Brilliant film - lousy DVD, 3 Oct 2001

An interesting fact (not mentioned in the film) is that Harold Abrahams also set the British long jump record which stood for 30 years !!

I already had it on VHS where the sound quality was somewhat iffy (even in a NICAM player) so I splashed out on the DVD. The sound quality if anything is even worse. You have to crank up the volume to hear the dialogue to the point where there is an annoyingly audible hiss, and then the music deafens you when it comes in.

As has been stated before there are no extras (apart from subtitles)

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great film, terrible DVD, 31 Aug 2004

The film is, of course wonderful. I will not go over ground covered in the other reviews here, except to say that this is a beautiful, moving and inspiring film. I remember seeing it in my school hall when I was 9 years old and hadn't seen it again until I viewed this DVD. The years have only sderved to improve the film; comparing it to modern movies is a bit like comparing the 1924 Olympiad to Athens 2004- we seem to have lost something wonderful in the interim.

The DVD, however, is terrible. Others have mentioned the sound: this is not an isolated problem. Throughout the film the speech is muddy, the music harsh and distorted. Often there is mismatch between speech and film- an unforgivable offence. For such a beautiful film the picture itself is grainy; although this may be a deliberate cinematic effect (I can't quite believe that!), given that the sound is so bad it is more likely just poor transfer. As for extras, erm... what extras? I'm not usually too bothered but in a film like this, a Best Picture Oscar winner and a historical tale to boot, I would expect a little more, even a short documentary of the true facts, pictures of the athletes or brief biographies of the protagonists would be nice. Particularly galling as that this is billed as a "Special Commemorative Edition" yet is identical to the previous edition bar a cardboard slipcase bearing the words "Commemorative Edition"!; commemorative of what, exactly? 80 years since the events shown? Then why no documentary abut the 1924 Olympics or the development of the Olympic movement? Or perhaps commemorative of this year's (Athens) olympics? I suspect the words "cash" and "in" are involved here.

I can't help but feel that the producers of this DVD have betrayed the ideals which they promote so highly in this film.

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