Friday, January 17, 2020

By the Gods!

The gladiator training scene from DEMETRIUS & THE GLADIATORS (1954)

The cast includes Susan Hayward, Ernest Borgnine and Barry Jones.

Last night, I watched THE ROBE in HD from a Blu-ray release. Beautiful print. Crystal clear image. So why is the image for this movie taken from its Blu-ray so murky? It's baffling to me. It's great to see so many details on the extras in the background. No Ed Fury in sight though (see previous post below). But there is a fellow right dead centre who I thought, for a split second, was Steve Reeves. You can see him better in the screenshot below, on the far right. It's not Steve since the man's arms are too small. I wonder who he is. I think he's John Weidemann, the fellow who starred in GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953), in the 'Olympic' scene with Jane Russell.

I recently purchased Blu-rays of THE ROBE (1953) and its sequel, DEMETRIUS & THE GLADIATORS. I have to say that watching them in HD, even with the murky image of DEMETRIUS, gives the movies a whole new aspect. I will write reviews of those Blu-rays soon enough. Suffice it to say, my appreciation for both movies have gone up considerably.

Does anyone have the US Blu-ray release of DEMETRIUS? Is the image this murky? This Blu-ray is from a Spanish edition (since the US one is out of print and the copies for sale out there are too expensive).


2 comments:

Scott Ochiltree said...


My experience with DVDs (I cannot play Blu-rays) is that ones from Spain are almost always visually disappointing.

An example is SLAVE GIRL (Yvonne de Carlo, 1947). As per my very critical review on Amazon this enjoyable movie has such poor video quality as to be essentially unwatchable. I tossed its DVD into the trash.

Anonymous said...

The U.S. Twilight Time Blu-ray of Demetrius is not great quality like The Robe.