Tootsie: Columbia Classics – Volume 5 (4K UHD Review)

• Reviewed by: Stephen Bjork
• Review Date: Dec 30, 2024
• Format: 4K Ultra HD
• 

Director

Sydney Pollack

Release Date(s)

1982 (October 22, 2024)

Studio(s)

Mirage Enterprises/Columbia Pictures (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)

• Film/Program Grade: B
• Video Grade: A
• Audio Grade: A-
• Extras Grade: B-

Review

[Editor’s Note: Though we’re reviewing the films in the set one by one, Tootsie is currently only available on physical 4K disc in Sony’s Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 5 box set. It’s available on Amazon by clicking here, or on any of the artwork pictured in this review.]

Dustin Hoffman is an actor who has always enjoyed going to extremes to immerse himself in roles, whether burying himself under mounds of Dick Smith’s foam latex in order to play 121-year-old Little Big Horn survivor Jack Crabb in Little Big Man, or spending a year researching autism to play Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. He’s also an actor who has been willing to take Method acting to the extreme, spending hours screaming his lungs out in order to create Jack Crabb’s hoarse voice, or running a half mile before a take to appear out of breath in Marathon Man. Oh, and needless to say, he also has a reputation for being so demanding that he can be difficult to work with. So, it was perhaps inevitable that all of those factors would come together with Hoffman going to extremes in order to play a man playing a woman in Tootsie. Of course, that same year, Julie Andrews technically one-upped him by playing a woman playing a man playing a woman in Victor/Victoria, but the classically trained actress did that the old-fashioned way: by acting. Hoffman, on the other hand, ended up living the part, in more ways than one.

That’s because the story for Tootsie hit a little close to home for him. Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) is a New York actor with a reputation for being difficult to work with, so his agent George Fields (Sydney Pollack) has been struggling to find a job for him. When Michael unsuccessfully tries to help his friend Sandy (Teri Garr) land a part as the hospital administrator on the soap opera Southwest General, he impulsively decides to audition for the same role, dressed as a woman. Rechristening himself as Dorothy Michaels, decked out in drag with the help of gobs of makeup and his penchant for Method acting, he succeeds despite the doubts of the series director Ron Carlisle (Dabney Coleman). Michael really only wants to raise enough money to produce a play written by his roommate Jeff (Bill Murray), but Dorothy becomes an overnight sensation, forcing him to keep up the ruse for longer than he anticipated. That becomes a strain on both his personal and professional life, especially once he finds himself attracted to his co-star Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange), while Julie’s father Les (Charles Durning) becomes attracted “Dorothy” in return. With everything spiraling out of control, only Michael’s gift for improvisation can possibly save the day. Tootsie also stars George Gaynes, Geena Davis, Doris Belack, and Lynne Thigpen.

Hoffman was deeply involved with the development process for Tootsie, so naturally it became a rather protected one. The story evolved through multiple drafts of the screenplay, starting from the original idea by Don McGuire and passing through multiple writers including Murray Schisgal, Larry Gelbart, and an uncredited Elaine May before it finally went into production. There was a directorial carousel as well, with Dick Richards and Hal Ashby making early exits before the project finally landed with Sydney Pollack. The merry-go-round even extended to the casting as well, with Hoffman insisting that Pollack take over the role his agent instead of Dabney Coleman, who went with the flow and agreed to play the director of Southwest General instead.

With all of those different cooks stirring the pot, it shouldn’t be particularly surprising that there are some unresolved tensions within Tootsie. It’s also very much a product of the Eighties, with some dated elements including a few borderline homophobic moments. While it’s supposed to be a story about a man getting in touch with his feminine side, there’s no sense of empowerment from that—quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. Micheal Dorsey can’t get a job as a man, but it’s actually easier him to get a job as a woman regardless of how unattractive that “she” may be, which undercuts the challenges that women really face in the entertainment business. Even more problematically, Dorothy Michaels becomes a folk hero due to the way that she stands up for herself, with real women like Julie gaining strength from “her” example. In other words, it took a man in the guise of a woman to teach other women how to stand up for themselves. (In Tootsie, these sisters aren’t doin’ it for themselves.) Plus, Sandy ends up shafted in the process, and Teri Garr deserved much better than that. Hollywood has a long history of telling drag-related stories, but Tootsie doesn’t really advance the concept beyond what Some Like It Hot had done two decades earlier—and in that case, Jack Lemmon’s character really did get in touch with his feminine side.

Is that overthinking things? Perhaps. In the end, despite receiving a raft of Academy Awards nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor, Tootsie is a relatively inconsequential comedy, and it’s best appreciated as such. The real measure of a comedy is how much that it makes us laugh, and in that sense, Tootsie is an unqualified success. It was also a step along the journey to examining gender identity in far more consequential fashion, so it’s still important in that regard. It’s just that like all of us, Tootsie could have done better. (Although in an ironic postscript, Dustin Hoffman ended up losing the Oscar for Best Actor to Ben Kingsley for Ghandi, while Jessica Lange took home the sole statuette for Tootsie that year as Best Supporting Actress. Maybe, just maybe, some of these sisters could do it for themselves after all.)

Cinematographer Owen Roizman shot Tootsie on 35mm film using Panavision Panaflex cameras with anamorphic lenses, framed at 2.39:1 for its theatrical release. As Grover Crisp explains in his detailed restoration notes, the original camera negative was scanned in 2014 on a wetgate 4K scanner at Cineric in New York. The digital files were sent to Prasad Corporation for cleanup before being color corrected at Sony Colorworks in Culver City. At that point, Roizman was still involved to make sure that everything matched his intentions. High Dynamic Range grades (in both Dolby Vision and HDR10) were created later, after he passed away in 2023, but the master that he approved was used as a guide for the new work.

It’s hard to imagine that Roizman would be anything less than thrilled with the results. This is a stellar example of getting the most possible out of a film element while still allowing it to look like film. There’s not a trace of digital enhancement visible, with everything looking as natural and, well, filmic as possible. There’s plenty of grain visible in the stocks that Roizman used, and it’s all reproduced perfectly here, neither smoothed out nor exaggerated. The colors and contrast are both impeccable, with nothing looking oversaturated or too harsh. It’s the ideal way to apply an HDR grade to an older film: using it to draw out every possible nuance in the colors and depth to the contrast range, but not to enhance them so much that it looks like something that couldn’t have been achieved in the analogue domain. Instead, it’s like a higher quality version of the prints that would have been available in 1982, minus the image degradation that resulted from generational loss. Outstanding work from Sony, as usual.

Primary audio is offered in English Dolby Atmos, 5.0 DTS-HD Master Audio, and 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio. Tootsie was originally released in mono, and this 2.0 track is the original theatrical mix. Yet Dave Grusin’s score was recorded in stereo, so that provided the foundation for an expanded mix. Chace Audio had handled the original audio restoration, which was later expanded by Deluxe Audio in 2014. While both the 2.0 mono and older 5.0 mix are included here, the new Atmos mix supervised by Brian Vessa easily trumps both of them. Grusin’s score is brought to greater life and integrated better into the soundstage. There are a few added immersive sound effects, but for the most part the original mono dialogue and effects stems have just been processed in order to provide a bit more presence, subtly drawing the viewer into the environments of the film. It’s another great example of how to gently expand the soundstage for the new format while never losing the character of the original mono mix. Yet Sony has still done the right thing by including the original mono mix, so the choice is still yours.

Additional audio options include French, German, Italian, Spanish (Spain), and Spanish (Latin America) 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio. Subtitle options include English, English SDH, Arabic, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Sony’s 4K release of Tootsie is the fourth film in their Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 5. The set also includes All the King’s Men, On the Waterfront, A Man for All Seasons, The Age of Innocence, and Little Women, plus a bonus UHD with the following silent films: The Price She Paid, Ladies of Leisure, The Belle of Broadway, The Desert Bride, and The Scarlet Lady. The packaging is similar to the other four volumes, with two wings that open up, each of which houses three films in individual Amaray cases with slipcovers. (The inserts use the original theatrical poster artwork, while the slipcovers offer new artwork.) At the back of the box is a separate compartment that houses a hardbound book featuring essays on each film by different authors (the inimitable Julie Kirgo, in this case) as well as individual restoration notes by Grover Crisp, plus notes on the audio remixes where appropriate.

Each of the films in the collection includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film, all of them based on the same 4K masters as the UHDs. There’s also a paper insert tucked inside with Digital Codes for each film. There are no extras on the UHD with the feature film, but the following extras are included on the Blu-ray only:

• Audio Commentary with Cerise Howard and Rohan Spong
• A Better Man: The Making of Tootsie:
  • Good Friends (SD – 18:15)
  • A Better Man (SD – 29:19)
  • Keep It Real (SD – 21:19)
• Deleted Scenes:
  • What a Surprise (SD – 1:30)
  • I Made You Some Soup (SD – 2:41)
  • Anybody Home? (SD – 1:26)
  • Amy Let Go (SD – 1:09)
  • Your Own Character (SD – :20)
  • You Can’t Play an Animal (SD – :18)
  • I’m a Virgin (SD – :40)
  • Wrong Door (SD – :23)
  • Signing an Autograph (SD – :25)
• Dustin Hoffman Screen Test Footage (SD – 2:45)
• Dustin Hoffman Interview (HD – 18:02)
• Theatrical Trailer (HD – 1:19)

The majority of the extras are all ported over from Sony’s 25th Anniversary Edition DVD release of Tootsie in 1997, but they’ve added a new commentary track for this version. It features author Cerise Howard, program director of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, paired with Australian filmmaker Rohan Spong—and as that description should make clear, they bring a Down Under perspective to their analysis of the film. They explore issues of sexual identity and gender identification throughout the track, noting various bread crumbs early in the story that pay off later, all while expressing their love for the film. It’s more of an appreciation than a deep dive into the making of Tootsie—for that, you’ll have to go back to Sydney Pollack’s commentary on the Criterion Collection Blu-ray—but Howard and Spong offer some interesting perspectives that are worth considering.

The archival extras kick off with A Better Man: The Making of Tootsie, a documentary in three parts that can be played separately or as a unit. It includes interviews with Sydney Pollack, Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Dabney Coleman, Terri Garr, Murray Schisgal, and Larrry Gelbart, plus a surprising amount of archival behind-the-scenes footage for a production from that era. The first part, Good Friends, focuses on the challenges of making the relationships between the characters work, with an emphasis on the big reveal and its aftermath (including on-set disagreements over how to stage things—Hoffman always gonna Hoffman). A Better Man covers the development of the story, including Elaine May’s uncredited work on the script, as well as the casting process and the design of “Dorothy.” Continuing the vein of Hoffman doing Hoffman things, while Dabney Coleman was originally cast as Michael Dorsey’s agent, Hoffman wanted to channel his real-life arguments with Pollack, so he insisted that the director take over the role and Coleman ended up shifting to another part. Keep It Real analyzes Tootie’s approach to comedy and character. Pollack didn’t consider himself to be a comedy director, so he wanted to keep everything as real as possible, and then let the comedy follow naturally.

There’s also a collection of Deleted Scenes, all of which add more flavor but it’s easy to understand why they were eliminated in the final cut. Most of them are just brief extensions, with the most significant being an early scene where Michael runs into his ex while he’s waiting tables. The Screen Test Footage features Hoffman in makeup as Dorothy for the first time, and it’s interesting because he hadn’t figured out what he wanted to do with the voice yet. Finally, there’s an interview with Hoffman that was recorded for the 2014 Blu-ray release of Tootsie from Criterion.

There are a few extras missing here from the Criterion set: a commentary by Sydney Pollack; an interview with Phil Rosenthal; an unused interview between Gene Shalit and Hoffman in character as Dorothy; and The Making of Tootsie, a vintage documentary that was produced back in 1982 (it’s the source of most of the archival footage in A Better Man). So, the usual caveat applies that you’ll probably want to hang onto that disc if you already own it. Yet there’s no escaping the fact that Tootsie has never looked or sounded better than it does here in 4K. For now, it’s only available as a part of Sony’s Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 5, which may be a bone of contention for some people who are interested in some but not all of the titles that it includes. Everyone’s mileage will vary on that score, but Volume 5 offers a potent collection of classic films that’s hard to resist even if one or more of them may not be to your tastes. Regardless of how you may feel about films like Tootsie, the first three alone are worth the price of admission for the whole set. As a result, it’s highly, highly recommended.

- Stephen Bjork

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