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Brown of
Harvard
(1926)

Directed by Jack Conway, this comedy-drama adapted from a popular stage play stars William Haines, Jack Pickford, Francis X. Bushman Jr. and Mary Brian.

Alpha Video
2022 DVD edition

Brown of Harvard (1926), black & white, 85 minutes, not rated.

Alpha Home Entertainment, distributed by Oldies.com,
ALP 8471D, UPC 0-89218-84719-5.
One single-sided, single-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD-R disc; 1.33:1 aspect ratio picture in windowboxed 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at 6.0 Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to 30 fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 2.0 mono sound encoded at 384 Kbps audio bit rate; English language intertitles, no subtitles; 10 chapter stops; standard DVD keepcase; $8.98 (raised again to $9.99).
Release date: 20 October 2022
Country of origin: USA

Ratings (1-10): video: 4 / audio: 3 / additional content: 0 / overall: 4.

This DVD-R edition has been mastered from an older 16mm reduction print that is a little flat in its greyscale range. Picture details are a little smeary throughout and a bit jerky in places, which leads us to conjecture that the slightly windowboxed presentation may originate from the 1990s VHS videotape edition from Critics’ Choice Video. The disc compression is a little heavy-handed as sharp eyes will be distracted by compression artifacts throughout the image of some shots (also evidenced by the slightly magenta and green pixels in the flaws).

The presentation is accompanied by a crudely cobbled-together soundtrack of preexisting musical recordings of varying audio quality. Arbitrary and distracting, actually.

This disc is not recommended as such but it is the only known commercially available DVD home video edition.

This review was updated in 2026.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is available from
ALPHA VIDEO through . . .