The magnificent Ambersons [blu-ray] / an RKO Radio picture ; a Mercury Production by Orson Welles ; [screenplay, production & direction by Orson Welles].
Format:
[blu-ray] /
Edition:
Blu-ray special edition.
Publisher:
The Criterion Collection,
Copyright Date:
2018
Description:
1 videodisc (88 min.) : sound, black and white ; 4 3/4 in.
Title from title frame. Narrator, Orson Welles ; cast, Joseph Cotten, Anne Baxter, Agnes Moorehead, Dolores Costello, Tim Holt, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Richard Bennett. Credits from booklet; most film credits are spoken aloud. Based on the novel by Booth Tarkington. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1942. Features: New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; Two audio commentaries, featuring scholars Robert L. Carringer, and James Naremore and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum; New interviews with film historians Simon Callow and Joseph McBride; video essay "The cinematographers" by Orson Welles scholar François Thomas; video essay "The score" by Bernard Herrmann scholar Christopher Husted; Director Orson Welles on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970; Segment from a 1925 silent film adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons; Audio from a 1978 AFI symposium on Welles, and audio interviews with Welles conducted by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich; Two Mercury Theatre radio plays: Seventeen (1938), an adaptation of another Booth Tarkington novel by Welles, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1939); Trailer.
Summary:
"Orson Welles's beautiful, nostalgia-suffused second feature--the subject of one of cinema's greatest missing-footage tragedies--harks back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Indianapolis, chronicling the inexorable decline in the fortunes of an affluent family. Adapted from an acclaimed Booth Tarkington novel and featuring restlessly inventive camera work and powerful performances from a cast including Joseph Cotten, Tim Holt, and Agnes Moorehead, the film traces the rifts deepening within the Amberson clan--at the same time as the forces of progress begin to transform the city they once ruled. Though RKO excised over forty minutes of footage, now lost to history, and added an incongruously upbeat ending, The Magnificent Ambersons is an emotionally rich family saga and a masterful elegy for a bygone chapter of American life"--Container.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.