After The Fox (UK)

After the Fox
MGM DVD
R2 (PAL), Norwegian
Even though the disc reviewed has a Norwegian cover, the disc is the same as the UK edition (and should be so throughout Europe).
Colour
Average bitrate: 8.50 mb/s
Ratio: 2.39:1 (16:9 enhanced)
Chapters: 16
Soundtrack: English DD 2.0 mono (192 mb/s), French 2.0 mono, German 2.0 mono,
Italian 2.0 mono, Spanish 2.0 mono
Subs: Danish, Dutch, English (hard of hearing), Finnish, French, German (hard of
hearing), Greek, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish
Extras: None
Cert: U
Cover Design: Unremarkable cover design, not really descriptive of the film, and yet again the original poster is avoided: Average.
Duration: 1:39:03 (4% PAL speedup)

The film itself
Not really inspired or imaginative but good entertainment nonetheless. The film Drags slightly during the last half hour but then picks up with a funny chase sequence at the end. Overall an agreeable timefiller.
7 / 10

Image Quality
The opening minute of the DVD looked pretty bad, aliasing and print damage all over the place, soft focus, poor colour quality, but then things settled firmly down during the opening titles which were remarkably clean and sharp.

The film is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.39:1 which is pretty much the same as the original aspect ratio, and I didn't notice any awkward framing. The transfer is 16:9 enhanced.

Sharpness is pretty good throughout, apart from the first minute or so, with fine detail being resolved in the picture without any noticeable edge enhancement. Shadow detail was good enough, though not outstanding, with the image mostly set in bright locations. Colour was a little too bright, unfortunately, with skin tones rather yellow and greyish. However, sudden splashes of vivid colours and general consistency led me to believe that the film looked this way originally. I did not notice any film grain or pixelization in the transfer and no low level noise either. In terms of video artefacts the only real worry was occasional moderate amounts of aliasing. The worst examples appear in the opening minute and then throughout the film on fine lines on cars, walls, streets, etc, but fortunately not all scenes exhibited this artefacting. Edge enhancement is visible - If you go searching for it, that is - but is generally well controlled. In terms of film artefacts, there are scenes that look a little spotty, but other scenes were clear as a bell. In any event, no distraction ever came from the film artefacts.
7 / 10

Audio quality
Let me think here, if there ever was reference quality mono, this is it. The soundtrack is a 2.0 DD track running at 192 kilobits per second and of course has the limitations of such old recordings but it is the original soundtrack and it has never sounded better. I managed to find no issues with it at all. The music score was delivered beautifully throughout, and the bass was fine too. The dynamic range was as good as we could ever expect for a mono track. Occasionally dialogue was obviously looped but that's because the film was in Italian originally. I sampled the Italian track, but it has been mastered at too low a level, and the wonderful score by Burt Bacharach has been replaced with some laid back dull jazzy score, I recommend the English track.
9 / 10

Extras:
There are no extras; there are no chapter menus either.

Region 1 vs. Region 2

The Region 1 disc was released in early 2002 and does contain the film's trailer as an extra but reviews suggest that the picture quality is lesser than what we have here. There's an unwatchable pan & scan version on side 2. Unless you desperately want a trailer, the Region 1 release has no other advantage.

Overall:
The picture quality is fine, apart from occasional aliasing and film artefacts

The mono audio is wonderful

There are absolutely no extras, to say the least