8.7 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 5.0 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Chronicling the stormy life of an influential publishing tycoon, when he dies news reporters scramble to discover the meaning of his final utterance.
Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth WarrickDrama | 100% |
Period | 34% |
Mystery | 18% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.37:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono
Portuguese: Dolby Digital Mono
Polish: Dolby Digital Mono
English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Four-disc set (1 BD, 3 DVDs)
Slipcover in original pressing
Region free
Movie | 5.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 4.5 | |
Overall | 5.0 |
Rosebud.
Has any one word so defined the filmic landscape as that hoarse whispered enigma Orson Welles utters in the opening moments of Citizen Kane? No, spoilers will not be forthcoming in this review, as solving the mystery of “rosebud” is one of the enduring joys of any true film lover’s experience with the medium. But that central mystery and the quest to solve its meaning which shapes the narrative drive of this film is only one of manifold joys that Citizen Kane offers any astute viewer. Welles was a brash young iconoclast with a mighty fancy new toy, and he and cinematographer Gregg Toland wasted no time in exploiting every nook and cranny that the movies had to offer. Citizen Kane is such an astounding feat of technical genius that its innovations are accepted today as rote clichés for movies, but in 1941 critics (perhaps spurred on by William Randolph Hearst, who didn’t exactly take kindly to seeing his life story parodied) took Welles to task for doing all sorts of then unheard of things like shooting interior sets to show their ceilings or deconstructing a storyline with multiple points of view (years before Rashomon it should be pointed out). Citizen Kane is such a bracing experience that for obsessive-compulsive film lovers it holds such a special place that many fans can recount exactly where and when they first saw it, certainly something that is increasingly rare in this day of prefabricated pabulum manufactured from paint by numbers kits and screenwriting seminars. Though Kane was rightly appreciated by the intelligentsia of its day, and most especially by film craftsmen who instantly realized what a defining breakthrough it was in any number of ways, this is a film which has only gained luster in the intervening decades. Nothing can seemingly dim the fierce, brilliant light of Citizen Kane, and a whole new audience is now set to remember their first time with Charles Foster and his cohorts as one of the giant icons of the Golden Age of Hollywood finally debuts on Blu-ray.
Warner once again does itself proud with a stunning high definition restoration and presentation of a catalog title, one of the crowning jewels in its assets catalog. Previous home video releases have been roundly criticized (sometimes fairly, sometimes not), but Citizen Kane's brand new AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1, mastered from a 4K restoration of original nitrate elements, should satisfy all but the most diehard, picayune-obsessed complainers. Many people have bitched and moaned about the very dark image quality of much of Kane on both VHS and DVD, without realizing that's exactly what Welles and Toland were going for. These two were experimenting with chiaroscuro years before any Johnny come lately auteur had even thought of it. The Blu-ray presents this shadowy world with gorgeously rich black levels and abundant shadow detail, which is not to say viewers are suddenly going to see William Alland's face all of a sudden, to give one salient example. But what amazing detail and what a refreshing lack of compression artifacts. Usually tricky items like chain link fences and palm fronds resolve with absolute clarity, and Toland's incredibly impressive deep focus work is delivered with jaw dropping intensity. The frequent use of back lighting offers an amazing display of gray scale and contrast and unlike the DVD, grain structure has not been erased to within an inch of its life and looks completely natural. There is some very minor ringing on just a couple of scenes but that is about the only issue of any kind with this release, and it's kind of churlish to even mention that, so minimal is it in the overall scheme of things.
Say what you will about the Dolby process (and believe me, I hated its compressed highs long before it became fashionable due to my own recordings which were processed with noise reduction), it can hide a multitude of sins. Therefore, while a layer of aural shellack has been peeled away from Citizen Kane courtesy of this new lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix, that means some of the sonic warts can more easily be heard. There's some persistent distortion in the upper midrange that is especially noticeable early in the film, including the opening cues of Bernard Herrmann's iconic score, and, later, in Susan Alexander Kane's first appearance. That anomaly aside, which is no doubt endemic to the stems themselves, this is a brilliantly effective track, one that is surprisingly full sounding for its age. Especially impressive is Welles' incredible sound design (as noted above in the main body of the review), which gets a sparklingly clear reproduction here. Thankfully no faux surround mix has been attempted, and while that may give the film a slightly more claustrophobic sonic quality than some would like, fidelity is generally very strong here, with no egregious dropouts and even better no overwhelming hiss despite the lack of that Dolby masking on the high end.
Amazon's exclusive edition contains the much sought after DVD release of Welles' follow up to Citizen Kane, The Magnficent Ambersons.
The Magnificent Ambersons
Movie: 4 stars
Video: 3.5 stars Note: Screenshots 21-25 of this review are from The Magnificent Ambersons.
Audio: 3.0 stars
Somewhere tucked away on a dusty shelf, long forgotten and perhaps never to be found, one of the great lost relics of the Golden Age of Hollywood may await an unexpecting interloper—in Brazil, of all places. In the land of Carnaval, Samba and Bossa Nova, rusting film canisters with probably decaying film stock may lie as they have, untouched by decades. For it was to Brazil that RKO sent a print of the original rough cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles' acclaimed follow up to his epochal Citizen Kane. Welles had always been a combination of wünderkind and enfant terrible, melding traits of those two terms about as well as their languages' native countries ever have (which is to say not too well, as any student of world history will tell you), and RKO had fairly quickly realized that it had given Welles the keys to the Hollywood kingdom without requiring much in return. In fact RKO's supposedly over-generous contract with Welles had infuriated executives at some of the bigger studios as they felt it set a dangerous precedent. After all, who were these mere "artists" to require things like "complete creative control"? And so when RKO was negotiating with Welles for a third feature (one which never saw the light of day), they extracted some important concessions from the auteur that had not been part of his Citizen Kane deal, and one of those was relinquishing rights to a final cut, a "right" which in those studio system driven days was virtually unheard of anyway. And that brings us back to those missing canisters which may hold one of the great unsolved mysteries in the entire history of film. RKO was not pleased with the screening audience reactions to that rough cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, and they promptly went about reediting and even reshooting sections of the film without Welles' involvement, since he was busy on a trip to Brazil working on a "good neighbor policy" project initiated by Nelson Rockefeller (yet another in the long line of Welles projects which was never successfully completed). For years film scholars and just ordinary curious fans have wondered what that initial rough cut must have been like. Even the assurances of editor Robert Wise, who was part of the coterie overseeing the reshoots and the tinkering with the original version, who has stated that the edited version is certainly no worse than the rough cut and may in fact be better, has failed to completely silence the din of completists who almost feel compelled to find and finally see Welles' original vision.
The Magnificent Ambersons even in its edited and revised form is one of the great glories of 1940's film and perhaps of film in general. It's as distinctly cynical as Citizen Kane, though in this case that can be traced to the source novel by Booth Tarkington, a novel which cast the rise of a new American industrial class and the death of an old, name-based American aristocracy as a cogent commentary of what was happening to the United States as a whole in the era between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of World War I. The Amberson family is the "old guard," a wealthy conglomerate whose wealth is never really explained, but is just kind of "there." Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello) is perhaps a slightly silly young girl who is easily offended when her beau Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) makes a literal misstep when courting her, and she puts the kibosh on his advances, instead marrying a "safe" but unspectacular Wilbur Minafer (Donald Dillaway in a role which doesn't even merit a credit, somewhat a propos considering Wilbur's transparent and inconsequential nature). As one of the gossiping townspeople mentions, that will spell certain disaster for any Minafer children, as Isabel, clearly not in love with Wilbur, will pour all her attention into her offspring. And that certainly is the truth, and even more so than perhaps thought of even by the gossipers, as the Minafers only have one child, the spoiled rotten snotty brat George (played by Tim Holt as an adult). George Minafer is one of the most unpleasant, unlikable main characters of any film of that era, and it's quite remarkable that Welles would be brave enough to build a film around him, even with the imprimatur of Tarkington's novel and its Pulitzer Prize winning status.
The bulk of the film takes place with George as an adult, falling in his own obnoxious way for Eugene's daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter), while attempting to keep Eugene, a widower, from his mother, who as the film progresses becomes a widow herself. Playing into this internecine and inter-familial drama is George's spinster Aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead in yet another absolutely incredible performance), a woman who once had eyes for Eugene herself but long ago recognized the inexorable magnetism between Eugene and Isabel. Fanny's not quite mute rage drives several emotional key points of the film, leading to some semi-tragic consequences.
While RKO imposed a somewhat happier ending on the film (which is nonetheless in line with Tarkington's original conception), The Magnificent Ambersons has the sadness of an elegy about it, as if Welles is writing the epitaph of an entire generation, indeed an entire socioeconomic era, in celluloid. Much like Kane, Ambersons is a film of long shadows and skewed angles, a film which exults in technique to highlight the suppressed emotions of many of its characters. Pay attention especially to the big party scene where George meets Lucy and marvel once again at the almost symbiotic relationship between Welles and his master cinematographer Stanley Cortez, as the camera weaves and darts through room after room and characters figuratively and literally waltz in from different angles, taking part for just a moment in conversations that overlap and intersect.
The Magnificent Ambersons, though, is perhaps an even darker meditation on American "success" than was Citizen Kane, if only because George is so completely despicable from the get go. Charles Foster Kane at least was idealistic and seemed to have a good heart, in the early going if not later in life. George Minafer is a punk, to put it bluntly, and the audience along with most of the major characters in the film are going to be waiting with baited breath for his (as Tarkington puts it) "comeuppance." That gives the film a rather depressive spiral that makes it one of the more curiously introspective—almost abstract expressionist—films of its era.
Fans have long clamored for a DVD release of this film, and Warner has finally relented with a bare bones edition that nonetheless presents the film from a generally decent looking print. Don't be concerned by the fuzziness of the opening sequence, as that is part of Welles' and Toland's vision, and in fact only the most attentive viewers may notice when the gauziness around the edge of the frame disappears. While the print does show occasional minor damage, on the whole it offers excellent contrast and very solid black levels. As with Kane, Welles and Cortez intentionally go for an incredibly dark look a lot of the time, so what would normally be termed crush is part and parcel of their vision, and this DVD represents that generally very well. The Dolby Digital mono soundtrack has a few niggling issues, notably some omnipresent hiss and narrowness in the higher frequencies, but it's largely free of any noticeable outright damage, and dialogue is always clear. Note the spoken credits at the end (another innovation by Welles), and the curious absence of a credit for Bernard Herrmann's score. When the film was reedited, Herrmann's score was tinkered with (and interpolated with other composers' work) too much for his comfort level and he demanded his name be removed from the film.
Warner has provided yet another deluxe package with an excellent assortment of supplements both on the Blu-ray and two DVDs included, as well as other print material included in the sturdy slipcase.
Blu-ray Supplements
What can you say about Citizen Kane that hasn't already been said? Probably not much, except this: if you've never seen it, you are in for one of the grandest, most memorable film experiences of your life. For your first-timers, don't "think" too much as you watch, simply glory in the magnificence of the story and how it's told. But then go back (several times) and exult all over again at how incredibly brilliantly Welles and his team reinvented film, establishing "norms" that are utilized to this day. This Ultimate Collector's Edition is a very handsome package and it sports gorgeous video quality and very good audio quality. You probably can already guess Citizen Kane comes with my Highest recommendation.
Ultimate Collector's Edition
1941
70th Anniversary Edition
1941
75th Anniversary Edition
1941
First, incorrect BD, pressing UPC 715515266116
1941
Incorrect BD First Pressing UPC 715515266215
1941
2nd Corrected BD Pressing UPC Sticker 715515270212
1941
2nd Corrected BD Pressing UPC Sticker 715515270113
1941
Extended Director's Cut
1984
2006
2007
2011
Election Year Edition
1995
1951
2019
2017
1980
1957
2014
2012
1997
1957
2017
Cidade de Deus
2002
2022
2011
2021
1987