8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Televista offers inferior edition of an engaging film, March 28, 2009
This review is from: The Yankee Clipper (DVD)
"The Yankee Clipper" (1927), a Cecil B. DeMille production directed by Rupert Julian, is highly entertaining hokum but it is notable because it was largely photographed at sea on an 1856 well-founded wooden sailing ship which passes almost perfectly as a real clipper ship of the period. Unfortunately, Televista's DVD edition is cheap and sloppy: their source material is a duped copy of a 16mm print, so the b&w picture quality leaves much to be desired; it is also quite incomplete compared to a competing and much handsomer Flicker Alley release of the same film in its anthology DVD "Under Full Sail." That the Televista version has a longer running time than Flicker Alley's is due entirely to the video transfer being at a very much slower frame rate (painfully slow, in my opinion -- there is no fixed, established running speed for silent films). The music on the Televista release is a "needle-drop" score from phonograph records which works well for some scenes and is completely inappropriate for others. In the interest of full disclosure, I restored the version released by Flicker Alley, so although I am not a disinterested observer, I am very aware of the relative completeness and image quality of the two editions mentioned here.
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