Garden Of Eden (BLU-RAY)

Nearly a century after its big screen debut, director Lewis Milestone’s The Garden of Eden returns in a new Blu-ray Disc edition from Flicker Fusion, featuring the 2025 restoration by the San Francisco Film Preserve, the George Eastman Museum, and the Library of Congress, while offering a new score by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius. Corinne Griffith headlines as ingénue Toni LeBrun, who leaves her family’s humble bakery to follow fame and fortune in Budapest as an opera singer. That dream shatters however when she finds herself a cabaret chorus girl working for the delightfully menacing Madame Bauer (Maude George). Taken under the wing of the cabaret’s seamstress, Rosa (Louise Dresser), Toni is caught in the whirlwind of glamorous Monte Carlo, winding up in a love triangle between her charming suitor Richard Dupont (Charles Ray) and his determined uncle. Boasting gorgeous production design by William Cameron Menzies, The Garden of Eden was originally released with an early Technicolor dream sequence that, unfortunately, has been lost to time. Utilizing archival research and rare still photographs, this new release includes a reconstruction of that missing three-minute sequence.