It was a special treat, a minor-league family ritual, and now a faded memory. It required dressing up in my only suit, complete with clip-on fake tie and a collar just tight enough to cause sensations of suffocation. The good shoes were uncomfortable and distressingly squeaky on linoleum. Hair was firmly combed. Brylcream and a sprinkle of Vitalis were applied. (The mingled scent of the two was a male standard throughout middle-class America.) We had to leave early since the seats were reserved and no latecomers were seated. It was either in downtown Houston, not too terribly far from our suburban house, or all the way over in Dallas, a longer trek from the western suburbs of Fort Worth. But it was joyous nonetheless. It was cool. It was a memory-ingraining experience almost without equal.
I refer to the attending of a Cinerama movie in the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. Even if Cinerama itself has been utterly outclassed by later developments, the time-consuming and deliberately fussy nature of the experience made it into something altogether unique. Cinerama movies were shown only on reserved-seat basis in road shows that came into town and stayed for years, usually giving way to the next movie in the series after a good long run. I’m pretty sure that we saw the first film This is Cinerama around 1961 or so; it was originally released in 1955 and in all likelihood had been running in Houston’s Rivoli Theater for a good while by the time we got around to it. We didn’t see all five of the original Cinerama movies, but I’m pretty sure we made it to Search for Paradise. I still remember those jet fighters at the end.
Let’s get something straight right from the beginning here. Those “first five” movies themselves weren’t worth the bother. They ranged from trite to lousy to occasionally engaging, but when all is said and done they were just a bunch of travelogues with occasional attempts at “acting” that set new standards for stilted awkwardness. Those five big road-show Cinerama releases—This is Cinerama, Cinerama Holiday, Seven Wonders of the World, Search for Paradise, and South Seas Adventure—would have laid gigantic eggs had they been ordinary, run of the mill movies. They weren’t even all that good of travelogues or documentaries. Disney did that way better than the Cinerama folks, who never came up with anything even remotely approaching the skill of The Living Desert. Cinerama had Lowell Thomas, who handled the narration for the earlier movies and even appeared in Search for Paradise as an appropriately wooden actor playing his appropriately wooden self. He had been a household name, face, and voice since his Lawrence of Arabia days, and his stint as the public face of Cinerama was his last hurrah.
The very word Cinerama is almost meaningless to post-boomer folks; at best it might carry some connotation of Hollywood excess. It was an elaborate three-camera process that combined three oversized 35-millimeter film panels into one, providing a screen image that was not only eye-poppingly wide but tall. It was designed to be projected on a curved screen—146 degrees of arc, to be precise—that filled the entire field of human vision, depending of course on where you sat in the theater. It posed no end of technical difficulties and was in fact something of a Rube Goldberg machine. Three cameras meant three projectors; the left camera projected to the right-hand panel, the right camera to the left-hand panel, and the center one to the middle. The screen curvature meant that reflections from the two edge panels tended to wash each other out. Thus the screen itself was constructed out of a plethora of vertical louvered strips to ameliorate the reflections. Cinerama was cumbersome for directors, cinematographers, projectionists, and actors alike. On the other hand the gargantuan image was remarkably clear, given the fine-grained film running at 26 frames per second, and it was capable of being marvelously immersive. That is, as long as you didn’t get too distracted by the inevitable geometry problems or the jerky seams at the juncture of the panels.
The sound system was worth the price of admission alone: seven channels on multi-track magnetic tape, powered by ultra-studly amplifiers, all from a separate soundtrack reel controlled by at least one, and usually two, engineers for every showing of a Cinerama film. This was in an era before folks had home stereo systems, remember: stereo LPs weren’t available until 1958 and most people were still in mono until the mid-1960s. The Cinerama sound system was the greatest recorded audio any of us had ever heard up to that point, and it may be the single biggest influence on seeding a generation of audiophiles—who are now more gray than not.
MGM’s How the West Was Won was both the end and the climax of the three-camera Cinerama technique. Unlike the first five films, it was a full-on narrative movie, and it proved that Cinerama could be used for straight-up movies that told a story. It also proved that Cinerama wasn’t very good at it. The geometry and parallax problems posed by the width, curvature, and triple-camera setup meant that intimacy was well-nigh impossible; actors had to look at points far past each other during filming lest they look onscreen as though they weren’t looking at each other. Awkward, to say the least. How the West Was Won accordingly becomes a stilted pageant during non-action scenes, but when the Indians attack or the buffalo stampede, it’s just peachy. Alfred Newman’s score is integral to the cinematic E-ride; it has, in fact, outlasted the movie and remains one of the all-time great film scores, combining period stuff with first-rate modern movie scoring. The only other narrative Cinerama movie, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, remains in limbo, although the skinny has it that a reconstruction—if possible—and release is on the horizon.
Several years ago Warners gave us a jim-dandy restoration of How the West Was Won that allowed the option of seeing it in pure wide-screen splendor, or in the “smilebox” technique that approximates the look of a curved screen on a flat TV. Geometry problems are exacerbated, however, by seeing it on a flat screen, smilebox or not. Stuff in the middle of the screen thrusts outwards, for example, and people walking from left to right look as though they’re traversing an arc with the peak pointing towards the audience. Warners couldn’t fix that, but they had pockets deep enough to apply digital wizardry that removes the seams between the panel junctures. That is a lot more complicated than it sounds, because the geometry problems that plague the image can cause those very joins to spread out towards both top and bottom of the film. In the process, stuff appears twice in the seam. Nowadays clever algorithms and money can solve all of that, and Warners has both.
That’s not true of the folks who have provided labor-of-love restorations of the first five “travelogue” movies, although they’ve worked miracles on badly decayed and carelessly-stored original film elements. After all, nobody gave a fig about Search for Paradise after the Cinerama craze had passed, so nobody paid much attention to how it was being stored. Frankly, it’s a lousy movie, although its wide-eyed political incorrectness offers some chuckles and/or grimaces, depending upon your mood and/or personality. But if the restorers couldn’t match the Warners funding, they’ve done a marvelous job with image stabilization, color correction, and the overall presentation. They remembered just how important those big curtains were in Cinerama theaters, as they slowly opened—it took a good long time—to display that astounding screen in all its glory. They also remembered that the non-movie parts of the soundtrack—Overture, Entr’acte, and Exit Music—were monophonic. You got the stereo only as long as the monster screen was lit up.
Occasionally downright good film-making pops up in the original travelogue films. I’d forgotten just how much fun the Cypress Gardens sequence in This is Cinerama is, with the water-skis zooming around and the power boats roaring across the screen (and through the speakers.) It’s well-edited and fast-paced, two attributes normally distinguished by their absence in Cinerama flicks. We’ll ignore the pathetic attempt at “plot” by adding a hapless young lady (named Toni) who never can quite get anywhere on time. Some of the sequences act as time machines, such as the dusty pre-Strip cowtown Las Vegas caught in 1956’s Cinerama Holiday. Sometimes the music rescues the show, such as the pulsating orchestral mambo that props up the uninspired airplane tour of Rio de Janeiro in Seven Wonders of the World. Sometimes the music comes close to ruining the show, such as the smarmy vocal solos that infest Search for Paradise, courtesy of veteran Hollywood schlock composer Dmitri Tiomkin and some uncredited hack lyricist. Probably the Japanese dancers in Seven Wonders of the World represent the nadir of the series as they listlessly flip their little geisha fans to astoundingly tasteless music that marries Three Little Maids from School to The Girl from Ipanema. Chalk the whole sequence down as revenge for Pearl Harbor and move on.
Following that same line of reasoning, I suppose the visibly ill-at-ease and lederhosen’d Vienna Boys Choir warbling out The Blue Danube Waltz in This is Cinerama can be understood as compeuppance for the Blitz.
I originally began this paragraph: “Reservations about their artistic quality aside …” then nuked the line as an out-and-out lie. I have no reservations whatsoever about their artistic quality. They have none. They weren’t meant to. They were all about the technology, the experience, the sheer fun of Cinerama. Judged for that alone, they hold up remarkably well, even seen in “smilebox” on a high-def modern TV via Blu-Ray. Maybe their admittedly faded charm would be utterly lost on anyone below about the age of 55. But there are still a lot of Boomers left, and a lot of us are sitting ducks for reminders of those super-jolt orgasmic experiences of our salad days. Cinerama has a place not only in movie history, but in Boomer history as well. We were the ones pestering our parents to take us to those expense, fancy-pants movies, after all. So we’re the ones who can relive the thrill of it all, however faintly that thrill might still shine even through these beautifully restored video versions.
Is there anyone in our age group who doesn’t remember how This is Cinerama opened? After an interminable black-and-white standard screen introduction on the history of movie pictures since prehistory (yes, it really goes back to cave paintings) Lowell Thomas stood there before his big portrait of T. E. Lawrence and intoned: Ladies and Gentlemen … THIS … IS … CINERAMA!
And we all know what happened next, right? And if you don’t? Look it up, kid. Or pop for the new Blu-Ray/DVD combo release and see for yourself. It was one of the great wet-your-pants moments in all film history, after all. At least it was if you were a seven-year-old kid in Houston’s Rivoli Theater being utterly blown away by an experience beyond your wildest imagination.