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Format: Laserdisc CAV
Not Rated
Recording Mode: (unknown)
98 min.
UPC: 715515000642 |
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Details
Movie Description
Directed by Orson Welles, this film is based on a Booth Tarkington novel about a family unwilling to change with the times. Highly rated by film critics. Special features include an audio commentary by Carringer, Welles' complete shooting script and storyboards, the entire radio play by Welles' Mercury Theatre Group, and clips from the silent movie.
Synopsis
Orson Welles' elegiac look at the passing of an era, and the coming of modernity to America. At the end of the 19th century, an aristocratic Midwestern family is threatened by its inability to adapt to the rapid changes in society caused by industrialization.
Film Notes
Director Orson Welles' edit of the film ran two-and-a-half hours. But while he was in South America filming his third feature, "It's All True," RKO recut the picture, and shot new scenes to give the story a "happier" ending. Allegedly, RKO destroyed nearly an hour of the removed footage, and "The Magnificent Ambersons," along with Welles' own "It's All True" and Von Stroheim's "Greed," is one of the most mourned "lost" films in cinema history.
The National Board of Review cited Agnes Moorehead and Tim Holt for their acting achievements. Moorehead was named Best Actress by the New York Film Critics.
A silent version of Booth Tarkington's novel was released in 1925. Titled "Pampered Youth," the film was directed by David Smith and starred Cullen Landis, Ben Alexander, Allan Forrest, Alice Calhoun, Emmett King, Wallace McDonald, Charlotte Merriam, Katheryn Adams, Aggie Herring, and William J. Irving.
The Turner videocassette is part of the "RKO Collection."
The Voyager CAV laserdisc (#CC1109L) includes the shooting script of the film, complete storyboards for all scenes, including those cut by the studio for the film's theatrical release and subsequently lost, as well as silent film and radio treatments of the Ambersons story.
Filmed premiered August 13, 1942.
Quotations
"Real life screened more daringly than it's ever been before!" -- marketing line for the film
"And now Major Amberson was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life, and he realized that everything which had worried him or delighted him during his lifetime, all his buying and building and trading and banking, that it was all a trifle and a waste beside what concerned him now, for the Major knew now that he had to plan how to enter an unknown country where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson." -- Narrator (Orson Welles)
"Something had happened. A thing which years ago had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town. And now it had come at last: George Amberson Minafer had got his come-uppance. He got it three times filled and running over. But those who had so longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him." --Narrator
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