Visible film grain crops up from time to time, colors are somewhat faded in places, plus all of the opticals, including fades and other transitions are somewhat rough looking. Blacks are inconsistent, sometimes appearing accurate, sometimes leaning towards dark gray. Shadow detail isn t anywhere near the level of a new movie, in addition the inconsistencies in the black level also affect the depth of the image. Dual layer authoring keeps digital compression artifacts from becoming noticeable on this lengthy movie. The Dolby Digital 5.1 channel soundtrack has been created from the film s original four channel stereo track.
Directional effects are somewhat limited, with the surround channels seeing very little action.
Dialogue is cleanly reproduced and maintains intelligibility its throughout. Whatever benefits there were to re-mastering the soundtrack in 5.1 seem to be reaped by Dimitri Tiomkin s stirring musical score. The recordings have held up rather well, although one will notice some frequency limitations to the music. While a bass channel has been encoded into the mix, there is actually very little low frequency information present on the soundtrack. English Dolby Surround, French mono, and Spanish mono soundtracks have also encoded onto the DVD, as have English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean and Thai subtitles.