After the sepia tone sequence, I was surprised to see how vibrant the hues are during the rest of the movie. There are vivid blue skies on this DVD, along with strong golds and greens on the landscape, plus natural looking flesh tones. This transfer offers a truly excellent representation of the way the film stock recorded the colors more than thirty years ago. In addition, the DVD reproduces all of these hues without any chromatic distortion. The film element utilized for the transfer is very clean and relatively free from age related blemishes.
Film grain becomes noticeable in places, but it is never a distraction.
This smartly authored DVD takes advantage of dual layers to prevent noticeable traces of digital compression artifacts. The Dolby Digital monaural soundtrack is the only slightly weak link in this otherwise marvelous presentation. When this movie was released in 1969, the sound was ideally suited to the equipment that reproduced it in the theaters. Today, with everyone owning better speakers than what were available in 1969, the limited frequency range of the film s soundtrack is less than inspiring. Perhaps, it wouldn t have been necessary to go the entire 5.1 channel route, but the original music recordings could have been utilized to enhance the sound of Burt Bacharach s score.