Black Beauty (1971)

[Arkadin]

coming from Odeon on October 22nd.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Black...Blu-ray/40903/

[ParisTexan]

Does anyone own this? I'm wondering what the picture quality is like.

[rapta]

Originally Posted by ParisTexan

Does anyone own this? I'm wondering what the picture quality is like.

It's £2.99 at Zavvi right now. Worth the gamble?

[Aclea]

Can't answer for the transfer but it's not great as a film:



Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty to highlight the cruelty that was the lot of working horses in the Victorian era, but despite being one of the best-selling novels of all time, aside from Caroline Thompson’s 1994 adaptation as far as filmmakers are concerned it’s just a name they could use for any story vaguely involving a horse. The 1971 version is certainly no exception, throwing out nearly all of the novel and replacing it with a trite episodic story aimed firmly at the family audience and offering nothing that will frighten the horses – melodramatic villainy from Patrick Mower’s sadistic crippled young squire, a comic interlude with some horse-racing tinkers, warring circuses on the continent and a cavalry engagement in India, each story increasingly pedestrian and predictable.

Typecast with animal films after the success of Born Free, director James Hill briefly shows some signs of trying to elevate Wolf Mankowitz’s workmanlike screenplay in the early scenes, particularly with a striking slow motion fox hunt, but quickly seems to lose interest and opts instead to just try to get through it on time with the minimum of fuss and imagination. It’s only the opening scenes with a young Mark Lester bonding with and losing the horse and the last reel that hint at the novel’s mixture of occasional acts of kindness amid a bleak life of cruelty, abuse and neglect. Few of the humans make much of an impression, but worse is just how little attention the story pays to its titular star – Beauty is just something for the humans to occasionally sit on, not just sidelined but offscreen and ignored for more and more of the running time in the middle of the film. It’s never terrible, but it rarely rises above the mediocre.

[Simon Lewis]

Just put in the disc for a quick look. Definitely HD, bit soft in places, but overall looking quite good, detail much better than DVD.

[ParisTexan]

Originally Posted by rapta

It's £2.99 at Zavvi right now. Worth the gamble?

That's what got me asking, haha!

Thanks, Simon. I think it's worth a punt, even if not a great film.