This is not really in the forte of the film genre that I like but I’ll be as objective as possible. Most of this film reminded me of Robin Williams’s impersonation of John Wayne in The Birdcage, and just how completely accurate he was. J

John Wayne plays Wil Anderson a cattle rancher with a bit of a problem. He needs to heard his cattle and horses 400 miles but he has no trail hands. It seems all the men in the area have disappeared off to a gold rush and left the territory short of working hands. With a little gentle persuasion Wil decides to take on 11 of the local school boys and teach them the tricks of the trade to get his job done.

He acts somewhat as a father figure and mentor to the boys during their journey. All goes horribly worng however when they are poached by a team of rustlers led by Asa Watts (Bruce Dern). Asa has just got out of jail and was turned down a job on the trail ride by Mr Anderson. He seeks to get his reveenge and in one way he does.

The boys however led by the trail cook Jebediah Nightlinger (Roscoe Lee Browne) finish their job in a pretty spectacular way.

The breaking of Boys and Making of men is actually a very good way to describe the issue of the film on a whole.

So How Does This Transfer Hold Up?

VIDEO
The 2.35:1 Anamorphic Widescreen transfer was certainly a low point in watching this movie. It’s not enough that John Wayne can’t act you then ahve to content with what i can only say is perhaps the worst if not one of the worst transfers I have seen.

A great many of the faults would of course lie in the original filming, but surely some mediocre remastering could have fixed a lot of these.

Where to Start?

The film lacks sharpness of any description. Film artefacts are quite prevalent during the entire movie along with a couple of instances of MPEG artefacting. Shadow detail is completely nonexistent and we really are missing quite a bit by the look of it.

The colour palette of the film could be brought down to one base colour of brown and it’s different hues and tones. I’m not impressed with the colour in this film at all. There seems to be little if no effort to improve on the sadly muted and somewhat overexposed colour schemes here. This is mainly attributable to the original print though. The excessively lit shots have lent themselves to some bad shimmering which was often distracting.

There are continual problems with grain especially in background images. (where you can find some fantastic painted backgrounds).

AUDIO

The Dolby Digital D 5.1 audio track is a little better thankfully. The film is predominantly based in the front sound stage and the surrounds and base channel don’t get much use at all. The limited use of the surround channels is disappointing as there are many opportunities to make these known.

Generally dialogue is clear but occasionally it became muffled.

One really definite fault I found and it may just be on the disc I had was that after the opening music sequence the audio volume dropped dramatically then when the Intermission music came on, all my neighbours got blown out their front doors as the volume was excessively louder. As I said perhaps just this disc but certainly a major fault in the audio track.

The musical score from very early in the career of John Williams is quite spectacular though with some fabulous western style music that actually made the film bearable to watch.

In all though the audio track didn’t have many dynamics to it and often sounded flat and lifeless and mono directional.

EXTRAs

Theatrical Trailer

Featurette: The Breaking of Boys and the Making of Men

Not a bad overview of the issue the film is tackling. It’s a shame though that the transfer quality here is even worse than the feature. You may have to force yourself to sit through this.