A fun Saturday night ... my report on my 3-D and Cinerama adventure is below!
Columbia TriStar's The Talk of the Town is a superior 'idea' movie by George Stevens that does something decent with Frank Capra - type material. Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman are excellent; Cary Grant seems miscast at first but really isn't.
Warner's disc of Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart finds him doing excellent directing work on a personal film ... with the one mistake that he cast himself as the lead. If you can forget that Clint's trying too hard to be John Huston, a man with a completely different personality, this is a good Hemingwayesque safari story.
3-D and Cinerama Report
So, about those movies I saw yesterday .... GOG showed as part of the big 3-D festival at the Eqyptian. It's a big series, separate from the Cinematheque, run by the owner of Sabucat, a stock footage company. The atmosphere was pretty exciting. I think most of the shows are selling out, and for good reason: unlike most screening series in LA, the opportunity to see these films in real 3-D doesn't happen very often, and can't be replicated on DVD or video in their original formats. And that's what brought out literally everyone - some big critics, lots of older fans and 3-D techies and enthusiasts, plus the usual Sci-Fi addicts and cognoscenti who have probably seen GOG 20 times but can't pass up the opportunity to see an original 1954 print. So it was like one of our 1970s screenings, when we couldn't believe anyone in Hollywood would dredge up prints of genre favorites we wanted to see. I even saw an old friend, who apparently flew out from New York just for this series.
The Egyptian was packed, and with glasses firmly in place, GOG began. It ran at 1:37, even though it was clearly formatted for 1:66 (judging by the titles). The 3-D effect was fine, with many shots organized to place objects in different planes of depth. The apparent depth-space between 'planes' seems to be exaggerated in many shots, because there were many scenes where people closer to the camera looked too small in comparison to people behind them, sort of a variation on the telephoto shot in baseball games past the pitcher's mound toward home plate, where the batter looks bigger than the pitcher, who's 30 yards closer. A speaker told us that UA has no 3D versions of GOG, and that it was thought to be lost until someone (presumably a collector) found a left eye to match a right eye print. Unfortunately, the left eye was badly faded. This didn't hurt the 3-D, but the colors were subdued. If one closed a left eye, the colors popped into bright, true hues. Close the right eye, and the picture turned purplish. Together, they combined into a satisfactory but slightly faded composite. Very interesting.
GOG is a fun Science Fiction film that presages a lot of ideas in movies like THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN. It's about a super-secret lab under the desert full of technological gimmicks to be explained at length for 80 minutes, with about ten minutes of suspense and action. The futuristic look is terribly dated, but the attitudes are downright hilarious. Every scientist has a learned female assistant, all of whom are of starlet caliber in the looks department. The banter is somewhat tech savvy but naive just the same (typical of producer Ivan Tors), and the solution to the big mystery is something we figure out practically going in, and must wait for the characters to catch up. Gog and Magog are twin robots that of course are committing the murders, etc. The movie has one of the most cavalier attitudes toward radiation in the movies - both hero and heroine get 'serious' doses when Magog opens the atomic pile. She faints. But we fade up on both of them looking chipper: "We'll be better in no time!"
After the show, director Joe Dante introduced the charming William Schallert, who read from his 1953 datebook all the roles he took in plays and bits in movies that year, and said that all he really remembered about GOG was that he earned about $250 and got strangled by the robot. Director Herbert L. Strock talked about making this film and others, and told us that like Andre De Toth and Raoul Walsh, he had monocular vision and couldn't see his own 3-D picture! UA premiered the movie in 3D at the Paramount theater on Hollywood Blvd (now the El Capitan) but then released it only flat, which made Strock angry - they'd gone to such trouble and expense to do it in 3D. Everyone agreed that this was the first time - in 49 years - that it had been publicly screened in real 3D.
A couple of hours later we walked over to the revamped Cinerama Dome to again share the auditorium with a crowd of hardcore cinema history enthusiasts of all ages. HOW THE WEST WAS WON played in real 3-projector Cinerama - they even introduced the projectionists by name - and it must have been a contractual obligation or a labor of love, because the theater ran much like the old roadshow I saw at age 10 at the Pacific Theater a few blocks away. 5 people were still required in the projection booth, and ushers guided the audience to reserved seats. It was very pleasant - no line, and we just strolled in about 10 minutes before screen time knowing our seats were set.
So, here's the rundown for all you enthusiasts who've seen the movie in Dayton, Ohio, etc. Warner/Turner has recreated the experience to original specs by making new prints of exceedingly good quality, and playing the soundtrack from a separate interlocked mag roll. Technically, the show went off without a hitch. The screen is composed of three slightly overlapping panels that appear taller than they are wide - Cinerama is 6 perfs tall instead of 4. The clarity and sharpness of each panel is very impressive, and the color is excellent overall, with only a reel or two having slight density problems. It looks as if there were no restoration/preservation problems at all. The presentation looks big, very big, and has the kind of old-fashioned grandiosity that tells us this is a real event, and not just a movie.
The three panels are very distracting, of course, and just as we spent a lot of GOG checking out the depth illusion when the movie slowed down, here we tended to see what was happening at the join marks. I remember the original screenings taking place on a screen with a deeper curve, but can't say that for sure. This screen was not made of vertical slats, and didn't make a clean curve but had three slightly curved panels.
As always, HTWWW is a great entertainment and a so-so movie. It's packed with excellently-cast stars, and the roster of smaller players includes everyone on the MGM contract list. Since there are few closeups and not even that many medium shots, we were surprised to recognize many actors we'd never have spotted on DVD, like Harry Dean Stanton as one of Eli Wallach's gang.
The slow parts of the film on DVD, the static views of rivers and plains and mountains, are so beautiful and impressive in real Cinerama, that they end up being an entertainment unto themselves.
HTWWW starts well and by the end gets a little draggy, perhaps because I've seen it too many times. I find the Caroll Baker / James Stewart story very moving, Debbie Reynolds good when not singing, and George Peppard adequate but not that compelling. Each segment has a 'Cinerama demo' moment or two, which no longer seem all that thrilling, but got oohs and ahhs when the picture was new. The constant parade of stars keeps the interest up, and the show finishes with an elaborate but downbeat action episode on a train that seems to have been a benchmark for sequences in movies like THE WILD BUNCH. This is the one where Yvonne De Carlo's husband, a stunt man, lost a leg while doubling for George Peppard hanging onto those loose logs on the railroad car.
Many shots in the train robbery, the buffalo stampede and the rafting scene were shot with 70mm rear projection and optically split into three pieces, and they look it, unfortunately. The multiple jeopardy wild ride on the train is seriously muted by the now-obvious process shots, that don't have the same You-Are-There 'Lowell Thomas' effect of the rest of the picture. The end is also still a misjudged mess - while grand music plays and Spencer Tracy tells us how great the West has become since we pushed 'primitive man' aside, we see aerial shots of things like strip mines and crowded freeways! The final shot flying out under the Golden Gate bridge is more of trip to nowhere than a visual culmination of a great manifest destiny.
The film played with full intro, intermission and exit music, which would have been more fun if they weren't just corny medleys of traditional songs. It would be terrific if other films came back in the roadshow format - they've promised to show IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD in 70mm later this year, but they don't have roadshow-length prints. The radio-report intermission tape was located, however, and they plan to play that. That's the report. Glenn Erickson
Posted by DVD Savant at September 14, 2003 11:50 AM