Full screen.

Title from title frame.

Based on the novel by Booth Tarkington.

Originally produced as a motion picture in 1942.

Credits from booklet; most film credits are spoken aloud.

Features: New 4K digital restoration ; 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 ; video essay "The cinematographers" by Orson Welles scholar François Thomas ; video essay "The score" by Bernard Herrmann scholar Christopher Husted ; Director Orson Welles on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970 ; Segment from a 1925 silent film 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 ; and a booklet with an essay by critic Molly Haskell.

Director of photography, Stanley Cortez ; editor, Robert Wise ; original score, Bernard Herrmann.

Narrator, Orson Welles ; cast, Joseph Cotten, Anne Baxter, Agnes Moorehead, Dolores Costello, Tim Holt, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Richard Bennett.

A brilliant, moving portrayal of an aristocratic American family in what many critics consider a masterpiece equal to Citizen Kane. Based on a novel by Booth Tarkington, the drama begins in the 1870s when the Amberson family is at the height of its wealth and prestige. But the day arrives when all the Ambersons are stunned by the truth of their financial ruin.

"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 in 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"--Container

MPAA rating: Not rated.

DVD, NTSC, region 1; 1.37:1 aspect ratio; Dolby Digital monaural.

In English with optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH).