Update: The release has been delayed to November 27.
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It’s official!
The Criterion Collection will release a 4K restoration of Orson Welles’ sophomore Hollywood offering, The Magnificent Ambersons, on Blu-ray and DVD on November 20.
Loaded with extras, the single disc Blu-ray carries a $39.95 suggested list price, while the two-DVD set is priced at $29.95.
Welles was working in Brazil on the ill-fated It’s All True when RKO Studios recut Ambersons without his involvement.
A 131-minute cut was chopped down to 88 minutes and a new ending shot for the film.
Sadly, the original elements were destroyed by RKO and no copy of Welles’ longer cut is believed to still exist. (Some frame enlargements from the longer cut exist, and a few seconds of cut footage can be glimpsed in the original trailer.)
The Criterion Collection offered the following description of its highly anticipated home video release of the 88-minute RKO cut:
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.
The Magnficent Ambersons was released as a short-lived, bare bones DVD by Warner Home Video in 2011. It has not been released on Blu-ray in North America.
A far superior laser disc was released by The Criterion Collection in 1989. It included production stills, an informative commentary track by scholar Robert Carringer, and footage from Pampered Youth, the 1925 silent film based on The Magnificent Ambersons.
Special features on the upcoming Blu-ray and DVD set include:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Two audio commentaries, featuring film scholars Robert Carringer; and 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
- Welles on The Dick Cavett 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
- Essay by critic Molly Haskell and (Blu-ray only) essays by authors and critics Luc Sante, Geoffrey O’Brien, Farran Smith Nehme, and Jonathan Lethem, and excerpts from an unfinished 1982 memoir by Welles
The Criterion Collection is home to many fine Welles restorations including Chimes at Midnight, Othello with Filming Othello, Mr. Arkakin, F For Fake with One Man Band and The Immortal Story.
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