Scott of the Antarctic dvd movie.|
Scott of the Antarctic buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $7.99 Our Price: $7.99 Features • Closed-captioned • Color • DVD-Video • NTSC In Theaters : 20 April, 1949 DVD Release : 16 May, 2006 |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Printing the legend |
| The Brits love nothing so much as their heroic failures, and Scott of the Antarctic is pretty much the poster boy for Imperial underachievers, thanks in part to the publishing success his very heavily edited diary (none of those crabby bits blaming everyone else for his own mistakes made the cut) and a neat bit of mythmaking from J.M. Barrie, who invented a fictional heroic death for him.
Surprisingly, although it doesn't dare to criticize and does play down Scott's awkwardness and snobbery, Ealing's beautifully lensed color epic holds back from deifying him, offering a more sober portrait than you might expect. Amundsen is purely an offscreen presence here, despite proffering the sneaking suspicion that he's a bit of a bounder and a cad for getting there first by being competent (not the British way of exploring at all!), and legendary Norwegian Arctic pioneer Nansen only gets a brief look in (and no mention of his affair with Scott's wife: goodness, no!), but then this is more a film about stoic endurance in the face of bad luck' (rather than bad leadership and bad planning) than the race for the South Pole. John Mills is surprisingly good casting for Scott, his slight awkwardness with others suggesting he'd done his homework (his gutted reaction to reaching the Pole second is convincingly bitter), and the supporting cast is full of welcome mainstays of the British film industry - Kenneth More, James Robertson Justice (without a beard for once!), Reginald Beckwith et al. Although the integration with the studio work isn't always entirely convincing, the location photography is genuinely staggering and Vaughn Williams score is impressively forlorn. As others have noted, the Region 1 NTSC transfer is atrocious. Seek out the UK PAL DVD instead, which is devoid of extras but does have a good transfer. |
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