Reconstructing 'The Thief of Baghdad' aka 'The Blue Rose' (1961)

A fairly basic project by this site’s standards, I intend to re-edit the HD BluRay transfer of the Italian film ‘Il ladro di Bagdad’ (1961) to conform to its original English release, titled ‘The Thief of Baghdad’, and supposedly in other parts of the world as ‘The Blue Rose’, though I’ve not found a poster or title card to support that theory.

Long story short, the complete English version only exists in very poor pan-and-scan VHS transfer.
Whereas the German Blu-ray version, which only came out in 2019, is of the longer Italian version. There is an English track, but any extra footage only has Italian with English subtitles.
Easy, I thought, just cut the extra stuff, replace the title cards and credits and done.
Wrong.
Instead, scenes have been re-arranged, single extra frames that need to be cut, shots missing from the Italian version, shots that crossfade into missing scenes, and I’m working with KdenLive. Joy.

V1 will be out when it’s done. Currently up to ~42 min mark of the film.
Would only consider a V2 if by some miracle someone can find and scan a print of the Eng. ver. of the film. Y’know, Unicorn stuff.

It is done.

In all, 2 minutes of opening and closing titles, plus an additional 47 seconds within the film proper, had to be taken from the tape source. The rest is in HD. Audio is a straight rip from the tape; there is negligible quality difference between the tape and BD in terms of audio, plus it meant no audio editing. 😃

It was released under the name “The Blue Rose” in Australia. Watched it on a sleepover one night at a friends house. Wouldn’t have been older then 9. Have been on again off again searching for it when it creeps back into my memory.

chrisjmcd said:

It was released under the name “The Blue Rose” in Australia.

Yes, that’s what I was always told by my folks who saw it back in the day. And yet no posters or anything with that name have turned up online. Weird.

Well since I’m here, a couple of updates.

I did create a v1.1 of this ‘preservation/restoration’, but it’s only minor differences, and only came about because it wouldn’t work on certain media players. If anyone has trouble playing 1.0 let me know and guess I could release the update into the wild.

There’s also been another Blu-Ray release of the film since, but based on the runtime, it appears to be the Italian version again, with some new Special features. Note it’s only available in a triple pack with two earlier film versions of this story, from 1924 and 1940.