Review by Gary Tooze

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Introduction: The chase has been a vital cinematic ingredient since The Great Train Robbery of 1903. Some ten years later, Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops brought the concept to hilarious heights – or depths, if you prefer. (Billy Wilder's 1959 Some Like it Hot opens with an homage.) Westerns from the silent era through the 1930s had endless chases per movie: Indians chasing wagon trains, cavalry chasing Indians, outlaws chasing stagecoaches, posses chasing outlaws, good guys in white hats chasing down runaway horses with damsels in distress. Dramas and comedies made frequent use of the sound stage so that filmmakers could control every nuance of production, but were less convincing for chase sequences, having to rely on rear projection for that extra bit of wincing unreality. The sound stage became the order of the day until after WWII, when more light sensitive film became available and the camera itself became more portable. With film noir the camera moved out on location once again, often at night.

The idea of the chase as the basic architecture of a movie isn't all that common in film, though it does seem to provide the impetus for many of our dreams. Alfred Hitchcock placed his personal stamp on the chase in the late 1930s with The 39 Steps and Young and Innocent, in 1942 with Saboteur and in 1959 in North by Northwest. In the following decades, the chase could be seen in such diverse films as Stanley Kramer's 1963 interminable farce, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Sydney Pollack's romantic The Electric Horseman, Spielberg's relentless TV movie Duel, and the delightfully disrespectful Smokey and the Bandit. It's there again in The Searchers, John Ford's tale of twisted revenge and racist hatred and also Hitchcock's introverted, nightmarish masterpiece in the genre, Vertigo. Satoshi Kon would bring the dream and the chase together in his 2006 anime, Paprika.

Though its antecedent is probably the chariot race from Ben-Hur, the idea of a car chase being considered as part of character development got a genre-making boost in Peter Yates' 1968 detective drama, Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen in the title role. The car chase would find ferocious expression three years later in William Friedkin's thriller, The French Connection, where Gene Hackman terrorizes Manhattan's population as his juggernaut chases down an elevated commuter train through defenceless traffic and the spare pedestrian.

It wouldn't be long before the car chase would become the staple of comedies and thrillers alike from The Blues Brothers and Beverly Hills Cop to The Road Warrior and Ronin, as each in turn tried to outdo its predecessor in sheer carnage and automotive acrobatics.

In the mid-1960, an entire TV series (4 seasons, no less - Ed. Now on DVD HERE!) was developed around the basic Hitchcock formula: Roy Huggins' memorable The Fugitive starred David Janssen as a man wrongly accused of his wife's murder. The police chase him from one episode to the next, as he doggedly tracks his one-armed man. Huggins' clever amendment was to place his hero in harm's way every time he did his doctor thing, which was often.

 

 

The Film: 7/10

Image : 5/7    NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

The Fugitive in the old MPEG-2 encode is not much fun to look at, though oddly sharper in some spots. Made almost fifteen years ago before digital effects became the norm for dramatic thrillers and when they still had much the same look as they had for The French Connection twenty years earlier. The Fugitive adds extra light for indoor shots and close-ups, perhaps to allow the movie to play better on pre-high definition television, as it ensures greater visibility, depth of field and clarity of focus at nearly all times.

However, viewed on smaller than 55-inch high-definition displays, the use of extra artificial lighting strikes us as obtrusive, which it would not in front projection or in the theater. We don't notice it when the image is blown up to the size of a theatrical screen, but at home, the contrast is sometimes excessive. This is the case for many movies that use auxiliary lighting at the sides and behind, to help set off one character or object from another. There's not a whole lot that can be done about it for home video, for how would screen size be factored in?

Once again, the difference between the standard and high definition discs, while not something that knocks one's socks off in an A/B comparison, is more felt that observed. Differences in resolution, sharpness, color contrast and brightness are barely discernable, but our emotional involvement on the Blu-ray, despite all, is not insignificant by comparison. We might not even have been aware that the movie was as flat as it was on DVD until we see it in high-def. Motion artifacts, too, are minimized in this Blu-ray. One minor criticism that is entirely the doing of Warner's presentation for this disc: the decision to fill a 16x9 screen, or nearly, at 1.77:1 instead of the theatrical 1.85:1. The difference is minor and subtle, but there's really no good reason not to conform to the director's intentions here.

That said, the image is, except for the more carefully lit shots, noticeably soft, mushy and grainy – one wonders if this is entirely the result of film stock and lensing. The print used appears to be quite clean, with noiseless, if not solid blacks and a natural rendering of colors and flesh tones. Much of the color for outdoor shots, with the notable exception of the St. Patrick's Day Parade, is muted. On the other hand, the blending of live action and matte shots in the train crash is far from seamless when viewed in HD – again, not a fault of the transfer.

 

CLICK EACH BLU-RAY CAPTURE TO SEE ALL IMAGES IN FULL 1920X1080 RESOLUTION

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps even more than the image quality, audio suffers at the hands of the early adopter of the high definition medium. When The Fugitive came out on Blu-ray, lossless or uncompressed audio tracks were not yet the norm. Many of us, myself included, had not experienced such a thing in a home theatre environment. For a long time I preferred a simple two-channel mix, played through a proper outboard digital-to-analogue converter, to the thick non-dynamic Dolby Digital and DTS surround mixes. And this is what we have here at a subdued 48 kHz / 640 kbps.

We think immediately of the astonishing train wreck: the screeching of metal against metal, train against bus, the vain attempt to brake what will shortly be crashing tons of engine and freight as they scream and crush their way through the hillside in an unwitting attempt to turn Harrison Ford into a waffle. I suspect our imagination enhances that which is merely loud and scary but lacks weight, power or truly frightening scream. Still, I'll bet it's there, somewhere, on the soundtrack, but can't make its way through the thick of traditional compressed audio.

For a thriller, The Fugitive is relatively subtle in respect to its audio. There's not a whole lot to show off one's audio system in this movie: some nice helicopter effects and the tunnels and falling water around the dam, traffic sounds: everything is effectively designed to support drama, place and mood. What is wanted is atmosphere, clear dialog, and a great train wreck. And we almost get it. Let's hope for a reissue with a DTS-HD MA mix and an improved image. Gary's Momitsu has identified it as being a region FREE disc playable on Blu-ray machines worldwide.

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