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Licensor Information
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
Directed by: Orson Welles
Featuring: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Richard Bennett, Orson Welles
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 of the fortunes of an affluent family. Adapted from an acclaimed Booth Tarkington novel and characterized by 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.
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Technical Specifications
Format:
Blu-ray
Disc:
BD-50 (1 Disc)
Total: 1 Disc
Regions:
A (Blu-ray)
Aspect Ratio:
1.37:1
Audio Options:
English PCM Stereo 1.0
Subtitles:
English
Supplements
Types of Supplements Included: Audio Commentary, Interview, Video Essay, Television Program, Film Excerpt, Audio Recording, Radio Program, Theatrical Trailer, Booklet
- Audio commentary by film scholar Robert Carringer
- Audio commentary featuring film scholar James Naremore and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
- New interviews with scholars Simon Callow and Joseph McBride
- New video essay on the film’s cinematographers by scholar François Thomas
- New video essay on the film’s score by scholar Christopher Husted
- Orson Welles on The Dick Cavett Show Show in 1970
- Segment from Pampered Youth, a 1925 silent adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons
- Audio from a 1979 AFI symposium on Welles
- Two Mercury Theatre radio plays: Seventeen (1938), an adaptation of another Booth Tarkington novel by Welles, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1939)
- Trailer
- Booklet featuring essays by authors and critics Molly Haskell, Lucy Sante, Geoffrey O'Brien, Farran Smith Nehme, and Jonathan Lethem, and excerpts from an unfinished 1982 memoir by Orson Welles
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