His Girl Friday

Get the "Cary Grant on Film" version! D3K gets 0 stars!
This is one on my favorite movies of all time. The dialog is fast, funny and SMART. Plus, the gender treatment is fascinating, and not dated in the slightest. But . . . WARNING! Avoid the D3K DVD at all costs. It is truly the most horrendous digital transfer I have ever encountered. The picture is fuzzy and the dialogue almost incomprehensible. I have a five-year-old VHS copy of a TV broadcast of the movie that has much better sound/picture quality. To make things worse, the feature menus on the DVD are poorly designed, so that you cannot tell what you are selecting. And the makers had the audacity to have a whole menu with the credits for production of the DVD. I can't believe how mad I got trying to use this DVD.

Luckily my friend had another version I could compare (and eventually buy). The "His Girl Friday/Cary Grant on Film" version is superb in comparison: Dialog is crisp, picture sharp. It has a bonus documentary, Tony Curtis introduction and...

Thanks to the other amazon reviewers ...
for warning me about which version to get. I bought the columbia classics version which was digitally remastered. The picture and sound quality are both excellent. There are a couple of versions out there. Luckily, I read the reviews here and didn't get duped into buying the cheap poor quality dvd. The movie itself is my favorite comedy of all time next to Some Like It Hot. This was one of my favorite roles by Cary Grant. The chemistry with Rosalind Russell was very smooth and Ralph Bellamy played his part well as the stuffy insurance salesman...Remember GET THE COLUMBIA CLASSICS VERSION. It's an extra ten bucks but excellent quality.

Technical/quality issues
I'm sure you know that this classic movie is great. The DVD itself, on the other hand, is not what I've come to expect regarding restoration and remastering and whatnot. Bottom line is, the quality was as bad as the "bargain bin" VHS tapes of old movies that I quickly learned to avoid. In particular the sound was badly degraded, with a hiss that made it difficult to understand the dialog towards the beginning (that improved somewhat, but it was still bad). That's particularly annoying because I could clean it up better than that myself, with a trivial application of "Cool Edit" shareware! Clearly, this is a direct scan of poor quality original and zero work went into presenting it. The picture, too, is full of flickering spots and the whole thing has a soft out-of-focus look to it. If you just have to have this film in your collection, be resigned to the poor quality. If you're just looking, ask yourself if it's cheap enough for the lousy job.

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