Roxanne

Take the classic story of Cyrano De Bergerac and apply it to a simple town and if you can capture all the aspects of the story then you've got a hit on your hand.

C.D.Bales (Steve Martin) is the fire chief of a small town with a unique disoreder/gift. He has a nose that protrudes out some 3 inches. When he meets Roxanne (Daryl Hannah) he falls in love with her but can't accept that she will ever be interested in a man with such a feature.

Enter rookie firefighter Chris (Rick Rossovich), a buff young man who has the looks and catches the eye of Roxanne. Problem is that he can't speak to women so he gets C.D. to help him write some letters to her but C.D. ends up putting his own feelings in his writing and soon can't keep the truth a secret as bumbling Chris keeps tripping over his tongue.

You get the picture and it's interesting to note that as Roxanne has borrowed heavily from Cyrano, we have the name C.D. Bales using the same initials too.

The only other way I've been able to see this movie has been on either television or video and to see it now in all it's widescreen glory just brings out so much more of the movie. This 2.35:1 16x9 transfer is up there with the best of it's era and is a testament to the compressionists for providing such a clean image on a single layered disc.

There is an abundance of detail in both foreground and background combined with a cleanly crisp image that suffers from a minimum amount of edge enhancement. Color saturation was pretty much perfect with bright red fire engines and nicely tanned flesh tones.

Suffice to say I was very impressed with a transfer that I wasn't expecting too much from. It truly does make it feel alot more polished. The only down side was some of the footage in the bar scene where the imagery swapped from fine to soft to fine to soft.

There are five 2 channel surround options on this disc and surprisingly the surround channel are very active right from the beginning as the opening music fills both front and rear soundstages.

Dialogue on its own is totally clear and well balanced across the front stage. Surround channels were used to enhance the onscreen activity but didn't go overboard. Being a dialogue based movie there really is much else that makes the soundtrack standout.

There are 2 simple extras on this disc being a theatrical trailer of below average quality and profiles of both Daryl Hannah and Steve Martin.

This is a classic comedy and one of Steve Martins best. His latest efforts have yet to reproduce his earlier efforts and this is one of the better in his hall of fame.

Highly recommended.