Anne Of The Thousand Days

How to Actually Watch the 1969 Film Anne Of The Thousand Days

Most people look for this movie because they saw a clip somewhere or someone mentioned it in passing. It is Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold. It won an Oscar for costume design. That is the basic summary you will find everywhere. The real problem is finding a clean copy that does not look like it was shot through a television screen in 1987.

I spent about three weeks tracking down a proper version. The issue is that almost every upload on the major video platforms has been through multiple compression passes. You can see the artifacts clearly if you pause on any close-up of Bujold's face. The MPEG-4 encoding smears her eyes into gray blobs. It ruins the whole thing, especially since the cinematography by Freddie Francis is genuinely good and was shot on 65mm stock. The most reliable route I found is to grab the DVD from Amazon or eBay and rip it yourself with MakeMKV. It takes about forty minutes on a modern machine. The resulting MKV file is roughly 8.5 gigabytes and the video bitrate sits around 6800 kilobits per second. That is decent but not reference quality. If you want something closer to the original negative, you need a blu-ray source. I have the Criterion Collection edition and the transfer is noticeably better. Colors are more saturated without being oversaturated, which matters because the film uses a lot of warm amber and red tones in the court scenes. Textures on the costumes actually look like fabric instead of pixel mush. The bitrate on that disc is around 22000 kilobits per second for the video, and the DTS-HD Master Audio track is 24-bit 48kHz. It is worth the extra storage space if you are going to watch it more than once.

Here is a workaround I learned the hard way. Some rips of the Criterion edition have lip sync issues that come and go, usually during musical passages. The problem shows up around the forty-minute mark and again near the end. I fixed it by using the VLC offset setting at minus 120 milliseconds. You can adjust it by ear if your setup is different. Check the scene where Clarence and Anne argue after the dinner party. If the audio trails the video, you know you have the same issue. I also found that the theatrical cut and the home video cuts are slightly different. The Criterion edition runs about 133 minutes while some older VHS and LaserDisc versions are closer to 128 minutes. The missing material is mostly minor and involves a few shorter court scenes, but if you are particular about you should verify the runtime before you invest time in a rip. IMDB lists the original theatrical running time as 132 minutes, so anything significantly shorter is likely an edited version. One thing nobody seems to emphasize is the sound mixing. The original mono track is actually quite fine for what it is, but some streaming versions add artificial stereo widening that makes the dialogue sound hollow. I recommend sticking with the original mono audio unless you are running surround speakers and do not mind the compromise. The music by Richard Rodney Bennett is better mixed in mono anyway. The reissues that push everything into a wide stereo field lose some of the intimacy of the dialogue scenes.

If you are on a budget, the DVD rip is perfectly watchable on a standard monitor. Just keep your distance from the screen. The encoding artifacts are far less noticeable at a viewing distance of eight feet or more. On a large screen or right up close you will see the problems. But the performances carry it. Burton gives one of his more restrained turns and Bujold is exceptional in the role. That is why people keep looking for it decades later. I would also warn against the free torrent versions that circulate. They are almost universally the worst quality source available, often cam recordings or degraded TV copies that have been transcode three or four times. You are better off buying the DVD for five dollars than wasting an hour downloading something that looks terrible. The Criterion blu-ray is also available used for under twenty dollars in most cases.