As many of you may know, The African Queen is the only film of the AFI Top 100 and Imdb Top 250 to not have been released on DVD in the United States.
While this may strike many as odd, the movie industry has never shown particular interest in pleasing its customers. With so many other movies not on DVD, it IS possible that no matter how strange it seems, it could just have been accidentally overlooked for the past 10 years that have marked the DVD's heyday.
Whenever I discuss this with people, I always joke that the reason it's not on DVD is because the master has been lost or irreparably damaged and the studio is just to embarrassed to admit it.
I mean think about it, you are a major studio, and you own the rights to a piece of film history whose cast and crew are all legends, and you just can't find it. Maybe it fell in a deep hole, the ceiling leaked or someone ate their lunch on it. Would you say anything?
Besides the embarassment, it would be the wild west. A gold rush of people rummaging through back rooms of every old theater, sales of crappy prints for insane prices on eBay, and pirated copies being passed around wholesale. Really, the only sensible answer it to quietly inquire with collectors for a good quality print to restore.
Sounds crazy, right? Maybe not. Fox, who owns the rights to the film has been mysteriously silent. That was a good enough reason for me to look into securing a copy by other means.
PAL2NTSC was on my mind until I heard about the Korean Region 3 disc. It is an official release in NTSC format with some pretty reasonable reviews compared to a few PAL versions.
So imagine my surprise while watching it that the picture was jerky, Boggie sounded like he was huffing helium and Katherine Hepburn sounded like, well, a woman.
Examining the disc on my PC I discovered that the video was from a PAL master. 4% speed up to the audio, shortened run time and 1 duplicate frame in every 6 (at least it's progressive). Extras and menu design suggest it was probably taken from the UK R2 release.
I was so annoyed, I started a project to restore 24 fps and correct the audio for my viewing copy.
So that's that right? End of story? Maybe not. An interesting review of this release posted on DVDTown http://www.dvdtown.com/reviews/african-queen-the/4610/1 has this little tidbit:
But I couldn't help noticing some small jerkiness to the motion video at times, almost as though it were not being played back at quite the correct speed or hadn't been transferred at quite the proper frame rate. Still, the jerkiness is not at all noticeable most of the time, except in the first reel, and to confuse matters further it's even present to some degree on the prerecorded VHS tape, so maybe it's a quality inherent to the original film; I don't know.
The reviewer is referring to his old Fox Home Video VHS tape he was using for comparison. So, I already knew why the Korean DVD was jerky, but why would the VHS tape have the same issue?
The only answer that comes to mind makes my buttocks clench. It means only older PAL masters exist, no film. That would further explain why the international transfers are universally poor, showing little indication that they've been restored.
Perhaps we are seeing the last gasps of a screen classic. I own neither the VHS tape in question nor any laserdisc printed later than the last VHS release that I can examine.
Maybe I'm wrong and should be making myself a tin-foil hat. I really hope that is the case, but you never know.
--I may be a born fool, but you got ten absurd ideas to my one, an' don't you forget it!--
