I received my review copy of the Criterion Complete Mr. Arkadin set last week, and after a cursory walkthrough, I can say it’s pretty much everything we hoped it would be. While it isn’t absolutely “Complete” (something that has to be a bit of a gag on their part, given the project at hand here), […]
Sent to me today was this rather exciting bit of news regarding the Italian TV channel RAI, which is planning a Mr. Arkadin fest on April 1; the translation from their Web site, as provided to me: “Among the films completed by Orson Welles, this is certainly the work that’s presented in the largest number […]
As you’ll have seen if you peruse the message board, a post linking to Tim Lucas’ Video Watchblog column about the new Criterion Collection Mr. Arkadin DVD set resulted in some less than adulatory (but hardly vicious) words being written about Lucas, which in turn resulted in him ripping those of us who dared to […]
At the Home Theater Forum chat with Warner Home Video tonight, the usual “when is Ambersons coming out” question was posed to the Warner reps present; the answer was the same old “we’re still looking for materials” bit, which is rather frustrating, to say the least. How long, exactly, does this process take? Surely there […]
Per DVD Times, Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion, which featured Welles as a Clarence Darrow-type attorney defending a pair of Leopold & Loeb style murderers, will be making its DVD debut on May 23, in an anamorphic widescreen transfer. Extras are basically nil, but for those who want the film, this is good news.
Warner Bros has announced an “aggressive” release plan in 2006 for their catalog titles, of which The Magnificent Ambersons is one; a preliminary list of many titles was posted over at the Digital Bits site today, and Ambersons (not surprisingly, at this point) was not among those titles listed. With 200 titles on the cards […]
I’ve only recently seen over on the Criterion Forum forum that the excellent UK label Masters of Cinema will be releasing F for Fake, and that this release will include an interview with critic/Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum; no date was given. Considering their usual high standard of work, this should be a very good release. […]
A few days ago I suggested voting for the unreleased Welles titles listed in Turner Classic Movies’ database (see below). How has the voting been going since? Not too bad, thanks in part to threads on several other sites as well as this one (he said modestly). Ambersons is up to 90 votes (from 31), […]
Per a couple other sources, the Criterion Collection’s release of Mr. Arkadin has been removed from their “Coming Soon” section, but remains on the site, listed on its own page simply as “Coming Soon,” with no given date.
If you visit the Turner Classic Movies Database, you can look up titles they hold and vote to see them on DVD. I have no idea if it will make any difference to the powers that be (probably not, the cynic in me says), but why not go and vote for the unreleased Welles titles […]
From time to time, I’ll give a look to biographies of people who played roles in the life of Welles, however small, and the most recent and interesting of these is Samantha Barbas’ The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons, telling the story of that infamous gossip columnist who did her best […]
…Which of course begs the question, “Why bother?” But Mind City Productions decided that an animated version of Welles’ Mercury Summer Theater broadcast of Lucille Fletcher’s radio classic “The Hitch Hiker” was needed, and so we’re here to provide a look at it. First off, the disc appears to be a DVD-R, and two of […]