A Night to Remember Blu-ray Screenshots (Patreon)

Video

This is unfortunate. A Night to Remember tricks the eye. It's notably sharp. Imprint shows what's a clearly new scan based on the impressive resolution and resulting sharpness. Detail can flourish in this situation, capturing stitches on costumes or the luxurious furs worn by passengers.

And yet, this master is too often a mess. Signs of filtering are everywhere. Harsh gradients in gray tones create banding. Sloppily resolved grain causes mosquito noise aplenty. Smearing joins waxy faces on the regular, becoming worse with distance. Severity can change scene-to-scene, the ugliest more akin to a DVD due to the chunky artifacts, the best enough to suggest a great presentation. There's no consistency.

The print used is dinged by scratches and dirt, generally fine considering age (and ignoring the stock footage). Variance in gray scale, when not hampered by filtering, creates needed depth. Contrast can clip in places, further muddying things, if losing no substantial dimensionality.

Audio

Gorgeous audio detail sustains high quality vintage sound, superlatively crisp for its age, and a premium example of how great classics can perform on this format. There's no fidelity loss at high frequencies, and dialog is pristine in clarity. Preservation efforts in 2.0 mono keep A Night to Remember faultless, and it's a shame the same effort wasn't applied to the video.