Criterion Releases 2/22: Love Affair, Written on the Wind

[Mike Gebert]

Criterion has announced four releases for February— McCarey's Love Affair (1939), Sirk's Written on the Wind (previously out as a Criterion DVD), Ann Hui's Boat People and the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing.

The most interesting is Love Affair, which has been in dodgy public domain copies for years, sometimes with new scores added. Dave Kehr tweeted "This is the new, definitive restoration from @MoMAFilm and Lobster Film, rescued at last from public domain hell." Amusingly, it has two Charley Chase shorts directed by McCarey as extras—who expected Mighty Like a Moose to come from Criterion?

https://www.criterion.com/films/32533-love-affair

[Ray Faiola]

It will be interesting to see. I think TCM's airings the last few years have been of MOMA's 35mm print. So we'll see what can be done with digital restoration.

[Mike Gebert]

I never saw it on TCM, but people seemed impressed compared to other versions out there. The clip on the Criterion page looks pretty perfect.

[Daniel Eagan]

And Ann Hui is one of Hong Kong's most respected directors.

[Frame Rate]

The most interesting is Love Affair, which has been in dodgy public domain copies for years, sometimes with new scores added.
https://www.criterion.com/films/32533-love-affair

Is there any documentation for this? To properly re-score the film would, I imagine, require access to RKO's separate, 1939-vintage optical-sound dialog and sfx tracks, which I would be quite surprised to learn had been preserved -- all the way through the sale of the property to TCF for the 1950s remake and the latter studio's neglect of renewing the older film's 28-year initial copyright.

Digital notch-filtering and null-phasing might, I suppose, have been attempted instead to suppress Roy Webb's original background music, but the results on a mixed-down mono track (if that's all that survived) would likely make the actors' voices sound a bit wonky.

And then there's the problem of those copyrighted songs (by Harold Arlen & Ted Koehler and Buddy DeSylva) performed by Irene and the Mitchell Boy Choir.

I'm not denying that some PD-distributor actually attempted such sound-track butchery on McCarey's romantic masterpiece, but it just seems unlikely -- and I'm quite curious to hear how it turned out if it was done.

[Mike Gebert]

It's widely said to have happened, that's all I know. Presumably to get around the It's a Wonderful Life-type problem, of an element still being under copyright when the film is PD.