High School Caesar

O'Dale Ireland's High School Caesar (1960) has been issued by Alpha Video in a fairly decent edition, distinguished mostly by its intermittent flaws, many of which are annoying but none of which is fatal. The disc is mastered off of a fairly clean but dupey 16 mm print, which wouldn't be suitable for television broadcast. That's especially true of the sound, which is boomy and weak, swallowed in reverb that makes it a little difficult to understand all of the dialogue in the first half of the movie -- and getting the volume up to a usable level exposes a hum. One strongly suspects, however, that the producers of this movie relied on live sound for their audio track, so the producers of the DVD can be forgiven to a great degree. Short of using original master materials, there's virtually no possibility that any DVD could have passable sound; and, yet, at 32 minutes in, the sound suddenly improves dramatically, so that suddenly all of the dialogue is almost easy to comprehend. There's some story behind the making of this movie, and a flaw in the way it was done, that probably only star John Ashley could have told us about. At 19 minutes in and again at 38 minutes in, and at 48 minutes in the sound becomes boomy and indistinct again. That's the way the disc plays,and if Alpha were charging any more for it than a budget price, they would probably get complaints. The standard six chapters are adequate, and the simple menu is, as always, child's play to maneuver around.