Ambersons coming to Criterion in November

[Mike Gebert]

The magnificence of the Ambersons will be on Criterion at last... at least for those who do not still own the laserdisc edition with its reconstruction of the lost footage. It will also be first time on blu-ray.

November titles: The Magnificent Ambersons, David Byrne's True Stories, Some Like It Hot, Mizoguchi's A Story From Chikamatsu, and the previously announced mega-Ingmar Bergman centennial set.

[Harlett O'Dowd]

The magnificence of the Ambersons will be on Criterion at last... at least for those who do not still own the laserdisc edition with its reconstruction of the lost footage. It will also be first time on blu-ray.

November titles: The Magnificent Ambersons, David Byrne's True Stories, Some Like It Hot, Mizoguchi's A Story From Chikamatsu, and the previously announced mega-Ingmar Bergman centennial set.

Wait - will this Ambersons/Criterion contained said reconstruction?

[Mike Gebert]

I assumed so but actually I do not see it...

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
PLUS: An 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

[s.w.a.c.]

This is what was on the old Criterion laserdisc (I guess I can now use my copy for skeet shooting or some other frisbee-like pastime).

- Audio essay by Robert Carringer
- Video clips of Orson Wells on the Magnificent Ambersons
- Wells complete shooting script
- Excerpts from Pampered Youth, 1925 version
- 1939 Mercury Theatre radio drama
- "The Other Ambersons"
- "The Unmaking of a Film Classic"
- Booklet describing captions for the complete storyboards

[Jim Roots]

What a wonderful couple of months ahead! The complete Bergman, conveniently being released around my birthday (please start up a gofundme so you can all buy me a group birthday present, thank you), and then Ambersons soon afterwards, a film I have waited decades to see. This is really something to look forward to!

Jim

[SilentsPlease]

The magnificence of the Ambersons will be on Criterion at last... at least for those who do not still own the laserdisc edition with its reconstruction of the lost footage. It will also be first time on blu-ray.

November titles: The Magnificent Ambersons, David Byrne's True Stories, Some Like It Hot, Mizoguchi's A Story From Chikamatsu, and the previously announced mega-Ingmar Bergman centennial set.

There is no reconstruction of the film on the laserdisc, or anywhere, because the lost footage is still lost, possibly for good. What the LD does have are supplements that explain how the film was altered by the studio against Welles' wishes.