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Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
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When a Man Loves
(1927)

John Barrymore stars in this romantic historic drama with Dolores Costello, Warner Oland and Sam de Grasse. Oland makes a great, smarmy antagonist.

Warner Archive Collection
2009 DVD edition

When a Man Loves (1927), black & white, color-tinted black & white and color-toned black & white, 112 minutes, not rated.

Warner Home Video,
no catalog number, UPC 8-83316-16523-2.
One single-sided, single-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD-R disc; 1.33:1 aspect ratio picture in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at 6.2 Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to 60 fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 2.0 stereo sound encoded at 192 Kbps audio bit rate; English language intertitles, no subtitles; 11 chapter stops; standard DVD keepcase; $19.95 (reduced to $12.99)
Release date: 16 June 2009.
Country of origin: USA

Ratings (1-10): video: 7 / audio: 6 / additional content: 0 / overall: 7.

This Warner Archive Collection DVD-R edition has been prepared from a very-good to sometimes excellent 35mm archival source print. The presentation has been digitally mastered, with image stabilization and digital clean-up of the film’s intertitles but the motion pictures themselves have been allowed to remain much as they exist in the source print. There is no image stabilization or removal of dust and speckling, nor repair of other print flaws. The high-resolution scan could benefit from some digital reduction of the film grain.

The film is accompanied by its original 1927 synchronized music and sound effects soundtrack, with some occasional acoustic distortion and disc noise that is characteristic of the Vitaphone sound technology.

We recommend this disc, the only known home video edition of the film that we are aware of.

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