Perfect Understanding

Laurence Olivier stars as Nick Randall, a young man in love with Judy Rogers (Gloria Swanson; Sunset Boulevard). The two write up a contract that their marriage will not be the typical one and tie the knot. Later their marriage and their contract is put to the test when one of them is unfaithful.

I went in wanting to love this film. The cover claims that the film is a rediscovered romantic comedy, but that’s not true. Instead you get a film whose first half is made up of fluff, a lot of picturesque scenery and some boring monotone line delivery, then the film is sunk in the typical at the back end.

Perfect Understanding is just one of those frustrating films that has the cast written in performing the most idiotic mistakes in order to delve them further into a drama that is unnecessary and simply written. To make matters worse the acting is pretty bad. I know that Laurence Olivier eventually went on to become an icon in the film industry, but even he admitted that everything before his break out performance in Wuthering Heights was complete rubbish. This film will attest to that.

PICTURE QUALITY:
Obviously the picture quality is an improvement over the original source, but the film isn’t as great as some of the other black and white films I’ve come across on Blu-Ray.

For starters the film is jumpy here and there, sometimes little blips in the screen will appear briefly as well. Clarity is often muddled by extremely soft picture, take for example some shots of Olivier in the second half of the film looking filmed over. There is also a fair amount of grain involved in the picture.

Audio is pretty terrible sounding with LPCM 2.0 sound quality. It sounded as if the actors were close to the microphone and their stiff dialogue delivery was rapid fire and hard to understand, a problem that became more apparent when I discovered there were no subtitles.

There are two different schools of Blu-Ray aficionados, those that dislike the manufactured look older films get when they’ve been cleaned up too much and those who favor seeing old black and whites as if they had been filmed yesterday. I’m of the second school. Unfortunately Perfect Understanding didn’t blow my mind as far as the HD quality is concerned which was equally magnified by the fact that I wasn’t enjoying the film as I watched.

BONUS FEATURES:
~Also Selected Shorts: 1933 - Two Mack Sennett Shorts:
~Husbands Reunion
~Dream Stuff