News

A thousand releases down the line, Criterion gives us a special edition of the most creatively brilliant & innovative movie in history, as the label debuts selected 4K releases. It’s a four-disc set, with three Blu-rays that hold a huge quantity of well-chosen and well-produced extras. What can be said about Kane that hasn’t been debated decades ago? Our Declaration of Principles is to just try and tell the truth: we try a ‘civilian’ approach, sketching the film’s wonderments without assuming the reader is already a true believer in the Cinema God Orson Welles. Which Welles definitely is.

Citizen Kane 4K

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1104

1941 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 119 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date November 23, 2021 / 47.96

Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane, William Alland, Paul Stewart, George Coulouris, Fortunio Bonanova.

Cinematography: Gregg Toland...

Hollywood’s most tragic ‘mangled masterpiece’ gets a new lease on life with this special edition of what could have been Orson Welles’ greatest film, had Rko not intentionally destroyed it to sully the stature of the unlucky Boy Genius. The movie can’t be reconstructed but its reputation can be restored — the story of the demise of a powerful industrial family would have been a dramatic powerhouse, perhaps more impressive than Citizen Kane.

The Magnificent Ambersons

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 952

1942 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 88 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date November 27, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Richard Bennett.

Cinematography: Stanley Cortez

Film Editor: Robert Wise

Original Music: Bernard Herrmann

From the novel by Booth Tarkington

Screenplay, Production and Direction by Orson Welles

Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons is probably the most mourned ‘lost’ title in American film history.

Fritz Lang’s third wartime anti-Nazi film is an Alfred Hitchcock-type spy chase taken from a psychological novel by Graham Greene, with the psychology angle transferred mostly to physical threats — ticking clocks, a mystery cake, and German bombs in the Blitz. Ray Milland is cool and collected for a man just released from a mental asylum, and proves up to the task of defeating a Nazi conspiracy.

Ministry of Fear

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1944 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 86 min. / Street Date August 27, 2018 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £14.99

Starring: Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds, Carl Esmond, Hillary Brooke, Percy Waram, Dan Duryea, Alan Napier, Erskine Sanford, Byron Foulger.

Cinematography: Henry Sharp

Film Editor: Victor Young

Original Music: Victor Young

Written by Seton I. Miller from the novel by Graham Greene

Produced by Seton I. Miller

Directed by Fritz Lang

Why do we go for certain Region B Blu-ray imports, even...

This devastating romantic melodrama is Max Ophüls’ best American picture — perhaps because it seems so European? It’s probably Joan Fontaine’s finest hour as well, and Louis Jourdan comes across as a great actor in a part perfect for his screen personality. The theme could be called, ‘No regrets,’ but also, ‘Everything is to be regretted.’

Letter from an Unknown Woman

Blu-ray

Olive Signature

1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 87 min. / Street Date December 5, 2017 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring: Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians, Marcel Journet, Art Smith, Carol Yorke, Howard Freeman, John Good, Leo B. Pessin, Erskine Sanford, Otto Waldis, Sonja Bryden.

Cinematography: Franz Planer

Film Editor: Ted J. Kent

Original Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof

Written by Howard Koch from a story by Stefan Zweig

Produced by John Houseman

Directed by Max Ophüls

A young woman’s romantic nature goes beyond all limits, probing the nature of True Love.

Edward G. Robinson uncovers another killer, but this time he’s after a Nazi mass murderer, not an insurance salesman. Orson Welles’ most conventional thriller is a masterpiece of style and judgment, with a good sense of time and place – and a lot of expressive shadows. How does this new Blu-ray shape up in comparison to earlier presentations?

The Stranger

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1946 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 95 min. / Street Date August 29, 2017 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring: Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Philip Merivale, Richard Long, Konstantin Shayne, Billy House.

Cinematography: Russell Metty

Production Design: Perry Ferguson

Art Direction: Albert S. D’Agostino

Film Editor: Ernest Nims

Original Music: Bronislau Kaper

Written by Anthony Veiller, Decla Dunning, Victor Trivas

Produced by Sam Spiegel

Directed by Orson Welles

Up pops Olive Films with another Blu-ray of Orson Welles’ impressive The Stranger, for the first time an HD scan...

Don’t look to this noir for hardboiled cynicism – for his first feature Nicholas Ray instead gives us a dose of fatalist romance. Transposed from the previous decade, a pair of fugitives takes what happiness they can find, always aware that a grim fate waits ahead. The show is a career-making triumph and a real classic from Rko — which shelved it for more than a year.

They Live by Night

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 880

1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 95 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date June 13, 2017 / 39.95

Starring: Cathy O’Donnell, Farley Granger, Howard Da Silva, Jay C. Flippen, Helen Craig, Will Wright, William Phipps, Ian Wolfe, Harry Harvey, Marie Bryant, Byron Foulger, Erskine Sanford .

Cinematography: George E. Diskant

Film Editor: Sherman Todd

Original Music: Leigh Harline

Written by Charles Schnee, Nicholas Ray from the novel Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson

Produced by John Houseman

Directed by Nicholas Ray...

Joan Crawford Movie Star Joan Crawford movies on TCM: Underrated actress, top star in several of her greatest roles If there was ever a professional who was utterly, completely, wholeheartedly dedicated to her work, Joan Crawford was it. Ambitious, driven, talented, smart, obsessive, calculating, she had whatever it took – and more – to reach the top and stay there. Nearly four decades after her death, Crawford, the star to end all stars, remains one of the iconic performers of the 20th century. Deservedly so, once you choose to bypass the Mommie Dearest inanity and focus on her film work. From the get-go, she was a capable actress; look for the hard-to-find silents The Understanding Heart (1927) and The Taxi Dancer (1927), and check her out in the more easily accessible The Unknown (1927) and Our Dancing Daughters (1928). By the early '30s, Joan Crawford had become a first-rate film actress, far more naturalistic than...

The Lady from Shanghai

Written and directed by Orson Welles

USA, 1947

Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) is an Irish émigré to the United States who earns his income as a sailor. Walking the streets of Manhattan one night, he comes across the carriage of one Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth), whose beauty and charm immediately catch his eye. After rescuing her from a group of thieves in Central Park, he offers to drive her home, during which time they grow fond of one another. Lo and behold, the next day, Mr. Bannister (Everett Sloane), a notorious criminal lawyer and her husband, makes an offer: come sail with them through the Americas on their way to San Francisco. O’Hara, clearly attracted to the man’s wife but trepidatious about potential complications, reluctantly accepts the offer. The trip and its aftermath in San Francisco prove unforgettable, with everyone’s disdain for Mr.

Orson Welles' Too Much Johnson, screened for the first time to a full house at Pordenone Festival of Silent Cinema, comes trailing clouds of mystery like so much else in the life and work of its maker.

We know Welles shot the film in 1938 with a newsreel cameraman, intending it as a series of insert sequence within a play he was producing with the Mercury Theater. For various reasons, the three sequences, intended to carry the exposition in William Gillette's 1894 farce, were not ready or could not be projected when the play opened, and as a result the show was not a success.

Now George Eastman House has restored what it describes as Welles' cutting copy, apparently discovered in a warehouse in Pordenone itself. It consists of several reels of loosely ordered material with multiple takes, and was presented without any alteration apart from the preservation necessary to make the material projectable.

Jeanne Crain: Lighthearted movies vs. real life tragedies (photo: Madeleine Carroll and Jeanne Crain in ‘The Fan’) (See also: "Jeanne Crain: From ‘Pinky’ Inanity to ‘Margie’ Magic.") Unlike her characters in Margie, Home in Indiana, State Fair, Centennial Summer, The Fan, and Cheaper by the Dozen (and its sequel, Belles on Their Toes), or even in the more complex A Letter to Three Wives and People Will Talk, Jeanne Crain didn’t find a romantic Happy Ending in real life. In the mid-’50s, Crain accused her husband, former minor actor Paul Brooks aka Paul Brinkman, of infidelity, of living off her earnings, and of brutally beating her. The couple reportedly were never divorced because of their Catholic faith. (And at least in the ’60s, unlike the humanistic, progressive-thinking Margie, Crain was a “conservative” Republican who supported Richard Nixon.) In the early ’90s, she lost two of her...

Joan Fontaine movies: ‘This Above All,’ ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ (photo: Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine in ‘Suspicion’ publicity image) (See previous post: “Joan Fontaine Today.”) Also tonight on Turner Classic Movies, Joan Fontaine can be seen in today’s lone TCM premiere, the flag-waving 20th Century Fox release The Above All (1942), with Fontaine as an aristocratic (but socially conscious) English Rose named Prudence Cathaway (Fontaine was born to British parents in Japan) and Fox’s top male star, Tyrone Power, as her Awol romantic interest. This Above All was directed by Anatole Litvak, who would guide Olivia de Havilland in the major box-office hit The Snake Pit (1948), which earned her a Best Actress Oscar nod. In Max Ophüls’ darkly romantic Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Fontaine delivers not only what is probably the greatest performance of her career, but also one of the greatest movie performances ever. Letter from an Unknown Woman...

Orson Welles‘ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane, winner of the best original screenplay Academy Award, will hit UK theaters on Nov. 30. In addition to London’s bfi Southbank, Citizen Kane will also be screened in Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. Written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane stars Welles as a newspaper magnate based on William Randolph Hearst. Also in the cast: Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore (a distorted version of Marion Davies), Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, and Everett Sloane. Cinematography by the masterful Gregg Toland, music by Bernard Herrmann. Citizen Kane was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including best picture, director, and actor (Welles). More information here.