The Thief of Bagdad would seem to be a likely candidate for release in Warner Home Video's new Warner Archives series. These are DVD-Rs of high quality, no extras except for occasional trailers (but then many regular classic film DVD releases also unfortunately lack any extras), and they're all in their correct aspect ratios -- which, for Thief, would be 2.35:1. Warners is releasing lots of titles the studio controls from the WB, MGM, RKO and Allied Artists libraries in this series, many of them long requested, so Thief would be a good fit.
TTOB was released theatrically in the US (and elsewhere) by MGM, so Warner (which owns most of the MGM library) most likely still has the rights to the dubbed version, though almost certainly not the original Italian. Of course, the optimum resolution would be to have a standard DVD release featuring both the original Italian and dubbed-in-English versions, but I'd happily settle for just the dubbed version, as long as it was in widescreen and a good print. In 2007 Warners released four sets of so-called "Cult Classics", one of which contained three epics of the ancient world. One of these was another Italian-made film, The Colossus of Rhodes (1960), which was also released here by MGM, and the version on DVD is the English-dubbed one. That set would have been a perfect venue for The Thief of Bagdad/Il ladro di Bagdad, but at least it proves that Warner will release such films if they still have the rights. At this point in time, a Warner Archives release would probably be more likely. Whether it'll actually ever happen is another issue.
Meanwhile, at least we have the CD with the film's wonderful score. Thanks again to our friend above, alanbobet, for notifying us about that. A great CD.
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