Quote:
Originally Posted by Shanghai Express
Would love if Criterion cared to rescue the Fox Borzage silents from mouse house hell. A French label put a number of them on Blu-ray nearly thirteen years ago but they've been largely ignored stateside for some reason.
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I've long considered this to be one of the mysteries of the blu-ray world - with the considerable interest in Borzage from many of the boutique labels (especially Criterion and Kino but a few others as well), why don't we have the three films (
Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, and
Lucky Star) that largely jump-started his career to first-tier status? I would have thought that Kino, Criterion, and perhaps even Twilight Time would have been fighting one another to get the rights when Fox was still licensing its catalog. Heck, you would think that Martin Scorsese would have prodded Criterion some given his acknowledged love for these films. I guess its still possible that Criterion could have licensed the films some time ago and has just been sitting on them for all of these years (a la Erich von Stroheim's
The Wedding March).
Incidentally, this is why I've been very curious about the "behind the scenes" negotiations that Bob Harris had to have done for
The Johnstown Flood. The underlying print material is from the 1960s Fox donation to the George Eastman House so I would presume that Disney would have some donor restrictions. If so, how did Harris get Disney's ok to access the material? I know that there is a somewhat recent 4K restoration on
Seventh Heaven, and it would be nice to see that at some point.