Tales of Hoffman (1951)

I watched Home Vision Cinema's VHS version of Tales of Hoffman. It's well-restored and clocks in at 124 minutes, so it's pretty much the full version.

Personally, I wasn't impressed with the film much. It's fairly thin on plot, relying more on spectacle than anything else. Maybe it's just than I'm not a fan of opera or musicals in general. Also, it was really hard to follow the plot at many points, because of the operatic style of singing used in the film. Could definitely have used some subtitles or captions.

From a technical standpoint, it works very well. Powell and Pressburger have done a great job of bringing an opera to the big screen, better than the Master himself did with The Magic Flute. I never thought I'd say this, but the ballet section at the beginning was just awesome. Really, really beautiful job those dancers did.

If you're an opera buff, you'll love it. Personally, it felt kind of lukewarm to me. Maybe I'll give it another shot when the restored Criterion hits.