Silent Era : Home Video : Wild and Woolly (1917) Review

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SILENT ERA FILMS ON HOME VIDEO
Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
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Wild and Woolly
(1917)

Douglas Fairbanks stars in this comedy-drama from the John Emerson-Anita Loos team of a rich, eastern dude who longs for the western life and copes with different circumstances than he expects in Arizona.

2008 Flicker Alley edition

Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer (1916-1921),
color-toned black & white, color-tinted black & white and black & white,
760 minutes total, not rated,
including Wild and Woolly (1917),
color-toned black & white, 72 minutes, not rated,
with His Picture in the Papers (1916), color-toned black & white, 62 minutes, not rated, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916), color-toned black & white, 27 minutes, not rated, Flirting with Fate (1916), black & white, 57 minutes, not rated, The Matrimaniac (1916), black & white, 46 minutes, not rated, Reaching for the Moon (1917), color-toned black & white, 69 minutes, not rated, A Modern Musketeer (1917), color-tinted black & white, 69 minutes, not rated, When the Clouds Roll By (1919), color-toned black & white, 86 minutes, not rated, The Mollycoddle (1920), color-toned black & white, 85 minutes, not rated, The Mark of Zorro (1920), color-toned black & white, 107 minutes, not rated, and The Nut (1921), black & white, 65 minutes, not rated.

Flicker Alley, FA0011, UPC 6-17311-67359-7, ISBN 1-8939-6735-2.
Full-frame 4:3 NTSC, five single-sided, dual-layered DVD discs, Region 0, ? Mbps average video bit rate, ? kbps audio bit rate, Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo sound, English language intertitles, no foreign language subtitles, 14 chapter stops, slimline keep cases in cardboard slipcase, $89.95.
DVD release date: 2 December 2008.
Country of origin: USA

This is the best available edition of Wild and Woolly available on DVD home video, despite the coarsely transferred Wild and Woolly and When the Clouds Roll By, with their coarse (vertical!) pixels easily detected and distracting on high-definition monitors.

Included is a 32-page booklet with an essay by Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta. The supplemental material includes productions stills and pressbook reproductions, an audio essay for A Modern Musketeer, and a reproduction of Fairbanks’ first film contract. This boxset collection won an award at Il Cinema Ritrovato in 2009 for excellence.

Note: A few DVD players have encountered problems playing some discs in this boxset. Flicker Alley has inititated a program to replace defective discs from this Fairbanks set. Click here to report defective discs.

USA: Click the logomark at right to purchase
a Region 0 NTSC DVD of this edition from Amazon.com.

2007 TeleVista edition

Wild and Woolly (1917), black & white, 65 minutes, not rated.

TeleVista, no catalog number, UPC 0-29502-41917-2.
Full-frame 4:3 NTSC, one single-sided, single-layered DVD disc, Region 0, ? Mbps average video bit rate, ? kbps audio bit rate, Dolby Digital 2.0 mono sound, English language intertitles, no foreign language subtitles, 12 chapter stops, keep case, $19.95.
DVD release date: 9 October 2007.
Country of origin: USA

Ratings (1-10): video: 4 / audio: 5 / additional content: 1 / overall: 4.

This edition has been mastered from a fair-to-good 8mm reduction print, that was originally prepared by Blackhawk Films, with a few sections that are flat and gray. Some care has been taken in the video transfer to center intertitles than were presented off-center in the source print. Still . . . for the money . . . lousy, lousy, lousy.

The film is accompanied by a combination of prerecorded music segments that includes a small emsemble of violin, viola and piano, woodwinds and piano, full orchestra, and synthesizer and electric guitar, among so many others. The supplemental material is nothing more than a series of still frame from this substandard source print. Ridiculous.

USA: Click the logomark at right to purchase
a Region 0 NTSC DVD of this edition from Amazon.com.

Canada: Click the logomark at right to purchase
a Region 0 NTSC DVD of this edition from Amazon.ca.

Other silent era DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS films available on home video.

Other silent era WESTERN films available on home video.

Douglas Fairbanks filmography in The Progressive Silent Film List

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