3 Movies | November 25th
How does one compete with television? Go big! That was the chief allure of Cinerama, the immersive widescreen film process that celebrates its 70th anniversary this year. TCM commemorates the occasion with the only two narrative features filmed on three-strip Cinerama, How the West Was Won (1962) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), along with the new documentary Rescuing a Fantasy Classic (2021), which traces the meticulous measures taken to restore The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.
The history of Cinerama actually stretches back to 1939, when inventor and photography connoisseur Fred Waller partnered with architect Ralph Walker on Vitarama, a precursor to Cinerama that sought to more fully cover the field of one’s peripheral vision. “Waller wanted to give the audience something beyond the commonplace experience – he wanted the audience to be in the movie,” Lenny Lipton wrote in “The Cinema in Flux.” It wasn’t until the early 1950s that Waller fully achieved that reality, joining forces with sound pioneer Hazard E. Reeves, Mike Todd, Merian C. Cooper and Lowell Thomas to bring the first Cinerama film to life, This is Cinerama (1952). The picture screened in New York City for almost two and a half years straight.
Put (relatively) simply, Cinerama involved capturing the action on three synchronized cameras mounted together and projecting the images from synced 35mm projectors onto a 146-degree curved screen. An impressive magnetic seven-track stereophonic sound system augmented the visuals and enveloped the theater. Not only did the spectacular imagery and sound enthrall audiences, but the whole experience proved luxurious, from the intricately outfitted auditoriums to movie-specific souvenir programs. Initially, “there was no need to cast movie stars, since the process itself was the attraction,” Lipton wrote. That changed in the 1960s, though, when MGM signed a deal to showcase Cinerama’s story-telling capability in two narrative features.
“It would be hard to imagine a subject which lends itself more strikingly to the wide-screen process,” Variety wrote in its review of How the West Was Won, a film that boasted as many credited directors as Cinerama cameras: John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall. A sprawling five-part chronicle of the Prescott family traversing westward during the 19th century, How the West Was Won matches the majesty of widescreen with a star-studded cast that included John Wayne, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Debbie Reynolds, Gregory Peck, Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb and many more. Filming required the finesse of four master cinematographers: William H. Daniels, Milton R. Krasner, Charles Lang and Joseph LaShelle, all of whom boarded the picture with one Oscar apiece.
The movie’s breathtaking visual splendor took a page from Cinerama’s roots in picturesque, episodic excursions and majestic movement. The filmmakers consciously placed the spectator in the middle of the action numerous times, a hallmark of the process, which included scenes of rushing river rapids, charging buffalo stampedes, covered wagons navigating trails and an electrifying train chase and shootout. The film even ends with an aerial journey across the modern-day West. Whereas the narrative drove the aforementioned Cinerama highlights, “the technology itself motivated the moment” in that final sequence, William Paul remarked in “When Movies Were Theater.”
“Every phrase of production was geared to the remarkable capacity of the Cinerama camera to capture for the screen a motion picture with absolute reality,” the Random House companion book “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Cinerama Present How the West Was Won” reported. For instance, due to the high level of detail Cinerama displayed on screen, all costumes, which numbered in the thousands, had to be hand sewn. Additionally, a majority of filming took place on location stretching from the Ohio River Valley to the Southwest, with spots like Battery Rock appearing for the first time on screen. Some settings proved so remote that roads had to be formed for production vehicles to haul equipment, trailers and more to and from 11 main locations across the country.
That said, adding story and actors into the mix proved challenging for those behind and in front of the cameras. One issue simply involved space: Cinerama’s large depth of field ensured everything in frame was in focus, requiring meticulous art direction and production design for a wider area. (This also made close-ups near impossible to film.) On the acting front, co-star Karl Malden recalled how difficult blocking was in his 2007 oral history with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In fact, during a scene with Stewart, Malden remembered having to coordinate their eyelines to match up; the stars couldn’t simply look each other in the eyes since each camera’s point of view was slightly different.
Though shot simultaneously with How the West Was Won, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm arrived in theaters first, in August 1962. Helmed by Henry Levin, with celebrated animator George Pal stepping in for the fairy tale portions, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm boasted another powerhouse cast: Laurence Harvey, Yvette Mimieux, Barbara Eden, Claire Bloom, Buddy Hackett, Russ Tamblyn and many more. This fictional account of the lives of the legendary Grimm brothers followed in the episodic Cinerama tradition with the cinematic re-telling of three of their tales: “The Dancing Princess,” “The Cobbler and the Elves” and “The Singing Bone.”
In his review of the picture for Boxoffice, Al Steen extolled, “‘The Wonderful Magic of Cinerama’ might well be a substitute title for ‘The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.’” The directors leveraged the Cinerama process through several riveting visuals, including shots of a carriage thundering down a mountain road, a precarious walk (and fall) across a partly decrepit bridge and the dizzying point of view of The Woodsman (Russ Tamblyn) as he tumbles down a hill.
Despite Cinerama’s inherent complexity, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm art director Edward Carfagno didn’t consider the three-camera set-up overly complicated. During his 1991 oral history with the Academy, Carfagno recalled having to work around the areas where the three frames joined on screen, but he could see where those would land. (Many set-ups utilized vertical objects in those locations when possible to cover the seams.) “You had to always line it up so that it wouldn’t look like this was one piece and that was another piece,” he said. “It had to look like one piece. That was the only big chore.”
For all the care and effort that went into making The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, an equally significant amount of work went into restoring the picture, which Harrison Engle’s documentary Rescuing a Fantasy Classic details. The 2008 restoration of How the West Was Won, a job that film editor David Strohmaier confirmed wasn’t overly complicated because the original negatives were in excellent condition, revived attention in Cinerama. Since then, all five 1950s Cinerama travelogues have been restored, leaving The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm the last of the three-strip Cinerama titles to receive that special treatment.
The interest and enthusiasm to save this film certainly existed throughout the years, but due to extensive damage to the original negatives, many assumed it to be an impossible, costly task. Costly, indeed it was, but impossible it wasn’t – at least with digital tools. Restoring the average film involves considerable effort, but three strips of film equates to three times the scanning, three times the potential fixes – basically, three times the amount of work. The team involved in this undertaking reversed substantial water damage, corrected colors, repaired flickers, re-synced sound and the list goes on; they even remedied errors inherent in the original release!
Though both How the West Was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm won Oscars, ranked among the year’s top box office draws and were celebrated for their use of Cinerama, the three-strip process ended after these movies. In addition to high cost, production limitations and exhibition factors, filming with three cameras simply wasn’t viable for many genres. Widescreen movies promoted as being presented in Cinerama from 1963 onward, including It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), were mostly shot on single camera 70mm and projected as such, even if on a curved screen.
Despite its brief heyday, Cinerama’s influence was enormous; as John Belton wrote in “Widescreen Cinema,” the process “restored affective power to the motion picture.” Indeed, Cinerama opened the door wide for successors like CinemaScope and IMAX, heralding a change in the theatrical experience that rendered the magic of movies even larger than life.
