What a pity! This reviewer hadn't seen this film since it originally screened in movie theatres circa 1954. By today's standards, the story is stiff, dated, and with hefty doses of propaganda and stereotyping. The acting is not memorable. Nevertheless, the presentation had some merits as the scenery in the original film was quite good and some of the staging was interesting. Despite such flaws, this reviewer, who grew up in the Black Hills and was living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation when the film was made, was looking forward to having the DVD.
But discussing the merits of the film is superfluous, because the DVD presentation is so abominable: Sound is harsh. Picture color fidelity is nil: Greens appear as oranges; other color distortions are rampant across the spectrum of colors and across any given screen image. Aside from the color, to say that the image is grainy would be a gross understatement: As a friend remarked, viewing a regular film with 9 out of 10 pixels being nonfunctional on the HDTV would probably produce a similar result. Though the film was originally done in Cinemascope, it is impossible to avoid some form of distortion on an HDTV 16x9 screen: Either one must be satisfied with a picture area reminiscent of the size of a postage stamp in the middle of the screen, or else there is distortion in ALL OTHER MODES including ZOOM mode. Playing the DVD on an older system seems to fill out the 4x3 TV image, though at what cost this reviewer is unable to say, there obviously being major lost of picture area. But such matters are irrelevant because regardless of what system one tries to use, the cumulative DVD flaws are so bad that this reviewer, in disgust, simply could no longer watch it. It is amazing that such a piece of crap would be marketed.
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