Cinerama!
Director:
Year: 1967
Rating: 6.0
A DVD producer - SmileBox - is beginning to remaster and release DVDs in
as close to Cinerama as they can get on a TV screen. The quality of these
two is lovely.
This is Cinerama (1952) - 5.5
Back in the early 1950's audience numbers began to drop for films and one
of the reasons given was people staying home to watch that new gizmo called
television. So the film industry came up with Cinerama (among other technical
advances) to get the folks to buy tickets. Cinerama was pretty spectacular
when it first came out. The screen was huge and curved and initially there
were three projector booths relaying the image onto the screen. That was
later changed to one but it was still a beautiful thing to see.
Some of the films shown in Cinerama were It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, How
the West Was Won, 2001 Space Odyssey, Battle of the Bulge and other films
that were helped by the Cinerama wide vision. I saw a few of those when I
was growing up and so I would guess I may have seen them on Cinerama! It
never really caught on except with specific films and theaters though it
is still around today in a small way.
I was thinking that this film was going to be a history of Cinerama with
lots of clips. Not so. This film was actually made to promote Cinerama back
in 1952 and opened on Broadway to rave reviews. It is narrated by Lowell
Thomas. I expect that name means nothing to most people these days but when
I was growing up Lowell Thomas was famous for his travels and film footage
about them. If you ever saw Lawrence of Arabia, Thomas is the journalist
(though they give him a different name) that follows Lawrence and makes him
famous. The film is partly directed by Meriam C. Cooper who directed a little
film called King Kong.
The film was no doubt remarkable at the time - not just for the Cinerama
aspect - but also for what it films. Much of it seems a bit dull now though
- a roller coaster, a bunch of performances though Aida is lovely, an interminable
time in the mangroves of Florida - but then some wonderful shots of Venice
and in the final 40 minutes (of a 133 minute film) it simply flies across
America and once you hit the Rockies it turns magnificent. I have always
scolded myself for not seeing all the great mountain formations of the West
and now I don't have to - I saw them the way they were meant to be seen.
In Cinerama!
The Seven Wonders of the World in Cinerama
(1956) - 6.5
Back in 1952 as a promotion for the new technological wonder of Cinerama,
the film This is Cinerama was produced and exhibited around the country.
Cinerama was an attempt to get folks away from their TV sets for a few hours
and give them the theatrical experience of a huge curved screen with three
projectors. This was narrated by Lowell Thomas and he is back here four years
later for this traveling Cinerama show that is much more interesting than
the previous one.
As Lowell explains, the original Seven Wonders of the world are all gone
except for the pyramids, but they are out to discover new Wonders of the
World and bring them to you the paying audience. YOU ARE THERE with CINERAMA
and ONLY CINERAMA PUTS YOU IN THE PICTURE! Even seeing this on a 36 inch
TV set is still pretty impressive as Thomas and his crew head all over the
world looking for the cool. Needless to say the sights don't really add up
to the original Seven Wonders but still they are a great to see - some more
than others. For audiences of 1956 much of this must have felt exotic and
strange and certainly many of the scenes are staged for the film but the
sets are real. Thomas's narration seems outdated now - at times a bit demeaning
to the culture in his choices and words and the pro-oil and baseball game
played by American children in Saudi Arabia feels jarring now - but back
then played well I am sure.
Still we get an opportunity to visit places as diverse as the Iguazu Falls,
Rio, Japan, Angkor Wat, Benares and Darjeeling in India, Cairo and the Nile.
the Holy Land, the so-called Dark Continent also known as Africa, the amazing
ancient city of Shibam in what is now Yemen and the Vatican. Along the way
it seems there is a lot of ritual, dancing and singing gong on - so we get
a musical in Japan, a country where it seems all women are beautifully adorned
in kimonos, a Buddhist prayer ceremony in Angkor Wat, a cobra dance and Riiki
Tikki Tavi in Benares, a tribal performance from the Watusi in deepest Africa
and then a Papal service in the Vatican.
The Christian religion gets special attention as this Papal segment is quite
long and earlier when following the steps of Jesus, Thomas's voice gets all
deep and melodramatic - so much so I was expecting Jesus to make a guest
appearance. Perhaps my favorite bit was the train ride up the mountain to
Darjeeling where they had two men in the front of the train throwing sand
on the tracks so that the train would not slip and wait for napping elephants
on the track. It does in a clearly set up scene as the break is not set and
it flies backwards at great speed to where it began.
They surprisingly skip China and the Great Wall - perhaps because Lowell
had made a documentary about Tibet that was released in 1954 called Out of
This World that was critical of China. And both Europe and the USA gets the
short shrift because I expect none of that seemed all the exotic and strange
to audiences.
The photography is as one would expect gorgeous and the quality of the picture
is pristine.
