Clint Eastwood Trilogy: Fistful/Few $/Good Bad Ugly [ML104531]

Note: This is the same as the individual widescreen releases on LD, just in a boxed set together.

The Dollars films make it to widescreen finally. Each film has vastly different presentations, all excelling in fidelity for the English mono dubs.

Fistful: uncut print with minor damage. Good color and stunning audio without distortion and EQ that removes information. Some intrinsic noise here and there, worst in the final confrontation but never awful. Transfer reused with some minor cleanup and audio scrubbing for 1st DVD.
PQ: 4/5
AQ: 5/5, still best release of English audio to date.

For a Few: Good print source with moderate wear here and there, nothing awful. Sadly the print used is edited all over the place from shot of violence to trimming of scenes to missing part of the final shootouts. Has the extended Indio laugh however. Print seems to have been reused for 1st DVD with some things put back in and other taken out causing massive sync errors that have never been corrected throughout later releases. Audio is wonderfully untouched.
Why and how they cut some things and made others uncut I will never know. Also, the film is opened up slightly to more of a 2.20 ratio for some unknown reason.
PQ: 4/5 for cropping and editing.
AQ: 5/5, would be best if uncut.

GBU: 1st release that uses Italian onscreen captions for the characters and is overmatted, with the trademark Leone closeups appearing even tighter. More of a 2.55 than 2.35. Video is very good and appears the best of the three. Audio is phenomenal again with no distortion unlike the ac3 versions and no scrubbing and EQing to remove noise and detail. I have the later release and it's DVD version which I know by heart so will post comparisons soon.

PQ: 4.5/5 overmatted transfer.
AQ: 5/5 still best release of English audio to date.

look forward to seeing the DVD comparisons of Good, bad ugly.

Ok, so here's what clever MGM did.

They took the LD transfer with Italian captions and swapped in English ones.
That's it.
The transfer is the same as the other one otherwise, as evidenced by the same damage marks and audio defects. The pressing is far better however with far less video noise and discs from Japan. Color seems to have a slight improvement as well. The framing is opened up a bit, restoring the space a bit lopped off in the earlier disc.
Cover art is beautiful re-rendering of previous single issue.

The DVD transfer improves on this with a progressive 16:9 encoding yielding better resolution and better color. It is still the same transfer and the audio is cleaned up a bit and EQ'd which also removes some atmospherics and overall impact.

The additional scenes are from an Italian print and have Italian mono. On the LD they are Side 4 in CAV but some bright person left off the English subtitles. These are present on the DVD, but of course the audio is also diluted into puny ac3.

The 1998 DVD of the 161 minute International cut with additional Italian scenes is a must own disc simply for being unaltered and unmutilated. Nowadays you have to verify the actual disc as all covers and printings will be incorrect and actually feature the b*****d Special Edition.

The 1998 remastered LD gets a
PQ: 5/5
AQ: 5/5

Note: I never mentioned but all of these transfers feature edge enhancement all over the place. It's noticeable but ultimately ignorable because these accurately reflect print sources of the era, especially Technicolor ones which are not even considered in the mastering of the newer MGM issues.

I just want to know what the original source was because it is a US International print with Italian captions for some odd reason. It does not have the unique Italian print edits either.
Wait, you know what--I bet it was the International version master which would have Italian captions that would later be substituted for each individual country's language just like the dub track.