Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Greedy Neighbors (1933)

This short feature drama, directed by Pengnian Ren, stars Lizhu Wu and Feiguang He, with Feijuan Wang, Zhang Yi, Dongxia Wang, Yanjuan Sun and Xiuying Sang.

This DVD edition has been mastered from fair to good 16mm reduction print. The source material is quite worn, with filmbase wear throughout the film being quite visible in the picture’s highlights. At other times, the print is dark enough to lose details in shadows. The analog video transfer is OK but the print is contrasty enough to lose image details in faces in many shots. The picture is presented in a letterboxed format rendering a cropped image of an approximately 1.76:1 ratio., losing picture information on the top and bottom of the frame (not to mention the picture information that was already lost at frame edges due to the close cropping that is common in vintage 16mm prints).

The film is not accompanied by a music score. Some kind of audio leakage is barely audible and does not appear to relate to the film. Also, the English subtitles are so badly translated that they are nearly as indecipherable as the Chinese intertitles. Lotsa luck following the story. You may just end up reading the subtitles for comic effect.

For desperate want of a better disc, this is (reluctantly) our recommended home video edition of the film. North American collectors will need a region-free NTSC DVD player to view this edition.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .