Blu-ray, DVD Release: Lonesome

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Aug. 28, 2012
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion


Lonesome movie scene

Romance is revealed at Coney Island in Paul Fejos' 1928 Lonesome.

The 1928 film Lonesome is the creation of a little-known, one-of-a-kind auteur, Paul Fejos (a filmmaker / explorer / anthropologist / doctor!), who bridged the gap between the silent and sound eras.

Fejos pulled out all the stops for the drama-romance-comedy collage-styled New York City “symphony” Lonesome, which is set in Coney Island during the Fourth of July weekend.  For his film, Fejos employed such then-radical techniques as color tinting, superimposition effects, experimental editing, a roving camera and three dialogue scenes (added because of the craze for talkies).

With its release by Criterion, Lonesome is making its home entertainment debut. Also included in the package are two other Fejos films included in this release: 1929’s The Last Performance (featuring a new score by Donald Sosin) and a reconstruction of the previously incomplete sound version of 1929’s Broadway.

The DVD and Blu-ray editions of Lonesome include the following features:

  • new digital restoration, featuring uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • audio commentary featuring film historian Richard Koszarski
  • The Last Performance, director Paul Fejos’s 1929 silent starring Conrad Veidt, with a new score by Donald Sosin
  • reconstructed sound version of Broadway, Fejos’s 1929 musical
  • Fejos Memorial, a 1963 visual essay produced by Paul Falkenberg in collaboration with Fejos’s wife, Lita Binns Fejos, featuring Paul Fejos narrating the story of his life and career
  • audio excerpts about Broadway from an interview with cinematographer Hal Mohr
  • a booklet featuring essays by critic Phillip Lopate and film historian Graham Petrie and an excerpt about Lonesome from Fejos’s autobiography
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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.