The Magnificent Ambersons
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 featuring 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.
Special Features
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Two audio commentaries, featuring scholars Robert L. Carringer and James Naremore and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
- New interviews with film historians Simon Callow and Joseph McBride
- New video essay on the film’s cinematographers by scholar François Thomas
- New video essays by scholars François Thomas and Christopher Husted
- Director Orson Welles on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970
- Segment from a 1925 silent adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons
- Audio from a 1978 AFI symposium on Welles, and audio interviews with Welles conducted by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
- Two Mercury Theatre radio plays: Seventeen (1938), an adaptation of another Booth Tarkington novel by Welles, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1939)
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Molly Haskell and (Blu-ray only) essays by authors and critics Lucy Sante, Geoffrey O’Brien, Farran Smith Nehme, and Jonathan Lethem, and excerpts from an unfinished 1982 memoir by Welles
New cover by Eric Skillman
Special Features
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Two audio commentaries, featuring scholars Robert L. Carringer and James Naremore and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum
- New interviews with film historians Simon Callow and Joseph McBride
- New video essay on the film’s cinematographers by scholar François Thomas
- New video essays by scholars François Thomas and Christopher Husted
- Director Orson Welles on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970
- Segment from a 1925 silent adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons
- Audio from a 1978 AFI symposium on Welles, and audio interviews with Welles conducted by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich
- Two Mercury Theatre radio plays: Seventeen (1938), an adaptation of another Booth Tarkington novel by Welles, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1939)
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Molly Haskell and (Blu-ray only) essays by authors and critics Lucy Sante, Geoffrey O’Brien, Farran Smith Nehme, and Jonathan Lethem, and excerpts from an unfinished 1982 memoir by Welles
New cover by Eric Skillman
Cast
- Joseph Cotten
- Eugene Morgan
- Dolores Costello
- Isabel Amberson Minafer
- Anne Baxter
- Lucy Morgan
- Tim Holt
- George Minafer
- Agnes Moorehead
- Fanny Minafer
- Ray Collins
- Jack Amberson
- Erskine Sanford
- Roger Bronson
- Richard Bennett
- Major Amberson
- Orson Welles
- Narrator
Credits
- Director
- Orson Welles
- Written by
- Orson Welles
- From the novel by
- Booth Tarkington
- Photography by
- Stanley Cortez
- Set design by
- Mark-Lee Kirk
- Set dressing by
- Al Fields
- Edited by
- Robert Wise
- Assistant director
- Fred Fleck
- Ladies’ wardrobe by
- Edward Stevenson
- Special effects by
- Vernon L. Walker
- Sound recorded by
- Bailey Fesler
- Sound recorded by
- James G. Stewart
A scene from The Magnificent Ambersons
