The miracle of cable--78 channels I mostly won't watch, plus a Starz/Encore movie package. I was initially excited about that, since I knew the Encore Western channel had recently broadcast the complete run of Sam Peckinpah's well-regarded TV series The Westerner. And Friday night's offering was one of Anthony Mann's very best, The Man From Laramie. So I tuned in.
For maybe five minutes. They broadcast this magnificently shot widescreen film full frame, reducing Mann's carefully chosen compositions to fragments.
I thought we'd settled this issue long ago. Though some movies are still released on DVD in full frame or letterboxed versions, most are letterboxed exclusively. Widescreen TVs are readily available, and most high-def programming on the networks is letterboxed.
Yet here we are, a premium cable channel carrying on like it's the seventies, giving us grainy, haphazard closeups of characters reacting to things we can't see, because they're happening on the other side of the frame, the side that's been lopped off because some programmer thought we'd turn tail and run if we saw black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.
Just out of curiosity, I tuned into the same network's broadcast of Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker last night. Surely this one they'll letterbox, I thought. It's a purely visual experience, unwatchable if you can't see the whole image. And of course it was shown full frame.
But hey, later this month they'll be showing the enjoyably dumb Charles Bronson vehicle Breakheart Pass, a movie I've only known from its network TV airings. Bronson hanging off the side of a train? Letterboxed or not, I'm there.
