Customer Reviews

Charles Bronson Collection (Telefon / St. Ives)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have been waiting for Telefon to be released on DVD for years and I must say that I am somewhat disappointed with the picture quality. I have found the image to be unusually soft in many places - mostly the interior scenes. There is a definite lack of sharpness. The movie itself is excellent.

Both films are decent (I repeat, decent, not the best ever) films in the Bronson catalogue. They are both in the mystery sort of direction, but have some action here and there. For me, St. Ives. was the best of the two. And up till now, as far as I'm aware, Telefon was not available at all on dvd. Having them both together is a nice deal. I pre-ordered it, and watched both films. Keeping in mind that they are products of their time and don't strive to be much more than that, I'd advise Bronson fans to check out these films. They look and sound decent enough, the pictures are clear, about what you would probably get on a decent video tape. Don't expect DTS sound and all the bells and whistles. They are not going to have frame by frame digital restoration, but they look real nice and the image holds up well. If you are new to Bronson, I recommend RED SUN (his best film in my opinion), CHATO'S LAND, THE MECHANIC, HARD TIMES, BREAKHEART PASS, DEATH HUNT, and of course, DEATH WISH. I'd also recommend ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE OLD WEST. But that is a heavy one. Some people people might want to look elsewhere if they are not into pictures that concentrate heavily on atmosphere and the slowing of time to tell a story. It's a masterpiece, but not for everyone understandably. Bronson Rules!

I have a copy of Telefon in widescreen taped from TV that was a much better transfer than this. The DVD picture is so soft on this new release that it appears to almost be out of focus altogether a great deal of the film. A great disappointment that they felt Telefon needed to be released as a two-fer with another title that was already out, and then released with some generic cover. What was wrong with the great theatrical artwork?!?!

Sure you can say "At least it got a release" but this scares me for the remaining Bronson DVD releases that have not yet arrived - Stone Killer, White Buffalo, Machine Gun Kelly, and From Noon til Three.

Maybe Region 2 will do it some justice. If you do buy this release, get it on the cheap and lower your expectations....

Come on Warner Brothers! Stop with these two-sided discs. Put each movie on a seperate single-sided disc! Charge an extra 5 dollars. We'll live with it. Especially, if you remaster Telefon. You really dropped the ball on this one.

Thanks to Amazon, I finally was able to add Telefon to my Charles Bronson collection; however, be warned that this DVD is very poor in picture quality. The content of the movie itself is excellent. One would think that Warner could make a sharper image on this DVD. Maybe one day, we will have the technology to get sharp pictures on all DVDs.

Despite being packaged like any one of a dozen cheap Public Domain compilations (you know, the ones that usually include The Valdez Horses/Chino and an episode of Man with a Camera they're trying to pass off as a movie), this release is a legitimate one from Warner Home Video bringing together a couple of Bronson's 70s output just before his fame began to wane.

Although little loved by fans of Ross Thompson's novel, St. Ives is an entertaining thriller with largely unrealised aspirations to being seen as a throwback to Warners' 1940s detective movies. Charles Bronson's the heavy gambling retired crime writer and would-be novelist of the title, hired by John Houseman's gentleman crook to act as go-between for a series of incriminating volumes only to stumble across dead bodies in tumble dryers and burglars who've taken the shortcut to the sidewalk via the window. It's not an action film, an elevator shaft fight and a climactic shootout notwithstanding. Instead it's a slightly quirky number full of neat little touches, be it Houseman watching The Big Parade and Birth of a Nation because, as his analyst Maximilian Schell explains, "Films really are dreams, especially old movies, and Abner loves them. They're good dreams for Abner. They're splendid, splendid therapy," Elisha Cook (no longer billed as Jr.) turning up as a hotel clerk who can even sleep through a shootout in the lobby or an amusing scene where a drop-off in the toilets in Union Station turns into a quirky discussion of restroom quirks. With some surprising faces popping up in the cast (Daniel J. Travanti, Jeff Goldblum, Robert Englund among them), it's an enjoyable 90 minutes that aims to be nothing more than a good night out at the pictures, and in this case that's enough.

Warner's DVD offers a good widescreen transfer with original trailer and brief behind the scenes short as extras.


By the end of the 70s, world politics presented an increasing credibility problem to producers: how do you make a Cold War thriller in the age of détente? By having a good Russian trying to stop a bad Russian starting WW3 by activating several suicidal sleeper agents planted all over America during the Stalin era and long forgotten by the new management was the solution 1977's Telefon offered. Charles Bronson's the good Russian chasing fellow Great Escaper Donald Pleasance's bad Russian with the help of Lee Remick before the renegade Stalinist can write his name across the United States by triggering a series of pointless suicide bombings on out-of-date targets. A workable enough premise, but it's a film that never goes quite as far as it could. It's fun that a couple of the suicidal sleepers are a priest and an All-American pancake-making mom, but that's as far at stereotype subverting as it goes with the rest an anonymous bunch. The film's never quite as cold-blooded as it needs to be either: when he's unable to stop one reactivated sleeper, Bronson strangles him instead, yet it's a rather polite and bloodless scene that sheepishly cuts away. While it provides plenty of explosions it rarely kicks into full gear. There's one good chase in a San Francisco hotel familiar to anyone who's seen The Towering Inferno or High Anxiety that comes to a satisfyingly explosive end in an underground car park, but the film's climax seems more adequate than inspired. There's not even the remotest flicker of sexual chemistry between Bronson and Remick to carry the film between things blowing up.

It wasn't exactly an untroubled shoot, with original director and co-writer Peter Hyams being replaced by Don Siegel (Hyams also found himself fired from Steve McQueen's last film, The Hunter - obviously he didn't endear himself to the Magnificent Seven), although some of his typically quirky dialogue survives in lines like Tyne Daly's CIA computer analyst's comment "That's exactly the kind of attitude that led to the downfall of the Hittite Empire." The change in directors occasionally makes itself felt in wild changes in cinematography from pin-sharp to that irritatingly over-diffused soft focus that ran rampant in the late-70s, but the over-riding impression is of an average movie but not a particularly unlikeable one.

Unfortunately, as with the TV prints, the picture quality on this widescren NTSC transfer is pretty inconsistent: sharp in some scenes, grainy in others. The only extra is the original trailer.

I have been waiting for Telefon to come out on DVD for a long time and now it is here. The quality is OK due to the age of the movie and the technology is dated but It is still as good as ever with some nice twists in plot. I had never seen St Ives before but it was a fair movie and you get both for a nice price. All in all I give Telefon 5 stars and St. Ives 3 stars hence the rating here.

I had been looking for the movie Telefon on DVD for some time. I saw other reviews indicating the picture quality wasn't very good, but I found the quality to be acceptable. The film is an older one and I didn't expect it to match the newer digital DVD pictures. It is clear, and the same quality as the picture when shown on one of the classic movie channels - but without the commercials.

I transferred my vhs tape to a dvd disc several years ago.
I have been waiting for this movie to make it to dvd because
I was hoping for a good pic quality.
That is not the case with this dvd.
It appears that this dvd was simply transferred from
a vhs tape just like the one I have.
The pic quality is soft.Its the same quality as a
vhs tape.

This is a good 2 movie pack. They showcase Bronson in detective/espionage roles, as opposed to the shoot 'em up of the Death Wish series. The picture is fine - I think people's expectations are overly high for a movie shot in 1977.
Other recommended Bronson fare and ratings:

***** Violent City - has one of the best soundtracks ever for a movie (Morricone)
*** Mr. Majestyk
**** Breakheart Pass
*** The Mechanic
*** Cold Sweat
**** The Stone Killer - tape only
**** Love and Bullets - nice scenery in Swiss villages - tape only

Can someone put the last two on a DVD, please.....