Lonesome
A buried treasure from Hollywood’s golden age, Lonesome is the creation of a little-known but audacious and one-of-a-kind filmmaker, Paul Fejos (also an explorer, anthropologist, and doctor!). While under contract at Universal, Fejos pulled out all the stops for this lovely, largely silent New York City symphony set in antic Coney Island during the Fourth of July weekend, employing color tinting, superimposition effects, experimental editing, and a roving camera (plus three dialogue scenes, added to satisfy the new craze for talkies). For years, Lonesome has been a rare treat for festival and cinematheque audiences, but it’s only now coming to home video. Rarer still are the two other Fejos films from his Universal years included in this release: The Last Performance and a reconstruction of the previously incomplete sound version of Broadway, in its time the most expensive film ever produced by the studio.
Special Features
- New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- Audio commentary featuring film historian Richard Koszarski
- The Last Performance, director Paul Fejos’s 1929 silent starring Conrad Veidt, with a new score by composer Donald Sosin
- Reconstructed sound version of Broadway, Fejos’s 1929 musical
- Fejos Memorial, a 1963 visual essay produced by Paul Falkenberg in collaboration with Fejos’s wife, Lita Binns Fejos, featuring the filmmaker narrating the story of his life and career
- Excerpt about the Broadway camera crane from an audio interview with cinematographer Hal Mohr
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: New essays by critic Phillip Lopate and film historian Graham Petrie and an excerpt from a 1962 interview with Fejos
New cover by F. Ron Miller
Special Features
- New digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- Audio commentary featuring film historian Richard Koszarski
- The Last Performance, director Paul Fejos’s 1929 silent starring Conrad Veidt, with a new score by composer Donald Sosin
- Reconstructed sound version of Broadway, Fejos’s 1929 musical
- Fejos Memorial, a 1963 visual essay produced by Paul Falkenberg in collaboration with Fejos’s wife, Lita Binns Fejos, featuring the filmmaker narrating the story of his life and career
- Excerpt about the Broadway camera crane from an audio interview with cinematographer Hal Mohr
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: New essays by critic Phillip Lopate and film historian Graham Petrie and an excerpt from a 1962 interview with Fejos
New cover by F. Ron Miller
Cast
- Barbara Kent
- Mary
- Glenn Tryon
- Jim
- Fay Holderness
- Overdressed woman
- Gustav Partos
- Romantic gentleman
- Eddie Phillips
- The sport
Credits
- Director
- Paul Fejos
- Producer
- Carl Laemmle Jr.
- Story by
- Mann Page
- Adaptation and scenario
- Edward T. Lowe Jr.
- Dialogue and titles
- Tom Reed
- Cinematography
- Gilbert Warrenton
- Editor
- Frank Atkinson
