Bloodline (1979) coming from Vinegar Syndrome Labs

[whiteberry]

Bloodline Blu-ray

After extremely wealthy pharmaceutical tycoon Sam Roffe is murdered while skiing in the Alps, his daughter Elizabeth is shocked to learn that, per her late father's will, she has been appointed to take over his drug manufacturing empire. Equally shocked are her scheming relatives, each saddled with financial burdens they hoped would be alleviated through a significant company sale. But when Elizabeth vows to do everything in her power to resurrect the ailing company, thus preventing the sale, it's not long before a mysterious, black-clad assailant begins killing anyone helping Elizabeth to achieve her goal. All the while, dead bodies of nude young women are washing up along the river banks of Europe, victims of a savage, snuff film-making serial killer...

Boasting an astonishing cast headlined by Oscar® winners Audrey Hepburn (Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and Beatrice Straight (Network), Oscar® nominees James Mason (North by Northwest) and Omar Sharif (Lawrence of Arabia), plus Euro Cult actresses Irene Papas (Don’t Torture a Duckling) and Romy Schneider (La Piscine), director Terence Young’s (Wait Until Dark) adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s international bestseller, BLOODLINE is an epic, jet-set giallo filmed across the world which places its A-list cast at odds with a sordid sex killer. Featuring a lush score by Ennio Morricone (The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly) and all strikingly photographed by three-time Oscar winner Freddie Young (Doctor Zhivago), this unbelievable big-budget exploitation gem at last comes to Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome Labs, newly restored in 4K from its 35mm original negative and featuring the disc debut of its majorly extended alternate TV version!

directed by: Terence Young
starring: Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara, James Mason, Omar Sharif, Claudia Mori, Irene Papas, Michelle Phillips, Romy Schneider
1979 / 117 min / 1.85:1 / English Mono

Additional info:

• 2-disc Region A Blu-ray Set
• Newly scanned & restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative
• Presented in both its 117-minute Theatrical Version and its 141-minute Television Version
• Commentary track with film historians Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson
• Stupid German Money (53 min) - an interview with Clemens Keiffenheim, second assistant director: Germany
• Off-Road (23 min) - an interview with stunt driver François Doge
• Theatrical trailer
• Reversible sleeve artwork
• English SDH subtitles

https://vinegarsyndrome.com/collecti...ucts/bloodline

New Trailer:

Bloodline (1979) [Vinegar Syndrome Labs Blu-ray Promo Trailer] - YouTube

[Stanis]

The cover = MST3K is getting Spicy!

[drush9999]

Cool another Audrey Hepburn that got beyond DVD.

[James Luckard]

One of the few Audrey Hepburn films I've never seen. Looks absolutely dreadful from the trailer, haha, but I'll order it because of her.

[Jobla]

I've never seen it either. When it first came out, I figured it was a body count film starring a bunch of old farts.

[Deciazulado]

Bloodline Blu-ray

[AliasCane]

Mine arrived sans Slipcover

[AliasCane]

Originally Posted by Jobla

I've never seen it either. When it first came out, I figured it was a body count film starring a bunch of old farts.

What old f*rts?

[dressedtokill]

Originally Posted by AliasCane

Mine arrived sans Slipcover

The slipcover is a website exclusive. The standard retail version comes without one.

[AliasCane]

Ah, then all cool.

[James Luckard]

I watched this last night.

Wow. Just... Wow.

First off, let's get this out of the way, the transfer is absolutely GORGEOUS.

As for the movie...

I've seen thousands and thousands of movies in my life, and this is easily one of the worst I've ever seen, but in a way that's really kind of fascinating and informative to watch unfold.

It's clear they didn't know how to adapt a massive, sprawling bestselling novel, so they just filmed random individual scenes from the book, with absolutely no connective tissue. It's one of the most incoherent movies I've ever seen.

It's pretty clear they faced two HUGE obstacles:

1) The filmmakers cast every single secondary role with a MAJOR star. As a result, they couldn't do what the film needed, and recut it to focus on Audrey Hepburn. They would have been forced to trim most of the scenes with the other big names. Instead, the film skips around from character to character every minute or two, never landing on one long enough to register. Each character also exists in a different tone, making the jumpiness feel more schizophrenic. For example, Omar Sharif's storyline is basically an Italian sex farce, while Audrey Hepburn's storyline is a romantic melodrama, and there's also a grisly, gory, brutal serial killer narrative line going on too. The movie flits about between these scenes in a way that never lets it establish a clear tone. Morricone's score matches each scene, so it only amplifies the abrupt tonal shifts.

2) The filmmakers were unwilling to radically reshape the story to fit in two hours. They were especially unwilling to cut extraneous subplots. For example, the subplot of the serial killer, who murders women while making snuff films, has absolutely nothing to do with the main corporate intrigue plot. It involves secondary characters and could easily have been deleted entirely. However, that subplot was clearly what they wanted to base the marketing on, and fans of the bestselling novel would clearly have missed it. So they kept it. The film is full of strange choices like this. It needed an L.A. Confidential approach. Anyone who has read that book knows it has multiple central storylines, and the movie chose just one, dropping the others entirely.

Given those ten-ton concrete weights the filmmakers had attached to their feet, they try their best. What we get feels like an 8-hour miniseries cut absolutely incoherently down to under 2 hours. At times, the whole movie feels like a montage. Individual scenes rarely last more than 3 or 4 lines of rushed dialogue, before the film jumps to the same characters in another country, or even on another continent, dealing with some other plot element entirely. Numerous plot strands, like Audrey investigating her father's death, are started and then abandoned, and the entire plot basically hinges on Gert Frobe (from Goldfinger) as a cop who sits in front of an all-knowing futuristic computer. He asks it questions about the mystery, which it answers for him.

Also, the filmmakers' choices about which scenes/sequences from the book to include are absolutely bewildering. For example, the core love story between Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara is given far too little screen time to register properly, yet we get an absolutely interminable and entirely unnecessary 5-minute flashback sequence to the 1800s, when the forefathers of the wealthy family (played by some of the worst dayplayer actors you've ever seen) founded their medicine business.

The whole movie was apparently made in West Germany with "Crazy German Money," as one of the featurettes is titled. It's fascinating to see one of these massive movies made outside the studio system.

As for the disc... It's kind of funny, for such a strange, flawed movie, but the transfer is BREATHTAKING. It's a brand new 4K scan of the negative, as they promote, and it looks like it.

The second disc includes a TV version of the film that's 24 minutes longer. I popped it in, and it looks like it's an older HD transfer, but it was late at night and I only looked at it briefly. I'll check tonight to be sure. I'm going to skip just to the added scenes and see if they somehow make the film more coherent, which I doubt is possible.

[James Luckard]

This is actually the best sequence in the movie, because it's RADICALLY different from anything else:

Audrey Hepburn tours pharmaceutical factory in BLOODLINE 1979 - YouTube

At the beginning of the film, as Audrey inherits her father's pharmaceutical empire, she's given a tour of one of their factories by Ben Gazzara.

The style of photography and editing is unlike anything else in the entire movie, filled with energy and inventive photography, and Morricone's score for this scene was dropped and replaced with an AMAZING Moroder-esque disco cue by composer Craig Huxley, which really energizes it.

[James Luckard]

I watched the TV version on disc 2, and want to correct what I said yesterday.

I think it might actually be a new 4K scan, just like the theatrical cut.

However, I realized this cut would have been assembled not from original negative material, but from something a couple of generations away. That would explain the reduction in image quality, and the presence of more and blurrier grain.

I can't swear to it without comparison caps, but I don't think this is an old HD transfer anymore.

As for the additional material in the extended cut:

I skimmed through at 10x speed and looked for new portions. It's mostly tons and tons and tons of additional establishing shots of various cities, or endless wide shots of people walking into rooms as scenes begin, etc. They clearly put in every moment of film that was shot, in order to pad the length out for TV, like with the extended version of Superman The Movie.

For example, for a meeting scene around 1:21:00, they pad the scene out at the start with an entire minute of footage of people waiting in various rooms, Audrey telling everyone it's time for the meeting, and then people walking the entire length of VERY LONG hallways, lol, and entering the conference room.

The wedding sequence soon after is similarly padded out endlessly too, with tons of wide shots of the festivities, and then seemingly every character kissing and congratulating Audrey.

This is how the movie was made longer, not through any truly meaningful added scenes.

There are a few minor added scenes, however:

1) 32:00-42:00 - The first big addition is an extension of the already excruciatingly long flashback to the 1800s, doubling its absolutely interminable length to an unbearable 10 minutes. I confess, life is too short to watch more of that dreadful material, so I didn't watch the new scenes there. I only bought the disc as an Audrey Hepburn fan, so I wanted to see anything new with her. (weirdly, however, the TV version actually deletes an intercut sequence from the theatrical cut of Audrey walking through the Polish village in the present and imagining the flashbacks).

These are the other entirely new scenes, for anyone who wants to skip to them:

2) 1:13:45 - Audrey recovers after her car crash, watched over by Ben Gazzara, Beatrice Straight and James Mason. It's only a minute long, but it explains why Audrey is so abruptly back in Zurich in the next scene in the theatrical cut, and it also amplifies the relationship with Gazzara, which was sorely needed in the shorter cut

3) 1:32:20 - Gert Frobe comforts a hysterical Audrey after the elevator crash. He then pours her a glass of whiskey in her office and walks slowly ALL THE WAY across the room, lol, hands it to her, pats her on the back, and then walks away again. Then we enter the scene in the theatrical cut. This is how most of the movie is padded out.

4) 1:40:00 - alternate version of the scene of Gert Frobe and Audrey discussing the investigation, running about 3x as long, using alternate angles

5) 1:42:15 - Romy Schneider and Ben Gazzara end their affair and discuss their scheming on a Paris street. 2 mins-ish. Doesn't add much.

6) 1:53:00 - Audrey and Ben Gazzara get partly undressed and kiss and fall into bed.

7) 1:55:30 - Omar Sharif's wife and mistress meet up and discuss the fact that he has seemingly vanished. Absolutely interminable scene, half of which consists of the mistress asking the wife what she'd like to drink and making the ENTIRE drink, lol. Also weird that they seem to be besties. Entire scene clearly shot as padding.

8) 2:00:30 - Romy Schneider meets with the banker calling in the company's loans.

The serial killer plotline is almost entirely removed, mercifully. The one remaining scene of the serial killer murdering a victim is EXCEEDINGLY truncated and uses alternate angles, to remove all sex and nudity, since this was a TV version. There's also an ongoing motif throughout the theatrical cut of nude female bodies being pulled from rivers in various cities. Since there was no way to recut these scenes so they'd be coherent and also meet broadcast standards, they're all deleted entirely, making the serial killer subplot even more meaningless within the overall plot.

In the end, I'm glad I looked at this longer version. Just like the extended TV version of Voyage of the Damned that I summarized recently, it's fascinating to see how these longer TV versions were created back in the 70s. Interestingly, both films are deeply flawed adaptations of novels, where the filmmakers struggled to coherently condense them into 2 hours. A decade later, in the 1980s, each would simply have been done as an 8-hour miniseries and would have been better for it.

[Colonel Blimp]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

I've seen thousands and thousands of movies in my life, and this is easily one of the worst I've ever seen, but in a way that's really kind of fascinating and informative to watch unfold.

It's clear they didn't know how to adapt a massive, sprawling bestselling novel, so they just filmed random individual scenes from the book, with absolutely no connective tissue. It's one of the most incoherent movies I've ever seen.

Alright - so I finished this and agree with huge swaths of your review.

I don't think it was one of the worst movies I've seen. It was not good, that's for sure, but I have a high tolerance for these 1970s melodramas and this kept my interest. So for me, it's not even in the arena of "worst."

HOWEVER, as you explain it's def. among the most incoherent and inexplicable movies I've seen that were at a big scale. The choices make no sense and the editing seems designed to confuse. Vital plotlines disappear, irrelevant plotslines get put in the front, the ending resolves one plot - but not others. It was very strange.

Obviously, for a low-budget thriller these are expected flaws. But this was a big production with major starrs, so it's odd that it was allowed to get this flimsy.

I would say the first 75 minutes are pretty good. Even though the jumps are confusing and a lot of balls are in the air, I was intrigued. There was the killer, the corporate intrigue, the romance, okay, I bought in.

But the last 45 minutes was both too long and too short. It all of a sudden decided to focus on one thing, throw in the usual misdirection, and tag on a 15-minute "action" conclusion that doesn't really explain any of the motivation.

(and don't even get me started on the talking computer)

Oh - and you were 1000 percent right about that scene with the pills that you posted. It's the most dynamic editing and score of the movie. I did like the music overall, so that was good.

I also liked the flashback - haha.

My rule for any of these movies is I just need to be interested - and that's good enough. I wasn't bored, I wanted to see how it ended, the actors chew the scenery and do their part. Omar Sharif and James Mason know how to play a villainous cad, a very underused Romy Schneider knows how to scheme, Ben Gazzara knows how to be oily but suave, and of course Audrey knows how to look at the world with her big eyes. They all do their job.

But in the end, what a weird mess.

Fun to watch but I did not need to buy it. That was a $24.99 mistake.

[DVD Phreak]

The streaming version is currently only $4.99 to buy at Amazon Prime, no membership required. It's the short version. The HD picture is very nice indeed. Anyone who doesn't want to spend too much on this 1979 box office bomb can buy this instead.