Ady

I love these four Rutherford/Marple films, too.
I think Ron Goodwin's theme and incidental music sets-up the whole mood thing perfectly.
http://www.britmovie.co.uk/forums/as...foul-ahoy.html
http://www.britmovie.co.uk/forums/lo...html#post37135

DAE

ChristineCB wrote "I picked up the four Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films on DVD (Murder She Said, Murder Most Foul, Murder Ahoy and Murder At The Gallop) and thoroughly enjoyed those".

"These Region1 DVDs are an excellent video-audio quality. I trust the R2's are even better".

Hi ChristineCB, can you (or anyone else) please explain why you would trust the R2 DVD's to be better quality than the R1 DVD's.

Margaret Rutherford is by far my personal favourite Miss Marple, but i can understand why Agatha Christie fans feel otherwise. I haven't seen 'Murder She Said' for many years but i have seen her other 3 fairly recently and i agree with DB7 on 'Murder At The Gallop'.

ChristineCB

PAL format has a higher frame-rate than the North American NTSC format, and is closer to the BluRay and HD standards.

spinalman

PAL should be better than NTSC, it was developed as a refinement of the earlier NTSC system. PAL has more vertical lines but PAL actually has a LOWER frame rate, but that has no real bearing on quality.

Playing the disks on quality TVs and players that are native to the system is more likely to influence quality.... as is the techinical quality of the facility that is dubbing / encoding to the format.

Paul

ChristineCB

I thought PAL was 34.xx FPS and NTSC was 29.97 at best. There is also something about sector size matching is better in PAL's discs so that a disc's sectors have higher thru-put of data.

alex

I think you will find that PAL is 25 fps.

ChristineCB

Ah well... as long as they colorize everything, that alone makes all films great and wonderful. Then they can pan & puke 'em, too. For the sake of iPods everywhere, just take out all but the middle 5% of each frame. Downloads will really speed along.

Ady

PAL is 25 frames of 720 x 576 pixels (digital frame size) per second , interlaced from 50 half vertical resolution fields per second .

NTSC is only 640(?) x 480 pixels , and even though NTSC's framerate is 29.97fps , this 'higher' datarate is wasted for a film, as film is shot at only 24 frames per second.

NTSC equipment has to process the film's 24fps using a 'pull-down' system of cutting and mixing fields to 'stretch-out' and 'slice-up' 24 frames to fit into 60 fields for interlacing onto the NTSC tv's screen every second.

PAL on the otherhand, simply shows the film 4% faster at 25 fps and it 'fits' the TV system exactly, without any messy pull-down conversion.

Also Christine , PAL stands for Phase Alternating Line, whereas
NTSC stands for Never Twice the Same Colour !!! (good job these are black and white ! )
Ady

djdave

A friend - who is much more technically minded than me - told me that manufacturers artifitially create "regions" with DVDs so that they can sell more copies. :mad:


Classic films....Rutherford's portrayal is so eccentrically English

spinalman

That is so, but with many DVD players now multi Region that has largely evapourated as a restriction. The NTSC/PAL conflict is more of a barrier now.

Paul

Ascoyne D'Ascoyne

I've noticed that in many of Dame Margaret's films her husband, Stringer Davies, also appears in a supporting role; perhaps her appearances were made on condition that he was also in the cast. If you're a jobbing actor looking for work it must help if you have a star in the family!

Ady

I've read that Rutherford was a bit frail by the late fifties ; - in need of constant 'medical' pampering from her husband, Stringer Davies. Initially , she turned down the part of Miss Marple, only changing her mind when Stringer was offered the supporting role.
Allegedly
A.....d.y
Ady

Ascoyne D'Ascoyne

Hmm...She looked very frail indeed in the swordfight scene of Murder Ahoy
The earliest film which I've seen where they appear together is "Innocents in Paris" (1953). I don't know if they were married at that time.

CC1

She was in her late sixties early seventies when she did the Mis Marple films and I always thought looked quite robust. She was eighty when she died in 1972 of pnuemonia - but I understand she was quite ill for some years suffering from alzheimers.

There doesn't appear to be a lot written about her - there is an out of print autobiography that I haven't been able to get a copy of. I liked her in everything that she did - there is no one quite like her nowadays.

MrDrakesDuck

Here's a book synopsis:-

"I thought I had to shoot Germans, not chew 'em"