The Way We Were - Collector's Edition

Uh-oh, Streisand - somebody had better put The Cure's Robert Smith on standby alert... *

This is what is generally regarded as a "chick flick". I'm a "chick", so I get to do the review. Hmmmm...

Anyway, here we have a tale spanning pre-war 1930's to the late 1950s, focusing on the opposites attract story of love between headstrong Young Communist League hell raiser Jewish woman (deep breath!) Katey Morosky (Babs), and big-man-on-campus buff WASP jock Hubbell Gardiner (Redford - why did they name him after a telescope?) Seemingly completely different people on completely different paths, she with her politics, innumerable jobs and oh-so-serious nature, he with his sports and air-headed partypartyparty friends, they find themselves caught in the pull of an it-shouldn't-happen-but-it-does attraction, helped along by a certain common ground in their aspiration as writers, and his seeming desire to keep that side of himself hidden from his peers.

Commencing during World War II, Katey runs into the be-uniformed Hubbell (I never have understood the whole swooning at men in uniforms thing, thankfully), who is in a somewhat comatose state in a bar. Cue the flashback to college, and the set up for the two's attraction. Then it's back to the now (that's the '40s, it's easy to get confused here) where eventually a once again inebriated Hubbell (Katey, you're a clever girl, listen to the alarm bells honey!) stays over, and a quick grunt and groan session ensues. Romance eventually blossoms, bringing us dinners, walks in the park, horse and cart rides - the usual stuff, until eventually Hubbell sells his book to Hollywood, and the now couple make the move there - so much for Katey's dreams of France...

A sub-plot dealing with the whole "better dead than red" affair of the late '40s into the '50s is sort of introduced, dealing with the black-banning of Hollywood writers believed to be Communist sympathisers, however it doesn’t really go very far, and in the state it was left in for the final cut it just serves to confuse matters somewhat (please read on for a bit more on this subject).

As there's no way to divulge more without spoiling the story, I won’t.

When this first began rolling I was more than a little worried - what had happened to the rather renowned Sony Pictures DVD 'Center'? Had they let the work experience kid loose on this film? With grain and artefacts such that it looked like a toddler had been playing with the film for two seconds (which I'm sure many of you can attest to is more than enough time to render anything pretty much destroyed), mercifully after around a minute things settled down. This isn’t to say the print is perfect by any means. There are still spicks and specks to be seen in abundance throughout, however the flick is essentially thirty years old, and for an idea of what quality actually is present you just need to look at some of the altogether more trashed footage used in the featurette (but more on that later).

Presented in its original theatrical ratio of 2.35:1, which is a nice change for a film of this nature, and 16x9 enhanced there's not much else to say. Colours and contrast, whilst never setting the world on fire, are quite impressive and everything is quite sharp, barring the occasional slightly fuzzy scene which comes down to the original camerawork rather than anything to do with the film's transition to DVD. The layer change comes at the end of a scene around the 80 minute mark, and isn’t particularly offensive.

Whilst presented in both original mono and remastered Dolby 5.1, I chose to view the bulk of the film in the latter. To be honest there was actually a lot less distinction between the two than you may imagine. Admittedly we're dealing with a dialogue-based film here, with very little in the way of other effects (save for Hubbell's all too frequent lash-outs at poor defenceless inanimate objects) to enable extra speakers to earn their keep, however it did all sound very centralised, and a little 'flat'.

Audio versus music levels are fine, with a film like this you need to catch most every word or you'll just be left scratching your head going, "Huh, wha…?". I'll warn you now, if you don’t like THAT infamous theme from The Way We Were (think of those old Yellow Pages ads - "Memories..." and wonderful Italian mamas) then run away from this disc as fast as your legs will carry you, as you are bombarded with the vocal version at the outset, and approximately 5192 orchestral variants (I then ran out of fingers to count more accurately, beat that Dr T!), courtesy of Marvin Hamlisch in one of his first big breaks, throughout the rest of the film. This isn’t to say it is bad per se, in fact the score adds greatly to the blub-factor in many of the scenes, so it does do its job admirably.

OK, it's a 'Collector's Edition', so what lovely goodies do we get? Well, it all starts with some rather sepia-toned and pleasant enough static and silent™ menus. On venturing into the extras section we get…

US theatrical trailer: Presented in a 1.85:1 ratio, and with the option of subtitles, this two and a half minutes lets you know in no uncertain terms that this film features "STREISAND AND REDFORD TOGETHER!" I guess that would have been a huge draw in the early '70s…

Documentary - The Way We Were - Looking Back: Put together just two years ago, if this just-over-an-hour feature (not 70 minutes as stated on the cover) continued on its merry way as it began I'd be weaving baskets and drooling uncontrollably by now. Mercifully the sappy intro veers off into a wonderful little special, featuring interview footage with director Sydney Pollack (and his pet rubber band, who doesn’t get an introduction), Babs, the author of both the screenplay and the novel the film was based on Arthur Laurents, composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman. There's much insight behind the film to be gleaned from this, the most important in my eyes being the ability to make some more sense of the plot on viewing many of the deleted scenes presented here. Cut because idiotic meddling test audiences couldn’t handle a little bit of politics in a love story, they were menaces to creativity then, they are menaces now. One excised scene actually even sheds a whole different light on a rather major plot development within the film (as I nimbly skip about avoiding spoilers), rather than the justified, but wishy-washy nonetheless considering, excuse assumed from the final cut. This is a great documentary in that it actually manages to make you more appreciative of what you get in the 'finished' product.

Director's commentary: Helmed solo by Pollack, whilst sparse at times this can also be very interesting. Essentially frame specific, although he does go off on somewhat broad (but interesting) tangents every now and then (such as his declarations of undying love for Cinemascope - well, until Out of Africa came along at least), I found this a lot more informative and captivating than I thought I would (and indeed wanted to time-wise).

Talent Profiles: The standard fare of a couple of pages of background and then a filmography, covering only Babs, Redford and Pollack.

Often a bit hard to follow (a tip - the time line goes '40s, '30s, '40s again, '50s), The Way We Were isn’t particularly helped by the large-scale mutilation of the Hollywood Ten/blacklist storyline, excisions which at times leave the story quite up in the air, and the viewer wondering just what exactly is going on. There is however a quite sweet at times 'opposites attract' type love story, which whilst it won’t be everybody's cup of tea does at least deftly avoid plummeting into over the top saccharinity as many such films tend to do. Babs is remarkably likeable (I admit it, I was dreading having to watch this), Redford does his dimple-boy thing quite well, eventual Bond girl Lois Chiles (bye-bye career!) phones in a perfunctory debut performance and you even get to see a young James Woods in one of his first roles, seemingly before he learned the 'f' word.

As far as weepies go you could do worse than this, but it is nowhere near being on a par to my personal benchmark, the 1939 Olivier/Oberon mascara-destroying masterpiece Wuthering Heights, in fact on a tissue scale of one to ten The Way We Were would only rate about a one or two (depending upon your hormone levels at the time). So guys, here's a tip from Aunty Amy. Just because you may rock up to your girlfriend's clutching this disc in your sweaty paws thinking, "Phwoar, I'm in!", don’t necessarily put money on it...

Disc-wise fans of the film should be well satiated. With a reasonable print, a great commentary and a well-paced and informative documentary the 'Collector's Edition' tag is a lot more justified here than with many other such claims.

You can call off Robert Smith, so sleep soundly Babs - for now...

* If you're looking here wondering "huh?" then I guess you don’t watch South Park...