MovieChat Forums > The Sting (1973) Discussion > Great storytelling, but not well polishe...

Great storytelling, but not well polished

posted 12 years ago by treyfk
5 replies | jump to latest

I watched this film the other day and I was very entertained and thought it was a fantastic script and well acted too, but on the technical side, this film was not well polished.

There were numerous parts of the film where you could quite easily tell that the actors had dubbed their own voices and it sounded like they were talking directly into your ear rather than hearing it as if they were in their respective environment (which is how it should sound). This took away from the film a bit in my opinion and as soon as I felt myself getting drawn into the film, some terrible dubbing would be placed in. And it's not like the film wasn't capable of sorting this out and polishing it. I can say that I've seen much older films that used inferior technology do a lot better with the sound of the characters' voices.

I still rate this movie very well though (8/10), but I think it just wasn't polished well enough and didn't live up to its potential. Was there any kind of time crunch that this film was under that caused this?

(And if there's been a re-release version of this movie with all of these dubs fixed then I would LOVE to see it. I realize that a few of these older films have been getting a face-lift with the better technology we have nowadays.)

[–] blue-3 12 years ago

treyfk on Mon Jan 28 2013 20:38:14 writes:

...I still rate this movie very well though (8/10), but I think it just wasn't polished well enough and didn't live up to its potential. Was there any kind of time crunch that this film was under that caused this?

I assume you saw it on DVD. The transfer was rather poorly done IMHO. With such low quality colour rendition, I couldn't get the colour setting right so I was not surprised there was an issue with the audio also.

I don't recall any such issues in the "real film" cinema release I saw all those years ago. I've seen much older films transferred to DVD much more competently.

[–] gottaluvafriend 8 years ago

I've seen The Sting more times than I can count and I've encountered nothing like what you describe. Perhaps I know how and why not to be too technically minded to just let it go; perhaps the copy of the movie you rented or bought is inferior? Maybe that copy is not very compatible with your sound system or vice versa?

[–] Destinata (3321) 6 years ago

Oh no, it's there. I didn't notice it as often as the OP, but there was one glaring error at the end. It's not as unusual even in modern movies. They're better at it now, but occasionally there's one that just jumps out at you.

[–] strntz (12233) 6 years ago

I realize that the OP made that post 6 years before this one, but I wonder if he saw this on TV where some "objectionable" language was over-dubbed or an international release where it was dubbed for clarity reasons.

I also can't recall any anomalies that the OP did in the audio track.

[–] Destinata (3321) 6 years ago

They wanted the PG rating, so they overdubbed an F-bomb at one point. And this wasn't the TV version. It was a good overdub, though. Newman was walking in front of Redford when Redford said it. But I'm hard of hearing and often have to look at people's lips to see what they're saying in movies. There's a big difference between the way the mouth is shaped for a B rather than an F. But what I'm saying is you'd have to see the lips to know they'd changed it.