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  Directed by
  Starring
  Specs
  • Widescreen 1.78:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer (RSDL 72.30)
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  Subtitles
    English - Hearing Impaired
  Extras
  • Theatrical trailer
  • Audio commentary
  • Cast/crew biographies
  • Featurette
  • Production notes
  • Photo gallery
  • Animated menus
  • Digitally remastered
  • DVD-ROM features
  • Filmographies

Newsfront

Palm Beach Pictures/Roadshow Entertainment . R4 . COLOR . 115 mins . PG . PAL

  Feature
Contract

Director Phillip Noyce is a familiar name to modern moviegoers the world over, having spent much of the past decade in Hollywood making large-scale films such as Patriot Games, Clear And Present Danger, The Saint and Sliver. But in the late 1970s, Noyce was one of many promising Australian directors starting off on what would hopefully be a long career - he’d just made his debut feature Backroads, and was contemplating what to do next when he received the screenplay that would help kick his directing career into high gear. Written by Bob Ellis from an idea by producer David Elfick, Newsfront posited a fresh idea - to tell the story of the years when Australians saw their news not on television, but in the cinema. Until television took over the task in the ‘60s, the cinema newsreel was a way of life for a huge number of Australians, who would head down to the local newsreel theatre to see a one-hour package of current events, trivia and a few diversions such as cartoons. These cinemas ran each week’s newsreel package continuously, so you could drop in at any time and eventually see all there was to see of events that made news both in Australia and around the globe.

Of course, someone had to produce the things, and that task fell to two companies in Australia - Cinesound and Movietone. They would send cameramen out into the field to try and get the best possible film of an event, then the footage would be cut together later with a (usually very theatrical) voice-over added, and the finished product would be rushed to cinemas. But it was the cameramen that did all the legwork, took all the risks and brought back the images that are now such a vital part of Australia’s historical archives.

Newsfront takes this scenario and builds around it a fictional story of two brothers - Len Maguire (Bill Hunter), a veteran cameraman with the fictional Cinetone company, and his brother Frank (Gerard Kennedy), who also happens to be his rival. The film follows their story from the tail end of the newsreel’s “golden age” through to the challenges presented to the medium by the advent of television - but it’s not just their professional lives that make up the story here, but their personal adventures and relationships as well.

This all, of course, has the makings of a great story. But what Noyce has done with Newsfront that really kicks the film into high gear - as well as lending incredible authenticity - is to use actual newsreel footage shot by the cameramen of the day, and then intercut the dramatic footage with it, seamlessly and eloquently. While this sounds simple enough, in reality it’s a very difficult thing to do, and it’s a remarkable achievement - the dramatic Maitland Floods sequence in particular interweaves old newsreel footage with carefully recreated drama so seamlessly the viewer never notices.

With a magnificent cast that includes many, many familiar faces from Australian cinema and television, Noyce (who slightly modified Ellis’ original script, causing a rift between the two for a time) unravels this expansive story in an episodic style, but with perfect pacing and a real sense for time and place. The production design and photography is absolutely stunning, with a keen eye for detail and the “look” of the era, and Noyce’s fluid direction shows beyond doubt that he had already developed sophisticated filmmaking techniques at this early stage of his career - much of the familiar Noyce “style” is clearly visible here. One of the landmark Australian films of the ‘70s, Newsfront stands up just as well today as it did on its release - and possibly even better, thanks to the magnificent restoration job that it’s been graced with for DVD.

  Video
Contract

Newsfront has for many years been seen on television and video only in full-screen format, an ancient transfer that was done with now-ancient technology. In cinemas, though, the situation was worse - no decent print of the film seemed to exist, and it was the very average 20 year-old print used for a 20th Anniversary screening of the film at the Sydney Film Festival that prompted Noyce to lobby for the film’s restoration and its eventual release on DVD. In charge of that restoration project was Frans Vandenburg, a film editor of many years’ experience; taking the task on with enthusiasm, he spent an enormous amount of time and effort searching for restorable film and sound elements, eventually finding both in the US after a considerable amount of frustration.

Vandenburg’s efforts, though (along, of course, with those of the labs and post-production houses that did the technical work here) are there to be seen on this 16:9-enhanced, 1.78:1 disc. Never before has Newsfront looked this good - not even, we’d be so bold as to suggest, when it was originally projected in cinemas.

Colour saturation (in the colour sections of the movie - many scenes are entirely in black and white to aid the integration of newsreel material) is rich and vibrant, and very much in keeping with the era - there are plenty of reds, browns and greens throughout the sets. The black and white sections have been perfectly balanced and look as good as monochrome always does on DVD, while the original newsreel footage - much of it restored for this release from the fragile, priceless original negatives - looks so clean it completely belies its age.

There are limitations - some visible film grain (this transfer was taken from a second-generation interpositive) and the occasional scratch or nick, but these won’t bother anyone given the age of the film (and, of course, the fact that unless this restoration was done, we’d likely never have seen Newsfront the way it was intended to be seen ever again).

The subtitles provided for the hearing impaired, by the way, once again follow Roadshow’s convention of being placed on screen relative to who is speaking - as always, a highly commendable effort.

  Audio
Contract

Originally made and presented with mono sound, Newsfront makes its way into the 21st century with, incredibly, a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, made possible by the discovery of three-track audio masters that were discovered in both the US and England. The creation of stereo after the fact has often been problematic for old movies, and can sound terribly artificial and “staged” if not done right. Thankfully, the audio here is done very, very right.

Largely dialog-focussed, the soundtrack wisely keeps most content to the centre channel, but uses various processing techniques to throw effects and dialog around the sound stage when appropriate. This is always done subtly and intelligently, and the overall effect is very natural.

Some sections of the audio are of slightly lower quality than the bulk of the soundtrack (particularly noticeable on the dialogue) but overall this is a remarkable job, and a lot of care has obviously been taken to keep annoyances like tape hiss to a minimum as well as to keep to the spirit of the original mono soundtrack.

  Extras
Contract

Particularly give the vintage of the film and the mistreatment it’s been subjected to over the years, there’s a terrific set of extra material here, though of course not in the over-the-top quantity you’re used to seeing on DVDs of modern movies. For their part, Roadshow have graced the disc with appropriately themed, fully animated menus with audio, and the scene selection menu screens are stunning, using full motion video with audio for capsule thumbnail previews of every chapter.

Filmmakers’ Commentary: One of this reviewer’s least favourite things when it comes to audio commentaries is the “cut and paste” approach used by studios when they can’t get a director, producer, or star to sit down and watch the film from start to finish. Instead, they’ll grab an audio interview and edit bits of it together to vaguely suit what’s on the screen - and the result is impersonal and usually less than informative. For Newsfront, though, Frans Vandenburg has taken the “cut and paste” approach and rewritten the rules. At various times and in various countries, he interviewed just about all the key players in the movie - director, producer, cast, everyone who was available (Phillip Noyce does seem to be watching the film at the time, though he’s quite obviously reading from a prepared script). He then assembled that vast amount of material into a coherent, fascinating commentary track that’s quite unique in its scope. Noyce offers direct opinions on particular scenes, Elfick gives background to the film’s production, and almost every time an actor appears on screen for the first time, they also appear 23 years later on the commentary track, offering fascinating insights. A lot of work has gone into this, and it’s one of the best audio commentaries of recent times.

The Last Newsreel: A ten-minute propaganda piece put together by Screensound Australia (the national archivists of newsreel films and footage), this is done in the style of a vintage newsreel but is really attempting to inform those who may have old film cans lying in their basement that they may be sitting on material that Screensound would consider vital to the completeness of their archives. A bit stodgily produced when it really should have been more “snappy”, this is nevertheless an interesting watch, and it contains a good amount of classic footage.

The Newsfront Story: Essentially a series of still-frame text screens that are “chaptered” by motion-video animations, this is a neat little capsule summary of the history of the production of Newsfront, put together by the same Village Roadshow publicist who worked on the original release of the film.

Biographies: A nice collection of nine fairly comprehensive bios with filmographies (7 cast members, the producer and director).

Photo Gallery: 32 publicity shots, admirably presented full screen (though with an “artistically faded from age” effect); these auto-display if left alone to do so.

Trailer: The original trailer for the film - almost. This was reconstructed from the restored film elements especially for this DVD, and looks terrific. A nice summary of a difficult film to summarise.

AFI Awards: What a gem of an inclusion - footage from the 1978 AFI Awards where Newsfront scooped the pool has been edited together with Phillip Noyce providing a commentary, telling an amusing story about that night and the healing of the rift between himself and Bob Ellis (for his part, though, Ellis still can’t resist a slightly dismissive look!). Wonderful stuff, though of course the image quality is fairly low (this would most likely have come of a low-band U-Matic videotape and has been 16:9 enhanced despite its 4:3 origins); it is, though, a pity we don’t get the option of turning Noyce off and hearing the speeches.

DVD-ROM Feature: A rare inclusion on Australian DVDs, DVD-ROM content is often criticised for being either (a) boring or (b) only usable on Windows PCs. Roadshow and the disc’s producers have avoided both problems - first of all, despite the warning on the back cover, the content here can indeed be used on a Macintosh or Unix machine, as long as you have Adobe’s Acrobat Reader installed (you’ll need version 4) as all of the content here is delivered in the form of PDF files. And what’s here is very good, though one can’t help but wish that more was included. There’s a “study guide” for school students (Newsfront has long been an educational favourite), a collection of 27 original reviews from the film’s release, a collection of scans of Australian Film Commission “assessments” done prior to the film scoring funding, and best of all a terrific 14-page text from Frans Vandenburg telling the fascinating story of the search for good-quality film elements and the restoration of the movie for DVD. Only criticisms: the formatting of the PDFs is somewhat sub-standard (though good use is made of Acrobat’s file-linking function), and Vandenburg made the minor mistake of not getting a proofreader to look over his work before publishing. Nonetheless, the DVD-ROM content here is a worthwhile and welcome inclusion, and shows there’s a use for DVD-ROM that we haven’t seen much of so far - namely, the inclusion of original production documents and other texts.

  Overall  
Contract

One of the key Australian movies on the 1970s, Newsfront is a fascinating, warm-hearted drama that is both technically innovative and historically informative. Beautifully written by Ellis and wonderfully acted by an ensemble cast of Australia’s finest, it’s just as exciting now as it was over 20 years ago. The restoration effort that’s been made for this DVD is absolutely remarkable, and was quite obviously a labour of love for all concerned; it sets a new benchmark for the release of classic local movies on DVD, and all involved should be justifiably proud. This is, needless to say, an essential disc for all fans of Australian cinema.


  • LINK: http://www.dvd.net.au/review.cgi?review_id=714
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      And I quote...
    "An essential disc for all fans of Australian cinema."
    - Anthony Horan
      Review Equipment
    • DVD Rom:
          Pioneer 103(s)
    • MPEG Card:
          RealMagic Hollywood Plus
    • TV:
          Panasonic - The One
    • Receiver:
          Sony STR-AV1020
    • Speakers:
          Klipsch Tangent 500
    • Surrounds:
          Jamo
    • Audio Cables:
          Standard RCA
    • Video Cables:
          Monster s-video
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