Hi Richard,
Yes, The Wonderful World of The Brothers Grimm was filmed in 3-strip Cinerama.
In fact, all of the scenes in the film were filmed in 3-strip whereas How The
West Was Won had some of them filmed in Ultra Panavision. For a complete list
of 3-strip and 70mm Cinerama, go to my web site - http://cineramahistory.com/ .
The films listed in the left column are all 3-strip. The rest are 70mm except
for Cinerama's Russian Adventure which were scenes from various Kinopanorama
3-strip films - but almost all theatres only showed this in 70mm.
Thanks,
Roland
--- On Thu, 9/11/08, Richard Del Belso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: Richard Del Belso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [MOPO] HOW THE WEST WAS WON -- New DVD in Blu Ray and High Def
To: MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
Date: Thursday, September 11, 2008, 6:32 PM
#yiv317234038 .hmmessage P
{
margin:0px;padding:0px;}
#yiv317234038 {
FONT-SIZE:10pt;FONT-FAMILY:Tahoma;}
Roland...
Was THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM filmed in a different process? i
always thought it was in the original Cinerama...but I don't know for
sure...never saw that one.
Richard Del Belso
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:17:22 -0700
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [MOPO] HOW THE WEST WAS WON -- New DVD in Blu Ray and High Def
To: MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
This is Cinerama and How The West Was Won, the first and last movies filmed in
3-strip Cinerama were the highest grossing films in the year they were each
released. This is quite amazing when there were only four Cinerama theatres in
the world in 1952 and 85 in 1962.
I'm amazed at the time and money that Warner Brothers spent on this restoration
when there are probably not that many people who remember Cinerama and are
willing to spend the money to buy these DVD's.
Roland
--- On Thu, 9/11/08, Richard Del Belso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: Richard Del Belso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [MOPO] HOW THE WEST WAS WON -- New DVD in Blu Ray and High Def
To: MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
Date: Thursday,
September 11, 2008, 4:44 PM
#yiv317234038 .ExternalClass #EC_yiv2054617154 .EC_hmmessage P
{padding:0px;}
#yiv317234038 .ExternalClass #EC_yiv2054617154
{font-size:10pt;font-family:Tahoma;}
Last sunday I was lucky enough to see the film in a newly struck Cinerama print
at one of the three theaters in America that can still project Cinerama (the
Arclight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood) It was absolutely thrilling. This was not
the 'restored" print on the DVD; they used the original Cinerama negative to
make a new print...and the notorious "lines" were still there. But the picture
is so involving that after the first few minutes, one hardly noticed them
anymore.
The film was chock-a-block with stunning visuals...from inspiring panoramas to
exciting action sequences (the Buffalo stampede, the raft caught in the rapids,
the runaway, breakapart train...WOW!), and I'm sure that it would impossible to
get the full impact without seeing them in Cinerama. Even so, the movie is
extremely entertaining and is filled with beloved stars and I'm sure it is
worth every penny of the cost of the Blu-Ray disc.I enthusiastically "second"
Channing's
recommendation.
Richard
Richard Del Belso
> Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:55:41 -0700
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [MOPO] HOW THE WEST WAS WON -- New DVD in Blu Ray and High Def
> To: MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
>
> 9/11/2008
>
> I've just watched the new print on Encore Western Channel and it is
> extraordinary. The original two separation lines are almost gone do
> to digitization, the color is absolutely stunning and pops, and the
> old distortion that came from the fact that the movie was to be shown
> on a curved screen is now non-existent. Even in the non-letter-boxed
> version that they also show, the image quality is incredible crisp --
> if you've looked at Cinemascope films on Fox that are panned and
> scanned, they are always blurry
and muddy. Finally, the film can be
> evaluated for the classic it is without all of the technical
> distractions that have plagued it since it was shown flat starting
> after it initial roadshow release in 1963. P.S. I don't there was
> ever a woman as sexy and beautiful as Carroll Baker, when she made
> this film. She's really a magnificent work of art!
>
> Here's a review from the New York Times (commenting primarily on John
> Ford's contribution to the film):
>
> HOW THE WEST WAS WON
>
> Warner Home Video
>
> The best reason for buying a Blu-ray player right now is Warner Home
> Video’s high-definition version of “How the West Was Won,” a film made
> 46 years ago in the highest-definition moving picture medium the world
> had seen: Cinerama. With its three strips of 35-millimeter film
> projected side by side
with a slight overlap on a gigantic, curved
> screen, Cinerama offered six times the resolution — which is to say,
> six times as much visual information — of the standard film of 1952,
> when it was first used commercially.
>
> Not even the finest home theater installation will be able to
> reproduce the scale and resolution of the Cinerama experience, or
> anything close to it. But moving from standard-definition DVD to Blu-
> ray generates a shock analogous to what the audiences of 1952 must
> have felt when the curtains parted to reveal the panoramic screen.
>
> The images are so crisp as to feel almost unreal; the depth of field
> seems dreamlike, infinite, with the blades of grass in the foreground
> as sharply in focus as the snow-capped mountains in the distant
> background. Unfortunately, there is no way to bend even a flat-panel
> monitor to imitate the immersive experience of Cinerama’s curved
> screen, which tried to fill every speck of the viewer’s peripheral
> vision. But sit close enough, and that sense of enveloping depth
> returns. It feels like a three-dimensional experience, and in some
> ways is a more convincing illusion (and a much less visually painful
> one) than that provided by the two-camera 3-D processes that followed
> in the wake of Cinerama’s popular success.
>
> The first Cinerama features were travelogues, transporting 1950s
> spectators to parts of the world most would never see. (Many of the
> earliest Edison and Lumière films, at the turn of the 20th century,
> fulfilled a similar function.) Released in the United States in 1963,
> “How the West Was Won” would be the first — and, as it turned out, the
> last — narrative film to be
shot in the three-strip Cinerama process.
>
> In a sense the film’s guiding aesthetic is still that of the
> travelogue, but instead of visiting various scenic locations, it makes
> brief stops at most of the symbolic locations of the western genre,
> from the embarkation points of the Erie Canal to the California
> mountains of the Gold Rush.
>
> The script, by James R. Webb (“Vera Cruz”), does its best to touch all
> the thematic bases of the genre too: the male characters include a
> mountain man (James Stewart) and a river pirate (Walter Brennan); a
> wagon master (Robert Preston) and a riverboat gambler (Gregory Peck);
> a builder of railroads (Richard Widmark) and a frontier marshal
> (George Peppard). The main female characters are even more broadly
> archetypal: a pair of sisters, portentously named Lilith (Debbie
> Reynolds,
who becomes a saloon singer and budding capitalist) and Eve
> (Carroll Baker, who stakes out a farm on a Mississippi riverbank and
> mothers two boys).
>
> As a dramatic narrative “How the West Was Won” doesn’t work all that
> well. Few of the characters are on screen long enough to establish
> identities beyond those of the stars who play them. Most of the
> episodes are thinly developed, and over all the film has a jerky, stop-
> and-start rhythm, perhaps because it is the work of three different
> directors.
>
> Henry Hathaway (“True Grit”) reportedly was in charge of the project
> and directed three episodes (“The Rivers,” “The Plains” and “The
> Outlaws”). John Ford directed one (“The Civil War”), and George
> Marshall another (“The Railroad,” although Hathaway later said he had
> to reshoot much of
Marshall’s material).
>
> Instead this is a movie of visual epiphanies, ingeniously realized in
> the face of crippling stylistic challenges. The Cinerama camera — an
> 800-pound behemoth that resembled a steel-girded jukebox — could move
> forward and backward with ease and elegance, resulting in some of the
> most impressive moments in the film (like the long tracking shot
> through a river town that opens “The Rivers”). But it couldn’t pan
> from side to side without creating registration problems, and close-
> ups were all but impossible to achieve with the system’s short 27-
> millimeter lenses.
>
> Moreover, characters couldn’t move freely across the wide screen,
> because crossing the two join lines — where the images overlapped —
> would create a distracting jump, and the action (beyond the broad
> movements of
rushing trains or stampeding buffalo) had to be
> restricted to the center of the screen.
>
> Hathaway and Marshall are resourceful and craftsmanlike in dealing
> with these limitations, finding ways to position the actors so that
> the join lines are hidden, or filling the unused space beyond the
> center frame with vertiginously detailed landscapes that fall off into
> infinite distance.
>
> But it is John Ford who rises to the challenge most poetically,
> chiefly by ignoring it. “The Civil War” is an exquisite miniature
> (unfortunately padded out by some battle sequences lifted from
> “Raintree County,” an earlier MGM Civil War film) that consists of
> only three scenes: a mother (Ms. Baker) sends a son (Peppard) off to
> war; the son has a horrible experience as night falls on the
> battlefield of Shiloh; the son returns and
finds that his mother has
> died. The structure has a musical alternation: day, night, day;
> exterior, interior, exterior; stillness, movement, stillness.
>
> In the first and last scenes the famous Fordian horizon line extends
> the entire length of the extra-wide Cinerama frame. In the aftermath
> of the battle the horizon line disappears in darkened studio sets. The
> sense of the sequence is profoundly antiwar — Generals Sherman and
> Grant, played by John Wayne and Henry Morgan, briefly appear as a
> couple of disheveled, self-pitying drunks — and it gradually becomes
> apparent that the elderly Ford is revisiting one of his early
> important works, the 1928 drama “Four Sons.”
>
> The expressionistic middle sequence, with its studio-built swamp,
> refers to F. W. Murnau, whose “Sunrise” was one of the great
> influences on
the young Ford, while the open-air sequences that
> bracket it, with their unmoving camera, long-shot compositions and
> rootedness in the rural landscape, recall the work of the American
> pioneer D. W. Griffith.
>
> When, in the final panel of Ford’s triptych, a gust of wind tousles
> Peppard’s hair in the foreground and then continues across to the
> forest in the middle distance and on to the stand of trees in the most
> distant background, it seems like a true miracle of the movies: a
> breath of life, moving over the face of the earth. No less formidable
> a filmmaker than Jean-Marie Straub has called “The Civil War” John
> Ford’s masterpiece; for the first time, thanks to this magnificent new
> edition, I think I know what he’s talking about. Birth, death,
> rebirth. (Warner Home Video, $34.99, Blu-ray; $59.98, three-disc
>
standard-definition collector’s edition; $20.98, two-disc standard
> definition edition, not rated)
>
> Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com
> ___________________________________________________________________
> How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List
>
> Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L
>
> The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com
___________________________________________________________________
How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List
Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L
The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com
___________________________________________________________________
How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List
Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L
The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com
___________________________________________________________________
How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List
Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L
The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com
___________________________________________________________________
How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List
Send a message addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L
The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
