First things first: Amazon, would you please STOP mingling all the Blu-Ray and DVD reviews together, not to mention the different releases of a given title!!!!!!!!! This disreputable practice has gone on for years--wake up and smell the coffee!!!!! Each transfer needs its own reviews so people don't get the wrong idea about what they're wanting to buy.
Now for the Blu-Ray review of My Fair Lady. The fact that CBS/Paramount gave this title very little publicity--and that was run-of-the-mill--made many fans of this movie suspicious of what was coming. As it turns out, they had a right to be wary. CBS was asleep at the wheel when this title was being prepared for Blu-Ray release. Robert A. Harris, a highly respected film restorer who worked on this film back in the 1990s, is furious and outright sick at what was done, or rather NOT done, for this release. He and some other web reviewers feel that CBS (the owner of My Fair Lady ever since it premiered on Broadway) used some materials from the 1994 restoration that were okay for DVD resolution, but weren't adequate for high definition, and simply transfered them to Blu-Ray with little or no corrections. And instead of using 65-mm elements, which would've given an incredibly sharp and detailed picture, they used 35-mm elements, resulting in only 30-35% of the possible resolution making it to the disc, according to Mr. Harris. The transfer has other problems: speckles, dirt, and instances of the extreme sides of the picture being much lighter (or at times even foggy looking) than the middle. If a human eye even checked the picture quality before it was okayed, he didn't know any better or CBS was determined not to spend a penny more than necessary to just get the movie out there.
Please understand that the level of problems one sees is determined mainly by the size of your television screen. On my 42-inch plasma set, this disc looked sharper and prettier than I was expecting, but it certainly could have been better even on that smaller screen. There should have been greater resolution, the speckles should've been removed, and there is certainly NO excuse for the foggy sides of the picture frame! My Fair Lady is the 1964 Oscar winner for Best Picture and is one of the very best musicals ever made; it is a classic that deserves the same stellar treatment that The Sound of Music and Ben-Hur received. While not a horrible effort, CBS's indifference to one of its crown jewels is an insult to the artists who made it and to the consumer who is being asked to pay for its substandard quality.