By LAWRENCE FRENCH On March 15 — the ides of March — Welles received the 132 minute rough cut print of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS in Rio. The next day, Welles had the first inkling that something might be terribly amiss with the film when he received a telegram from Robert Wise. As Wise had noted […]
By LAWRENCE FRENCH In early March, Joseph Breen, RKO’s head of production under George Schaefer left for Mexico on a vacation, leaving one of Welles key supporters absent during the panic that gripped the studio after RKO held the first previews for THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. RKO executive Charles Koerner assumed Breen’s duties, supposedly on a […]
By LAWRENCE FRENCH I was trapped down there (in Brazil), I couldn’t leave, and all I kept getting were those terrible signals about this awful movie I made. My own chums were running frightened — not just RKO… Even those people who truly had my interests at heart felt that I’d gone too far. I […]
By KYP HARNESS Finally released last month on DVD to little fanfare, having been unavailable for 20 years in its country of origin, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons is surrounded by a mythology
By ROGER L. RYAN On September 13th The Magnificent Ambersons made its very belated DVD debut in North America as an Amazon.com exclusive “add-on” for customers who buy the Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu-ray of Citizen Kane. Even though fans had been very vocal about wanting Ambersons released on DVD for a decade or more, the […]
Warner Bros. has released the official press release for their 70th Anniversary edition of Citizen Kane, due out on September 13, 2011. It will come in three editions: a DVD 3-disc set, priced at $49.99; a Blu ray 3-disc set priced at $64.99, and the Amazon exclusive edition which will include a fourth disc […]
Even after RKO drastically cut THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, I would have to say that based on the impressive ads I’ve recently come across, AMBERSONS actually must have had quite a bit of effort placed behind its initial release. This two-page trade ad certainly attests that RKO had quite a marketing campaign lined up for the […]
Coming across an interview with Jean Renoir from the Summer, 1954 issue of Sight and Sound, I was astonished to read that Renoir had only the highest praise for RKO executive Charles Koerner, who after all was the man that fired Orson Welles from RKO after the double fiasco of The Magnificent Ambersons and It’s […]