Girl in Lover's Lane

Charles R. Rondeau's The Girl in Lover's Lane (1959) was one of the last, if not the last, movie photographed by Edward Cronjager (1904-1960), a 35-year film veteran responsible for shooting Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1942), among other major movies -- but you'd never recognize his work, based on the quality of the print used for Alpha Video's DVD release. The source is a very worn 16 mm dupe print, not even remotely up to broadcast television standards of the period, with soft details and filled with scratches, blemishes and missing frames. Additionally, as would be understandable in utilizing a source such as this, there are also momentary flaws in the transfer that occasionally mar what picture stability there is; some of the picture information (especially the faces) is also almost whited out in detail, an indication that too much light had to be pumped through the print at certain points to make it viewable. Despite its flaws, the film is viewable overall; it looks about as refined as its setting and circumstances of production, which were very low-end. The six chapters standard to any Alpha Video release are just about right for the relatively simple story line, and assuming that one can look past the flaws in the source without developing eye-strain, this seems to be about as good a copy of The Girl in Lover's Lane as one is likely to see in the immediate future. The disc opens up to a simple three-selection menu automatically on start-up.