I had the pleasure of catching HOW THE WEST WAS WON during its September, 2003 engagement at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, showing in three-strip Cinerama. I'll discuss both the movie and the Cinerama process, which is, in a nutshell, three 35mm images projected adjacent to each other from three projectors.
The movie is hokey and old-fashioned, but it's a solid, smart, and spectacular hokey and old-fashioned. It's essentially the big-budget film equivalent of a pioneer pageant play, with several generations of one family finding themselves taking part in the western expansion of the U.S. from about 1840 to 1890. So there's not a single story to it, rather about five storylines presented sequentially, not intercut. It's not what anybody would call a "tight" screenplay, but it does manage to hold interest and tie together a tremendous amount of different issues and events in Western expansion, taking Manifest Destiny as a given but still being inclusive.
I enjoyed how it put a human face on the 1800s history. I thought Debbie Reynolds was a gas; I hadn't seen her in anything besides SINGIN' IN THE RAIN and MOTHER (and oh man am I a sucker for those old-time cabaret costumes). The romance between Jimmy Stewart and Carroll Baker was sweet. Seeing the buffalo stampede in Cinerama was breathtaking----pure cinema.
Cinerama was amazing, but its limitations showed. Its two biggest limitations were the two vertical lines showing the discontinuities between the three projected images. This can be distracting at times, but it's kind of interesting how it affected how the movie was framed. Often there'd be a clear division between action or characters on the left, center, and right sides of the screen, and sometimes they'd frame it so there'd be a tree or a column on the discontinuity. Cinerama was also the perfect fit for the big curved screen of the Dome; sometimes regular movies get a fisheye-lens look to them; I remember the credits for THE WILD BUNCH looked really odd at the edges. I wonder how it might look if instead of being projected as three images on one screen, it were projected instead as images on three separate adjacent screens, with a little bit of space between each one, like a triptych.
Process photography could not be done directly in Cinerama, so the process shots had to be done in single-camera 35mm and then transferred optically to Cinerama. The result was a bit jarring during some of the action scenes where it would switch between regular 35mm and Cinerama. On the other hand, this served to point out the spectacular quality of the Cinerama image. The depth of field was extremely deep, and details in things like faces, costumes, and scenery would show wonderfully. I particularly liked seeing the white water in the scene on the rapids.
Close-ups were apparently also not possible in Cinerama, so much of the movie is filmed as medium, full-body shots. This makes things more static, but also more straightforward and allows the viewer to absorb the image more and choose for himself what to focus upon.
Incidentally, they said it takes 5 projectionists to run the movie! One for each projector, one for sound, and one they didn't tell us what he did.
The movie is hokey and old-fashioned, but it's a solid, smart, and spectacular hokey and old-fashioned. It's essentially the big-budget film equivalent of a pioneer pageant play, with several generations of one family finding themselves taking part in the western expansion of the U.S. from about 1840 to 1890. So there's not a single story to it, rather about five storylines presented sequentially, not intercut. It's not what anybody would call a "tight" screenplay, but it does manage to hold interest and tie together a tremendous amount of different issues and events in Western expansion, taking Manifest Destiny as a given but still being inclusive.
I enjoyed how it put a human face on the 1800s history. I thought Debbie Reynolds was a gas; I hadn't seen her in anything besides SINGIN' IN THE RAIN and MOTHER (and oh man am I a sucker for those old-time cabaret costumes). The romance between Jimmy Stewart and Carroll Baker was sweet. Seeing the buffalo stampede in Cinerama was breathtaking----pure cinema.
Cinerama was amazing, but its limitations showed. Its two biggest limitations were the two vertical lines showing the discontinuities between the three projected images. This can be distracting at times, but it's kind of interesting how it affected how the movie was framed. Often there'd be a clear division between action or characters on the left, center, and right sides of the screen, and sometimes they'd frame it so there'd be a tree or a column on the discontinuity. Cinerama was also the perfect fit for the big curved screen of the Dome; sometimes regular movies get a fisheye-lens look to them; I remember the credits for THE WILD BUNCH looked really odd at the edges. I wonder how it might look if instead of being projected as three images on one screen, it were projected instead as images on three separate adjacent screens, with a little bit of space between each one, like a triptych.
Process photography could not be done directly in Cinerama, so the process shots had to be done in single-camera 35mm and then transferred optically to Cinerama. The result was a bit jarring during some of the action scenes where it would switch between regular 35mm and Cinerama. On the other hand, this served to point out the spectacular quality of the Cinerama image. The depth of field was extremely deep, and details in things like faces, costumes, and scenery would show wonderfully. I particularly liked seeing the white water in the scene on the rapids.
Close-ups were apparently also not possible in Cinerama, so much of the movie is filmed as medium, full-body shots. This makes things more static, but also more straightforward and allows the viewer to absorb the image more and choose for himself what to focus upon.
Incidentally, they said it takes 5 projectionists to run the movie! One for each projector, one for sound, and one they didn't tell us what he did.
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