Some good news today for Orson Welles fans. The folks at Distribpix have uncovered a pristine, uncut 35mm print of "Chimes At Midnight." I urge you to head over to there for the full story, but the bottom line is this: it looks great, they’ve already done a quick HD transfer for sample purposes, but they are hoping someone will step up and help pay for a proper restoration of the print, and they want to clear the legal hurdles to allow it to screen publicly.
Until that gets sorted out, check out this list of Orson Welles’ ten favorite films, drafted in the 1950s. At that time, he was a man who liked Cinema, as it’s essentially a top to bottom list of stone cold classics of the form. It’s a bit interesting to see De Sica‘s "Shoe Shine" trump "Bicycle Thieves" in Welles’ estimation, and it’s just as interesting that the notoriously incomplete "Greed" still ranks (having seen the recent semi-restoration that made the round a few years back, the movie is great, even with chunks cut out of it).
Check them out all below along with the trailers for each film:
1. City Lights (1931; dir. Charles Chaplin)
2. Greed (1924; dir. Erich von Stroheim)
3. Intolerance (1916; dir. D.W. Griffith)
4. Nanook of the North (1922; dir. Robert Flaherty)
5. Sciuscià (Shoe Shine) (1946; dir. Vittorio De Sica)
6. The Battleship Potemkin (1925; dir. Sergei Eisenstein)
7. La Femme du Boulanger (The Baker’s Wife) (1938; dir. Marcel Pagnol)
8. La Grande Illusion (The Grand Illusion) (1937; dir. Jean Renoir)
9. Stagecoach (1939; dir. John Ford)
10. Our Daily Bread (1934; dir. King Vidor)
[Open Culture via Rope Of Silicon]
Criterion!!!