If my pitiful and somewhat acrobatic “HD” streaming attempt can tell us anything, it is that the BFI needs to release The Gypsy and the Gentleman on Bluray - now that it has obviously been cleaned up, colour-graded, and scanned in high definition from a well-preserved 35mm master.
Or at least that is what we must assume because the BFI Player offers no additional information on the film or its restoration status, and even the native resolution of the streamed file remains a mystery. The above image has been resized to simulate standard Bluray dimensions, and while my patchy network does not have the bandwidth to render motion in anything other than a blob of blurry pixels, and even fails to reproduce full (colour) resolution in a still image, there is a powerful suggestion here of the magnificent detail captured in the original source - detail that the Bluray would be ideally suited to deliver, away from the vagaries of online traffic.
Compared to the dark and grainy 4:3 DVD that has been available for some time, the BFI’s 1.66 widescreen presentation comes as a stunning revelation: yes, the content in both formats is exactly identical. Yes, the DVD shows more of the picture at the top and at the bottom, and yes, the widescreen technique used by Rank uses less of the available frame than if the film had been shot in 4:3 aspect ratio. Yes, all of those things are perfectly true, and I would even add that had the DVD been properly sourced the new widescreen version would not even have that particular bonus to claim for itself.
It is not simply the technical specifications that define the Bluray as the superior format: the quality of the offering depends on the full use of those technical tools to maximize the complexity of the viewing experience. The BFI’s effort, even on a slow network, is nothing short of a miracle, and it fully deserves a proper Bluray release.