Bergman,
This is a wonderful film, one of my all time favorites. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote a fantastic musical score, and in a rare occasion, only one song was cut for the film, everything else was retained. Universal allowed a beautiful and exotic production, and I give a hats off to the recording and sound engineers for producing a soundtrack and mag stereo sound that is really incredible for 1961. This will have your sub-woofer busy during some of the musical numbers. The movie retains many of the Broadway cast and the casting is excellent. It's got great humor, several great love stories, and it mixes traditional China with the 50's and 60's beautifully. It is also very colorful so the high definition blu-ray should be just beautiful as costumes are gorgeous, and the Chinese parade and nightclub scenes really stand out.
I have shown this film to many people, some who never heard of it and they absolutely loved it. 20th Century Fox had exclusive first choice on all of the R&H properties, and I am guessing they chose to bypass this film, so it is the only Rodgers and Hammerstein film released by any other studio than Fox. I think Universal did a beautiful job with it. If you are a fan of musicals, this one has got to be sitting on your shelf next to the other big musical productions of the 60's and 70's. As you can tell, there are quite a few people on all of the forums celebrating the announcement.
As I previously stated, this film has been shown recently on Turner Classic Movies, and you can tell it is the new remaster because it has the Samuel Goldwyn rights, they obtained the television rights, but Universal retained the home video rights. I was so I used to the older transfer having seen it dozens of times, that includes all the showings on cable channels and also the previous DVD. That DVD was quite impressive, but now we have a brand new 2k transfer from the interpositive. Not sure why they didn't use the camera negative..was it destroyed in their fire, or was it in such bad shape they couldn't use it, or maybe they didn't want to spend the additional money if it cost more. And why wouldn't they do a 4k scan of a Rodgers and Hammerstein property when they did one for Thoroughly Modern Millie. Of course, Millie made much more money for Universal..it was their top grossing film of all time for a few years. There was no overture, intermission or exit music as far as I know.
If anyone can add any info on this film, we would be grateful.
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