.

Interesting that film legend has Marilyn Miller a flop in her 3 films but Sally cost about 650K and grossed a sizable 1.2M.

In theory the soundtrack could be re-done as a good full set of Vitaphone disks survive.

drednm wrote:Interesting that film legend has Marilyn Miller a flop in her 3 films but Sally cost about 650K and grossed a sizable 1.2M.

Actually more of a stage/Broadway legend known for ballet and tap dancing than for film. Both films "Sally" and "Sunny" were based on HUGE Broadway successes.
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In some instances Warner Archive has been upfront about picture quality on certain films. On my omnibus Dorothy Mackaill DVD, they specify that BRIGHT LIGHTS is taken from a surviving 1950s tv print re-titled "Adventures in Africa" , which is the only way to still view this film. That's fair enough.

sepiatone wrote:In some instances Warner Archive has been upfront about picture quality on certain films.

A matter of doing not only the right thing, but the intelligent thing--as it's not reasonable to assume that all, or even most buyers, will "understand" the technical problems & limitations involved in rescuing such pictures. For instance, I assumed the WA ed. of Sunny would be much superior to the copy I'd previously recorded from TCM. I've purchased three different versions of On With the Show foolishly hoping the "next one" would be superior to the others; short of discovery of a better print, I finally realized, there IS no better ed.

Praise God for that TV print of Bright Lights! And praise, especially, whomever allowed "Cannibal Love" to escape the censor's shears!

I've done that also, assuming the new copy would be improved. Actually the recent new Grapevine release of Fine Manners looked to me to be the exact copy I've had for years but with different music.

If memory serves me correctly, SALLY comes from a 35mm finegrain, which in turn was probably made from a 2-color
Technicolor print. The color inserts are from segments of a print discovered by the UCLA Film Archive.
The "16mm look" would be due to the lack of sharpness of Technicolor prints of that era.

Richard P. May wrote: The "16mm look" would be due to the lack of sharpness of Technicolor prints of that era.

Painfully apparent in the last reel of Glorifying the American Girl, surviving only in B&W as far as I know, but originally in color, & no doubt spectacular.

When Sally was on the Laserdisc Dawn of Sound series it was stated that it came from 16mm and the color, like that of Shows of Shows(Myrna Loy sequence introduced by some canine mutt, my joke!!) was not longer extant. Color sequences in both were from found 35mm and Turner paid to have them restored to the prints. The sound being hugely superior in that male dancing chorus with MM is said to have been from the extant Vitaphone discs with superior quality to the optical tracks surviving. However, if all this is fact then they should have matched the films entirely from the Vitaphone discs.