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  Directed by
  Starring
  Specs
  • Widescreen 1.85:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer (RSDL )
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital Mono
  • French: Dolby Digital Mono
  • Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono
  • German: Dolby Digital Mono
  • Italian: Dolby Digital Mono
  Subtitles
    English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Hebrew, Czech, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Hindi
  Extras
  • Theatrical trailer
  • Cast/crew biographies

To Sir With Love

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment/Sony Pictures Home Entertainment . R4 . COLOR . 101 mins . PG . PAL

  Feature
Contract

Mark Thackery (Sidney Poitier) plays a novice teacher who takes over the reins of a class at one of the toughest schools in Londons East End. The problem with these 'kids' is that they are just that. The discipline they receieve at home is that with which you dish out to children so they've never been given the chance or know-how to behave like adults.

Thackery takes it unto himself to teach these kids about life and love and sees to it that they become adults before the year is over and they are sent out into the world. Featuring a supporting cast which includes Judy Geeson as the naive Pamela Dare and the talented singer Lulu in her first movie role.

  Video
Contract

Having watched the trailer before the movie, I new what I was in for. It's always good to see the extras as you can always determine that the main feature will be atleast as good as this. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of this image for film stock of such age.

Presented in a 1.85:1 16x9 transfer, the image exhibits all the trademarks of a good Columbia Transfer with the downside of retaining the impurities in the source material. This is probably as good as the image is going to get so don't expect to see anything spectacular barring a complete re-shoot ala Psycho.

Colors are a tad muted at times and pleasantly rich at others. The gritty look of East End London is a dull grey and black with splashes of brown to fill in the dirty areas. Flesh tones are spot on and detail in the closeups is pretty good. Black levels are fine with not much areas that required a good presence of shadow detail.

One gripe I had with the transfer was the use of edge enhancement which created a ghost like aura around people and objects. It was mildly distracting at times and can only be attributed to what was a soft transfer from the beginning. The disc is dual layered with the layer change being barely noticeable. A mono soundtrack helps to lessen the impact of noticing a drop in audio at the layer change.

  Audio
Contract

The disc is presented with 5 mono language tracks. I didn't realise this due mainly to my amp doing some tricky processing across the front soundstage. No, I didn't set it to a faux stereo representation which is impossible, but it spread the mono track across the front soundstage, most likely to it being a 2 channel mono rather than 1 channel.

Overall, there was nothing remarkable about the soundtrack other than the dialogue being very clear and intelligible. In some scenes where the music creeped in it seemed a little louder than the dialogue and I had to adjust the volume to compensate.

All in all, a suitable soundtrack that does not need to be tampered with as some other 5.1 remixes have done.

  Extras
Contract

We are presented with a standard assortment of extras here that include the theatrical trailer and biographies of Sidney, Judy and director James Clavell.

One thing that shouldn't have been included is the 5.1 Dolby Digital City trailer. It gives the user the impression that the disc is a full on soundtrack when it isn't. Leaving it out altogether would have been wise. Village Roadshow do this best when they associate the proper dolby trailer to the proper audio mix of the movie. Just a comment.

  Overall  
Contract

At its time it was one of the most controversial movies released for the simple fact of using a black man in a lead role. Even to this day, it is clearly eveident how simple racist terms such as black magic and voodoo were acceptable in discussion, even when dealing with a black person.

Statements aside, To Sir with Love is a gripping movie about a teacher giving his students a different perspective on their own lives. When you come from a common background, being successful and intelligent is all a matter of attitude, discipline and respect and it certainly opened up my eyes to certain aspects of my life that need tuning now and then.

Even though the recent efforts such as Higher Learning and Dangerous Minds deliver similar messages, they do so with more violence than we would come to expect in the 60's. This is an excellent example of such a movie in that time.


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      And I quote...
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    - Steve Koukoulas
      Review Equipment
    • DVD Player:
          Pioneer DV-505 Gold
    • TV:
          Hitachi CMT2979 68cm
    • Receiver:
          Onkyo TX-DS777 THX Select
    • Speakers:
          Peterson Labs 100Watts
    • Centre Speaker:
          Sherwood SC-60E
    • Surrounds:
          Sherwood LS-502
    • Audio Cables:
          Standard RCA
    • Video Cables:
          standard s-video
      Recent Reviews:
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