Le Gendarme de St-Tropez (1964) 4K UHD

[nicwood]

I wanted to see with my own eyes if this release is as awful as I heard… and yes, it sadly is.

The thing I thought would be most problematic (the color timing) actually isn’t the main offender, it’s the horrendous encoding.

To begin with, colors definitely lean warm and are occasionally too much yellow and teal (skies) but it’s not a blanket tint and in most scenes totally watchable. Inconsistency is a problem here - the lab clearly tried to emulate the feeling of a 35mm print being shown but it doesn’t work. For that, it looks too digital. Again, no full-on disaster but far from perfect.

Encoding is an insult though. I’d consider this film’s encoding to be even worse than something like Potemkine’s Three Colors 4K encoding which I considered up to now the worst 4K encoding in France as of now. M6 (the distributor) doubles down on that.

Opticals and likely other second-gen material throughout the film have been grain-managed and the bitrate tends to plummet when "not much happens" on screen, which means that frequently landscapes and especially the skies become one big blocky mess.

OCN footage has been (I presume) left alone and, in occasional spikes of everything going well, looks gorgeous but only until the next scene / cut that reminds us again of the disaster this disc actually is.

I wish we had more Louis de Funès in 4K but I’ll take older masters any day over something like this again.

Edit: As I’m paying a premium price it’s usually 4K or nothing for me but I gave the included Blu-ray a shot to see if they fail that much on a regular BD as well and, guess what, it looks SIGNIFICANTLY better than the UHD (in DV or HDR10, doesn’t matter). The moments with grain management (possibly in the master itself) still don’t look good but the rest, such as low bitrates in static moments is not as heavily present here, sometimes even eliminated. I haven’t seen the entire film on BD of course but all the problematic moments on the 4K are solid here. Solid is the key word, it’s not a FiM BD. Grain and details actually look remarkably close to how Pixelogic encodes Criterion’s discs. So, maybe, a light low-pass filter has been used since the native 4K master can be very detailed but this is most definitely the lesser evil here.