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Lonesome - Criterion Collection (1928)
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| Starring: | Barbara Kent, Glenn Tryon, Fay Holderness, Eddie Phillips, Andy Devine, Conrad Veidt, Mary Philbin, Leslie Fenton, Fred Mackaye |
| Director: | Paul Fejos |
| Genre: | Silent, Comedy, Drama, Romance |
| Year: | 1928 |
| Studio: | Criterion |
| Length: | 69 minutes |
| Released: | August 28, 2012 |
| Rating: | NR |
| Format: | DVD |
| Misc: | NTSC, Full Screen, Black & White |
| Language: | English(Original Language) |
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SYNOPSIS:A buried treasure from Hollywood’s golden age, Lonesome is the creation of a little-known but audacious and one-of-a-kind filmmaker, Paul Fejos (also an explorer, anthropologist, and doctor!).
While under contract at Universal, Fejos pulled out all the stops for this lovely, largely silent New York City symphony set in antic Coney Island during the Fourth of July weekend, employing color tinting, superimposition effects, experimental editing, and a roving camera (plus three dialogue scenes, added to satisfy the new craze for talkies).
For years, Lonesome has been a rare treat for festival and cinematheque audiences, but it’s only now coming to home video. Rarer still are the two other Fejos films from his Universal years included in this release: The Last Performance and a reconstruction of the previously incomplete sound version of Broadway, in its time the most expensive film ever produced by the studio.
BONUS FEATURES:
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Audio commentary featuring film historian Richard Koszarski
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The Last Performance, director Paul Fejos’s 1929 silent starring Conrad Veidt, with a new score by composer Donald Sosin
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Reconstructed sound version of Broadway, Fejos’s 1929 musical
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Fejos Memorial, a 1963 visual essay produced by Paul Falkenberg in collaboration with Fejos’s wife, Lita Binns Fejos, featuring the filmmaker narrating the story of his life and career
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Excerpt about the Broadway camera crane from an audio interview with cinematographer Hal Mohr
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PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critic Phillip Lopate and film historian Graham Petrie and an excerpt from a 1962 interview with Fejos
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There are 1 reviews for this movie |
  | Evan | Had a chance to run this new release recently and it was an eye-opener!
The main feature LONESOME was an unusually compelling romantic drama--thanks to some imaginative camera work, exteriors and color sequences. Thankfully, it is the version with added original music, effects and dialogue scenes. Definitely worth viewing! Transfer quality very good.
The second feature, THE LAST PERFORMANCE--a late silent-- features Conrad Veidt. Transfer quality on it is only fair, due to small gauge film source (16mm)
The third feature (which was why I wanted to see this set) BROADWAY was a disappointment! After years of hearing about its legendary huge deco set, the special camera crane designed just to photograph that set and a supposedly groundbreaking story---I found ALL the characters annoying, the huge night club over-done, the constant crane shots showing a dizzying blur of amateur production numbers just not entertaining! The only redeeming feature was to see perennial drunk (from Laurel & Hardy and other films)Arthur Houseman playing a mostly sober gangster. The print quality was good until the last sequence in 2-strip Technicolor that was so "dupey" and muddy you could hardly make out who was doing what.
Still, thanks to Criterion for bringing these rare films to us.
Not sure if the transfers would look any better in Blu-Ray....I just saw the standard DVD.
The documentary about the crane was pretty interesting, but after a while got tired of Hal Mohr's cussing in his descriptions to the interviewer. |
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