The Outsiders [DVD]

The Outsiders is a 30+ year-old movie, there isn’t a lot of value in reviewing the story, directing, acting, etc. these many years later. Some people will like it, some won’t. I saw it for the first time in early 2017 on one of those obscure old-movie channels on cable and got hooked. So much so that I researched the story and became involved with the restoration project of the Outsider house in Tulsa. And … I bought my own copy of the movie. So this review will focus primarily on my satisfaction (or not) of the physical Blu-Ray copy of the movie, not of the content of the movie itself.To be fair, watching a movie on a classics movie channel is pretty brutal … filled every few minutes with commercials, mediocre video quality and barely intelligible audio quality. The poor audio quality on cable was one of the main reasons I wanted to see the movie again, I missed so much of the dialogue the first time around.Let’s be honest, a movie this old, and one that was made on such a low budget, isn’t he best candidate for Blu-Ray distribution. It’s not like buying a current digitally produced movie on Blu-Ray or even watching an old classic that has been digitally restored frame-by-frame. My hope was that at least it would look better than what I saw on TV and I had high hopes that the audio track would be cleaner and easier to hear. A secondary benefit (now that I have a more vested interest in the whole Outsiders mystique) is that the Blu-Ray version is supposed to contain more of what was in S.E. Hinton’s original book.The movie was shot with a stereo soundtrack so despite the 5.1 designation on the packaging it's not going to be true multi-channel sound. But on my system it does have a satisfying surround effect and ambience. Some of the dialogue is still obscured but there are director's notes indicating that it was recorded that way with some audio purposely overlapping for effect. In any case it was much easier to understand the audio on the Blu-Ray than was the TV broadcast movie (played through the same audio system).It's more challenging to discuss the visual quality, keeping in mind that this movie was shot some 35+ years ago. To add to that this movie was purposely shot with lighting, filtration, lenses and processing to evoke a 1950's era. I can report that watching the Blu-Ray disk was a marked improvement over the broadcast image and that the colors are deep and saturated with a dynamic range well-suited for typical modern TV screens.Bottom line: the Blu-Ray copy doesn’t disappoint. The audio is indeed a huge improvement over the cablecast and while still old, scratchy and dated it is definitely more intelligible. The visual quality to my eyes doesn’t look too much different, I suspect the source for the broadcast movie is the same as they used here.The real treasure is in the added material on the Blu-Ray disk. It is certainly worth the price of buying the disk.