Wide Screen Movies Magazine

edited by John Hayes

Issue 11 Preview

Extracts from the print version of the magazine.

Information on purchasing individual copies and subscriptions to the magazine may be obtained by emailing editor John Hayes

An appreciation of widescreen 35mm and 70mm films, past and present, in magazine format.

To obtain the fully-illustrated print edition of the magazine, contact John at the email address above.

“You see them WITH glasses!”…
A Short History of 3D Movies.

Part One:  The 1800s to the 1950s

The 1800s

3D movies have actually been around a lot longer than widescreen ones.  Almost as soon as the early still cameras were invented, it was realised that they could easily be adapted to produce a stereoscopic image.  Indeed, as early as 1856, J. C. d’Almeida gave a demonstration at the Academie des Sciences in which two stereoscopic images (that is to say two views of the same scene, photographed from slightly differing points of view - usually around two and a half inches - representing the distance between a pair of human eyes) were projected in rapid succession as lantern slides coloured red and green, with the audience viewing the screen through spectacles fitted with red and green lenses (This system of rapidly alternating left and right eye views would be used again - but not for more than a hundred years!  We’ll come to that later).  The green image could only be seen through the red lens and the red image only through the green one, effectively sending two slightly different images of the same scene to the brain of the viewer, where they would be combined to form a three-dimensional image.  Nevertheless, in spite of this remarkable discovery, for most people in the Victorian age their only experience of viewing 3D images would be via one or the other of the two most popular types of steroscope in use at the time; the Holmes or the Brewster.

 After a period of very little advancement in 3D projection, the 1890s produced a positive flurry of activity in the field, when Ducos du Hauron produced and patented a refinement of the two-colour, or anaglyph, system by superimposing a pair of transparent stereoscopic images, one coloured red and the other blue, on top of each other.  When projected, the viewer would see a three dimensional scene through glasses having one blue and one red lens. 

By the end of the century, moving pictures had arrived and 3D wasn’t very far behind.  In 1897 a Mr. C. Grivolas adapted the anaglyph technique to movies by using a specially constructed camera that would expose two reels of film simultaneously, through two lenses spaced as far apart as human eyes.  The resulting prints were then projected simultaneously on to the same screen by two interlinked projectors, with one lens having a red filter and the other a blue one.  Once again, the audience would don red and blue lensed glasses only this time they would see a three dimensional moving picture - the effect must have been truly startling to Victorian eyes.  And this would be almost exactly the way that 3D movies would be projected in the future.

The 1900s

As would continue to be the case with 3D movies right up to the present day, a few brief presentations here and there would be followed by very long periods during which no one would see, or even hear of 3D.  Several more years passed until an anaglyphic presentation of random scenes shot in and around New York and New Jersey by Edwin S. Porter (maker of the very first motion picture feature, The Great Train Robbery) and William E. Waddell, took place at the Astor theatre in New York on June 10th 1915.  An interesting novelty use of the anaglyph system was made in 1918, on the Keith-Abbey vaudeville circuit, which had nothing whatever to do with motion pictures.  A troupe of high-kicking chorus girls went through their routine while a translucent screen was lowered in front of them.  Lit from behind with red and green lights, their red and green shadows were cast on to the screen, which the audience then viewed through red and green glasses - giving the effect of the girls’ high kicks going right over their heads!   And though it is generally accepted that other occasional 3D presentations were given, none of them are officially recorded until the 1920s, when several major attempts at re-launching 3D movies occurred, more or less at the same time.

The first of these was an anaglyph format presentation - and the World’s first 3D feature film - given by film maker and inventor Harry K. Fairall, entitled The Power of Love.  It opened at the Ambassador Hotel Theatre in Los Angeles on September 27th 1922 - and the reviews were very favourable.  A few months later, during the Christmas holidays, William Van Doren Kelley, inventor of the Prizmacolor process, presented his ‘Plasticon’ anayglyphic short film Movies of the Future.  This was shown at the Rivoli theatre in New York City.  Early in the following year, Kelley would show a second Plasticon short - a travelogue about Washington DC - also at the Rivoli.  Kelley’s process used film coated on both sides, with the red image on one side and the green image on the reverse.  The audience viewed the 3D image through spectacles that had a pair of red and green Cellophane lenses. 

While all these systems were variations on the anaglyph stereoscopic method, a more radical idea came along with the presentation of the ‘Teleview’ system on December 27th at the Selwyn theatre in New York City.  The inventors of the Teleview system, Laurens Hammond and William F. Cassidy, had decided to take a completely different approach to the presentation of 3D images by designing an extremely complex projection and viewing system (although an almost identical system had been demonstrated by C. Dupuis in Paris as far back as 1903) Their process required two reels of film to be exposed through lenses approximately 2 ½ inches apart.  The two resulting prints were run simultaneously through two projectors that were electronically linked so that they would remain synchronised throughout the performance.  One print, however, would always be one frame behind the other; this would effectively produce alternating left and right images on the screen.  In order to make a stereoscopic image of the alternating pairs, each member of the audience would be seated behind his own ‘televiewer’ - the heart of the system.  This was a mechanical viewing device, which contained a rotating shutter, driven by an electric motor running in synch with the projectors and turning at some 1500 rpm.  The shutter would block the left eye view of the spectator when the right eye image was on the screen and vice versa.  Contemporary reports indicate that the effect was quite good.

Unfortunately, the programme wasn’t quite so favourably received.  It began with of a couple of shorts, one of which was a kind of travelogue featuring Hopi and Navajo Indians.  These preceded the main feature, a space travel film called M.A.R.S. (also known as Mars Calling, The Man from Mars and Radio Mania), which was at that time only the second feature length 3D movie.  The poor reviews coupled with the expense of installing the equipment more or less killed Teleview right there.  But interestingly, the alternating frame system would be reborn more than sixty years later. It would be developed in Japan initially for home video use with LCD shutter glasses replacing the Televiewer, and subsequently adapted for use in IMAX theatres for their earlier 3D presentations (now abandoned in favour of less cumbersome polarised glasses).  It would seem that the Televiewer was simply too far ahead of its time - but it does go to show that a good idea never really goes away.

Also in 1923 came an alleged 3D system that its developers dubbed ‘Natural Vision’ - not to be confused with the later, and completely different 1950s system, which would bear the same name.  This first Natural Vision was the brainchild of George K. Spoor, co-founder of the Essenay Studio in Chicago, who had formed a new partnership with Paul J. Bergren in 1916, specifically to develop a new 3D system.  Six years later, Natural Vision was demonstrated on August 23rd 1923, with an actual feature promised within ten weeks.  Another six years - and two weeks - later, the first Natural Vision feature was unveiled.  Danger Lights premiered at the State-Lake theatre, in Chicago - but not in 3D.  Somewhere along the line, Spoor and Bergren had quietly dropped 3D in favour of the big screen, and Natural Vision became the name that RKO used for all their films that were shot on 63mm film.

But to return to anaglyphs, the most successful system of that period was undoubtedly the one developed by Frederick Eugene Ives and Jacob Leventhal.  They had each been working separately to develop a 3D presentation system, and decided to pool their efforts, producing a series of shorts at a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey.  They called the first one Plastigrams, which was given a limited release by Educational Pictures towards the end of 1923 and into 1924.  For some unknown reason, Educational decided not to pick up their option on the remaining four shorts, so they languished for nearly a year, until the Pathe Company began releasing them at eight-week intervals from the beginning of 1925.  Collectively, they were known as Stereoscopiks, and their titles were: A Runaway Taxi, Zowie, Ouch and Lunacy.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, legendary filmmaker, Abel Gance was shooting his epic film, Napoleon, in the super-widescreen format that he had developed, called Polyvision.  A forerunner of Cinerama, Gance’s system used three synchronous 35mm cameras to produce panoramic scenes that would be spread over three adjoining screens.  Ever the pioneer, he decided that he would add 3D to certain scenes as well.  Though there are no records of the methods he used to attain his 3D effects, it is obvious from his own comments on the process that it was a type of anaglyph system:

“To see the rushes, I had to wear those red and green spectacles.  The 3D effects were very good, and very pronounced.  I remember one scene where soldiers were waving their pistols in the air with excitement, and the pistols seemed to come right out into the audience.”

Unfortunately, Gance decided to abandon the stereoscopic segments, and indeed, even the three-panel system was used in only a few of the early European showings of the finished film.

For the reminder of the 1920s, very little happened in the field of stereoscopic movie making.  Technicians were experimenting with sound systems that would revolutionise the cinema industry in the coming years, and the World was sliding towards the depression era.  In 1929, a San Fransisco man by the name of Graves Griffith, developed a ‘stereoscopic colour cinemetograph apparatus’, and was even granted a patent for it.  But the most interesting breakthrough did not come until 1932, when Edwin H. Land was granted a patent for ‘Polaroid’ filters.

The 1930s and the 1940s

Land’s cheap and simple method for producing polarising filters, as described by Brian Coe in his excellent book, The History of Movie Photography, involved depositing crystals of a chemical called Herapathite as a thin film, which was then manipulated in order to align these needle-like crystals in one direction.  This had the effect of creating a microscopic grill, through which would pass only those undulating light waves that were similarly aligned.  And because Land’s filters worked on the principle of selecting the orientation of light waves rather than blocking certain colours (an almost identical process had been developed in Europe by the optical company, Zeiss-Ikon), it would be possible to produce full-colour 3D images - if only there was such a thing as full colour film!  Happily, this was not too far away, as full-colour film would become available in1935.

The arrival of these new filters had a stimulating effect on the 3D film making community in various parts of the world, and it wasn’t very long before the first colour presentation of polarised 3D projection was given, in June 1936 at the Haus der Technik, in Berlin.  The pairs of stereoscopic images were printed side by side on a single strip of film and projected on to a metallic coated screen (a metallic screen preserves the directional integrity of light waves when they reflect back to the audience; something that doesn’t happen with a conventional white screen) through a pair of Zeiss polarising filters.  The film was called Zum Greifen Nah -You Can Nearly Touch It -, and it was shot in a fairground on two-colour Agfa film stock.  The film was shown to the public the following year on 12th December 1937 at the Ufa Palast am Zoo in Berlin.  A second production followed in 1939, using an improved system that utilised horizontally running film.  This film was called Sechs Madel Rollen in Wochenland.

It’s also worth noting that You Can nearly Touch It may have been slightly pre-empted by an Italian production, shot using polarising filters, Nozze Vagabonde - Beggar’s Wedding, which was also shown in 1936, though not in colour. 

Meanwhile, back in the USA, the previously mentioned partnership of Frederick Ives and Jacob Leventhal had been dissolved, Leventhal then teaming up with another accomplished 3D experimenter, John Norling.  Together, they devised a system using a pair of Bell and Howell cameras in a face-to-face configuration, shooting into angled mirrors.  They made an assortment of 3D shorts that were eventually sold to MGM.  Unsure of what to do with them, they were handed over to their ‘shorts’ specialist, Pete Smith, who was able to assemble them into longer ‘short’, which was released on 11th January 1936 - in anaglyph format - under the title of Audioscopiks.

Leventhal and Norling continued to produce more of their short 3D films, which were subsequently released on 15th January 1938, under the title The New Audioscopiks.

The following year, Norling, in collaboration with the Polaroid Corporation, made a fifteen-minute 3D short for the Chrysler Motors Exhibit at the New York Word’s Fair.  Depicting the assembly of a Plymouth motorcar, the film ran from the 4th may 1939, and though it was shot in black and white, it was considered the largest scale presentation of 3D to that date, as more than 1,500,000 people saw it.  Norling remade the film in colour for Chrysler for the 1940 World’s Fair.  It was now called New Dimensions, but this time it was filmed using Technicolor 3-strip cameras.  Norling also produced a third 3D short, Thrills For You, for the Pennsylvania Railroad exhibit at the Golden Gate Exposition of 1940 in San Francisco which was shot in black and white.  MGM, having been satisfied with the reasonable success of their Audioscopiks, instructed Pete Smith to produce one of his own.  Released on 1st march 1941, Third Dimension Murder was a spoof on the popular 'Frankenstein' movies; but WWII was rapidly approaching and would bring production of 3D movies to a virtual standstill.

Whilst all this was happening in Europe and America, The Russians had quietly been experimenting with various 3D systems, from alternating frame, through anaglyph up to and including polarised 3D.  But in the end they decided to explore a completely different route by attempting to perfect a method of 3D presentation that did not require the audience to wear glasses at all: the parallax stereogram.

This method of stereo photography had first been demonstrated in the early part of the century by A. Berthier, E. Estenave and our friend Frederick Ives, but by the early 1930s had been perfected by Russian engineer Semyon Pavlovich Ivanov.  A parallax stereogram is produced by placing a screen, usually made up of fine wires, in front of a senstive photographic surface, in such a way that parts of the surface are shielded from the left eye lens and other parts from the right eye lens.  When exposed, this will produce a double image made up of interlaced left and right eye views of a scene.  The printed photograph is then viewed through a similar screen which will allow each of the viewer's eyes to see only the appropriate left or right eye parts of the image.  The wire viewing screens were later replaced by plastic screens made up of fine lines which could be laminated directly on to a parallax stereogram, each line, in effect, acting as a tiny lens directing the eyes to their appropriate view.  This type of steroscopic process, which does not require viewing glasses and permits simultaneous viewing by any number of persons,  is still used today, usually in the production of novelty 3D items such as 3D bubblegum cards, 3D postcards and even 3D posters.

Ivanov then went on to adapt the principle for use in motion pictures.  In his book Stereoscopy, Russian stereographer Nikolai Valyus, describes in great detail the incredibly complex and cumbersome equipment that becomes necessary when the principle of the parallax stereogram is applied to the projection of moving stereoscopic images; but a more concise description can be found in Brian Coe's previously mentioned 1981 book, The History of Movie Photography:

Ivanov adapted this idea for the cinema.  His first patent was filed in 1935 and using a glass grating he demonstrated his process in 1937.  In 1940 he replaced the glass grating with a fine wire screen.  The system was installed in the Moskva cinema in Moscow in 1941; 112 miles of wire were used to make a grid over a screen of about 14 x 19 feet.  The films were shot with a conventional camera with a beam-splitting device on the lens, producing two vertical format pictures side by side in the standard film area.  The soundtrack ran between the two pictures on the print.  The film was back-projected, with a grid on the projector side of the screen to divide the two pictures into interlaced line images.  A similar grid on the audience side created the correct viewing conditions for 200 seats laid out in a fan-shaped area.  This was necessary for in some places in the auditorium no true stereoscopic image was presented.

The Russians produced two films for this system in 1940, the first being Concerto, which premiered at the Moskva cinema on the 4th February 1941, and the second, entitled Day off in Moscow, which continued there until the cinema was closed in June of 1941 because of WWII

Coe goes on to explain that the wire screen was eventually replaced by a lenticular ribbed glass screen and the vertical format images changed to square by reducing the size of the sprocket holes on the film.  In February of 1947 a film entitled Robinson Crusoe was shown on a 5 metre square screen at the Vostock Cinema in Moscow, and the Russians went on to produce several more 3D movies prior to the 1950s: Pal;  The Pencil on the Ice;  Precious Gift;  Lalim;  May Night;  Crystal and Aleko.

 By 1952 the format had changed again and the screen assumed the normal 1.33:1 ratio, with the image pairs recorded on the film one above the other by means of a prism attachment on the lens.  By 1955 there were 12 cinemas of this type in the USSR, and though the system worked quite well, it required the audience to avoid unnecessary sideways movement of their heads as this would dispell the strereoscopic effect.

The parallax stereogram system was not taken up outside the USSR apart from one variation on the idea, called the Cyclostereoscope, that was demostrated at the Luna Park, Paris in 1949, in which the grid screen was rotated rapidly in an attempt to remove the vertical line effect.

Before we leave the 1940s, there was one more developement in 3D photography that was extremely interesting and is well worth mentioning, even though it was never made available commercially.  This was the Polaroid Vectograph, developed by Edwin Land's Polaroid Corporation.  It would seem that the Vectograph process had succeeded in solving every one of the problems associated with stereoscopic projection.  It used only one strip of film; it used the whole area of the frame, giving a clearer, brighter image, and did not require polarizing filters, mirrors or prisms to be attatched to the projector.  In addition, the film was practically grainless.  With ordinary film, the image is made up of various densities of a chemical called silver halide, whereas a Vectograph image is comprised of varying degrees of polarization. The film is double-coated so that the left image can be placed on one side of the film and the right image on the reverse, meaning an end to the synching problems that plagued dual strip 3D presentation.  The film itself was a polarizing filter, so only the audience required polarized glasses to view the stereoscopic images on the screen.  These images were laid on the film using a dye transfer system similar to the old Technicolor process.  A monochrome version had been developed for the US Navy during WWII, and Land, at the behest of Warner Brothers, eventually developed a full colour version - unfortunately by that time, the end was in sight for 3D movies and Warners had lost interest in 3D production and a very frustrated Dr. Land was left with no market for his invention.

The 1950s - The first 3D boom

Outside of the Soviet Union, the immediate Post-War world saw little progress in the field of 3D movies, although a 3D newsreel was produced in Holland in 1948.  Photographed in colour, Queen Juliana was shot using a Dutch system known as Veri-Vision; a single camera, single film process that incorporated full and half-silvered mirrors to obtain the the stereo images (not unlike a commercially available stereo attachment for camcorders that is available today).  Though considered a success at the time, Veri-Vision had considerable limitations, and in fact, violated several laws of 3D presentation.

By the end of the 1940s, the film industry was in trouble.  Cinema attendances were at an all-time low and theatres were beginning to close at an alarming rate.  Returning servicemen were settling down and starting families, and somehow going to the movies had slipped down the list of priorities as their new responsibilities began to take hold and they looked for other, more family-orientated pursuits - and the one pursuit that seemed to be rapidly gaining the most popularity was watching television.

As studio executives contemplated their rapidly dwindling audiences - and therefore bank balances - help was on hand.  Although they didn't know it yet, TWO lifelines were about to be thrown to them, almost simultaneously

As we have detailed in an earlier article, Fred Waller was on the verge of adapting his amazingly efficient and successful gunnery trainer into a workable, ultra widescreen cinema system that would almost literally surround an audience with pictures and sound - Cinerama.  Within the next couple of years, the lost cinema audiences would be back, queueing around the block to see the first film in his process, This is Cinerama.  Almost immediately - and very characteristically - the studios began to seach for cheaper, less complex means of reproducing the same effect and  though they never really succeeded, it did change the way movies were presented forever.

And then came the second lifeline - from England this time.

In 1948, planning began for the Festival of Britain, an event that was conceived by the then Labour Government's Deputy leader, Herbert Morrison and composer Gerald Barry.  It's purpose was to demosnstrate to the war weary population of the British Isles - and the whole World, for that matter - that Britain was on the road to recovery after the ravages of the war years; it would showcase developments in the Arts, Sciences and Design Technology and would, in the words of Morrison himself, be "A tonic for the Nation".

Two brothers, Raymond and Nigel Spottiswoode, highly regarded in the field of film making and experimentation, were comissioned to design and build a cinema of the future.  In the short space of 14 months, they created what was to be called the Telecinema and produced five 3D shorts to be shown therein, two of which were cartoons created by noted Canadian animator Norman McLaren: Around is Around and Now is the time...to put on your glasses.  The system used to photograph these films was designed and constructed by Leslie P. Dudley and consisted of two Newman Sinclair cameras mounted 'face to face' with angled mirrors placed in front of each lens in order to deflect the image of the scene being shot into each camera.

Stereophonic sound would be added later, for showing in the Telecinema - which could indeed be described as the cinema of the future as it included, apart from stereo sound facilities, its own lenticular screen for 3D without glasses and newly designed equipment for TV projection.  It proved to be tremendous success at the Festival of Britain, attracting long queues for each performance.

The Spottiswoode brothers then formed a company called Stereo Techniques Ltd and began to produce several more short films.  Some of these were released in the USA by film producer Sol Lesser, famous for his low-budget westerns and Tarzan pictures.  These shorts stimulated tremendous interest in 3D once again.  A cameraman named Friend Baker, who had been granted a patent for a 16mm single strip 3D process, was approached by brothers Milton and Julian Gunzeburg to design a 35mm 3D rig.  The finished result - with the help of O.S. Brhyn and Lothrop Worth - was almost identical to to the one Leslie P. Dudley had produced in England, except that the cameras were replaced by Mitchell NCs and a heavy sound blimp was added.  They then formed a company to promote their rig: The Natural Vision Corporation.

The Gunzeburgs failed to make any headway with the Hollywood executives, most of whom were extremely wary of investing time - and more importantly, money - in what they considered to be little more than a fairground exhibit.  Both Columbia and Paramount passed on the system and Fox were by this time involved in developing their CinemaScope process, and had no time for any other system.  MGM took out an option on Natural Vision after being persuaded to do so by John Arnold, head of their camera department, but soon allowed it to lapse.  But then, as luck would have it, radio writer turned filmmaker Arch Oboler was immediately struck by the possibilites of the Natural Vision system, agreed to step in where the studios were afraid to tread.  With his producing partner, Sidney Pink, they scrapped the ten days of conventional 2D - or 'flat' footage - that they had already shot of their feature production, The Lions of Gulu, and started from scratch using the Natural Vision rig.

Retitled Bwana Devil, the film is based on true events which took place at the Tsavo River crossing, Kenya in 1898 during the the building, by the British, of the Uganda Railway, during which 140 workers were killed by lions (the same event was also the basis for the 1996 film The Ghost and the Darkness, which starred Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer).  It starred Robert Stack, Barbara Britton and Nigel Bruce and was shot on location, not in Africa, but at the Paramount Ranch in California's Santa Monica Mountains.  The area is now part of a National Recreation Centre and still has a 'Bwana Trail' to mark the locations used in the film.  To add a little authenticity to the backgrounds, Oboler incorporated some genuine African 2D footage that he'd shot in 1948.  Anscocolor film was used in the Mitchell camera rig instead of trying to adapt the cumbersome 3-strip Technicolor cameras to Natural Vision.

Bwana Devil opened on 26th November 1952 at Paramount Theatres in Hollywood and Los Angeles and was a tremendous success.  Presented in dual strip format, utilising interlocked projectors and polarising filters, Bwana Devil is considered to be the first colour 3D feature film presentation.  Further openings of the hit film followed in San Francisco on December 13th, with Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio on Christmas day and New York on February 18th 1953.  Originally billed as 'An Arch Oboler Production' , United Artists paid $500,000 for the rights and began releasing it as 'A United Artists Film' from March 1953.

Hollywood was forced to sit up and take notice and there began an immediate scramble by the studios to replicate the success of Bwana Devil - preferably with 3D systems of their own.  A man named Raphael Wolfe brought the Stereo Techniques system to the USA, rebuilding the rig and replacing the Newman-Sinclair cameras with Eclairs, but with little success, if any.  Columbia were quickest off the mark with their own hastily assembled rig, and had rushed into 3D production a noirish crime thriller, Man in the Dark (1953), starring Edmond O'Brien and Audrey Totter.  The first 'official' studio release of a 3D feature (Bwana Devil was an 'Independent') it tells the story of bankrobber who undergoes surgery, while in prison, which is meant to eradicate his criminal tendencies.  It also makes him lose his memory - inconveniently including where he stashed the loot. He is then kidnapped by his former cronies who naturally attempt to beat the location out of him.  His memory returns in a series of weird dreams, and the film climaxes in a chase over a roller coaster.  Shot in monochrome, it was released in something called 'Sepia Mono-Color', opening on 9th April 1953.

But probably the biggest breakthrough was made by Warner Brothers.  They had begun shooting a 3D movie on January 19th 1953, using the blimped Natural Vision rig.  Originally called The Wax Works, the title was changed prior to its completion on February 20th to House of Wax.  Starring Vincent Price, Phyllis Kirk, Carolyn Jones and Frank Lovejoy - with a supporting role from a certain Charles Buchinsky, who would go on to super stardom under the name of Charles Bronson.  A remake of Warner's earlier production of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), it tells the story of a talented waxworks sculptor, Henry Jarrod (Price) who is double crossed by his duplicitous partner, Mathew Burke (Roy Roberts) and is apparently killed when the wax museum they jointly own is deliberately burned down by the crooked partner, who then collects the insurance.  Burke is subsequently murdered by a mysterious, disfigured character, and a new waxwork show appears.  However, the beautifully sculptured figures are moulded over the bodies of murder victims...

House of Wax was an instant hit when it premiered in New York on 10th April 1953, and deservedly so; It is still a hugely entertaining film when seen today, more than fifty years later, even in a flat version.  But at the time, the sumptuous colour and superb 3D photography and six-track stereophonic sound were a revelation - the latter all the more remarkable because the director, Andre de Toth, was blind in one eye therefore and had no stereoscopic perception.  It was also presented in a widescreen format of 1.66:1 rather than the usual 1.33:1.  It would remain the highest grossing 3D movie until 1969s The Stewardesses - a low-budget sexploitation flick.

3D was up and running now and the studios began an almost mad scramble to acquire 3D rigs of their own and get a 3D movie into production.  Columbia bounced back first, on 1st May 1953, with Fort Ti, an excellent action adventure story set against a backdrop of the French and Indian Wars in Colonial America, which starred George Montgomery.  For Fort Ti, they abandoned their first camera rig in favour of Natural Vision, and enjoyed much success with this movie which, incidentally, was directed by the indomitable William Castle, who would later become more renowned as the creator of gimmick-laden horror movies such as The Tingler (1959), 13 Ghosts (1960) and The House on Haunted Hill (1959) than for the many other genres he worked in during his long and sucessful career.

In the midst of the rush into 3D film production, Universal International were a little more cautious than most, taking great care with the designing and testing of their own camera rig.  The result was worth waiting for; on 25th May they released one of the finest of the 3D movies that would be produced in the 1950s, It Came From Outer Space.  Directed by Jack Arnold and starring Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush and Charles Drake, this aliens-take-over-a-small-town sci-fi classic contains some of the very best stereoscopic compositions ever put on film.

Even Disney were not immune to the 3D bug - though Walt would only go as far as producing a couple of short cartoons, Melody and Working for Peanuts, and somewhat half-heartedly, a Micky Mouse Club special that was called exactly that: The Micky Mouse Club Special.

Over at Paramount, Adolf Zukor had slammed the brakes on a film that had already started shooting, and had them start over in 3D, releasing Sangaree on 27th May, with only moderate success in spite of the pairing of Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl.

MGMs first offering was a mediocre rodeo movie, Arena starring Gig Young and Jean Hagen; but later in the year (1953), they would produce another 3D movie - that would also be their last foray into the third dimension - that would find itself among the best rememberedmusicals of all time, the wonderful Kiss Me Kate, with Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson. - a film that was designed beautifully for 3D.

20th Century-Fox, fully commited to their new CinemaScope system, took an extremely wary view of 3D and studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck claimed to be singularly unimpressed by the other studios' 3D efforts so far; Fox even promoted CinemaScope with the tagline,"You see it without glasses!"  However, with great reluctance, he caved in to the perceived demand for 3D and Fox released Inferno on August 12th 1953.  A very good western by any standards, and starring Robert Ryan and Rhonda Fleming, Inferno provided disappointing box 0ffice returns for the studio, in spite of its superior 3D content.  In May of the following year, Fox released their second - and last - 3D movie, Gorilla at Large - a much better film than its title might indicate, with a good cast that included Cameron Mitchell,  Anne Bancroft and Lee J. Cobb; good production values and beautifully filmed in Technicolor and like Inferno, shot with Fox's own Clear-Vision 3D rig.  These were the only Fox 3D movies releaed during this period - and Gorilla was only released by Fox, having been made by Panoramic Productions; but the studio would revisit 3D briefly in the next decade with the 1960 3D movie September Storm.

All the major studios had 3D movies in production by this time, and the next couple of years saw the release of some really good 3D pictures, many of which attracted the talents of the period's 'A' list stars - John Wayne in Warner/Batjac's Hondo (27th November 1953) - and supposedly his personal favourite of his films; Warner's also released The Charge at Feather River on 11th July 1953, that most entertaining of westerns in which everything - arrows, spears, horses and people are happily tossed into the audience - a stream of tobacco juice as Frank Lovejoy spits at a rattlesnake; RKO's Second Chance (1953) with Robert Mitchum, Jack Palance and Linda Darnell; the same studio's The French Line (1954) with Jane Russell and Gilbert Roland; Columbia's Gun Fury (1953) with Rock Hudson and Donna Reed along with their classic 3D movie Miss Sadie Thompson (1953) - "Rita Hayworth turns it on in 3D!", ran the tagline; Paramount had favourites Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in Money From Home in 1954; and Warner's even persuaded Alfred Hitchcock to take up the polarizing spectacles in one of the best 3D films ever made, Dial M for Murder, in 1954.

It has long been a myth that the end of the 50s 3D boom was caused by poor quality films shot in 3D just to cash in on the current craze (unlike many of the 70s and 80s 3D movies yet to come).  And while it may be true that few of them were in any danger of winning an Oscar, many have endured over the years to become classics, even in their flat versions - add to the above brief list Universal International's Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and Revenge of the Creature (1955) - one of the last 3D movies of the period.  Even the worst of them, Astor's Robot Monster (1953) has attained a cult following despite it's utterly awsome stupidity - most likely because of it.

And there weren't just the 3D movies - there were 3D comics, too.  Practically every comic publisher in the western world brought out a 3D version of one of their popular characters.  There were 3D giveaways and gimmicks of all kinds.  The ViewMaster reels were at the height of their popularity, and amateur Stereo Photography also boomed, with nearly every camera manufacturer bringing out one 3D model after another.  It must have seemed at that time that 3D was here to stay for ever.  Unfortunately, nothing does last forever; and in the case of the  3D movie craze - even as it boomed - the seeds of its destruction were already being sown.

Decline and Fall...

But even though the studios had thrown their support behind 3D movies, some flies began to land in the ointment.  The first one (in the USA) was the rental deal that was forced onto the exhibitors by the distributors.  Dual strip projection meant that, effectively, two prints of a 3D movie were supplied to the theatres - a left eye print and a right eye one.  The distributors figured: two prints, twice the rental.  The exhibitors soon discovered, though, that customers wouldn't pay twice as much to see a 3D movie, especially because sometimes - and this led directly to the second big problem - you sometimes got sore eyes after half an hour watching a 3D picture!  This was because some projectionists were more than a little casual when it came to 3D presentation.  If one projector is slightly out of focus, or out of rack, the result is eye strain for the audience [see the accompanying article by Gary de Wan] as their eyes try in vain to correct the discrepancy.  Occasionally, damaged frames would be removed and the ends of the film simply spliced together, instead of being replaced with the appropriate length of blank film, thus rendering the remainder of the film from that splice onwards, out of sync with the other.  More eye strain!   And while the exhibitors' financial grievance was eventually resolved,  some patrons eventually began to avoid a 3D presentation of a movie if they could see it flat somewhere else because they didn't like having to wear the cardboard glasses.  In fact, many theatres were booking single prints of 3D movies anyway (which were still marked 'left' or 'right') because they didn't think 3D was worth all the effort and installation expense. 

Here's an example from my own experience. In Heywood, the small Lancashire town where I grew up, there were four cinemas in 1953, none of which were equipped to show dual strip 3D films.  I know we had to go to the Scala in nearby Bury to see The Charge at Feather River, starring Guy Madison - I'd be around six years old at the time - but then I don't remember ever seeing another 3D picture during that period, so they were probably a little thin on the ground in our part of the world, even at the height of the 3D boom.

The production of 3D movies began to peter out as the studios turned to the less troublesome CinemaScope as a means of coaxing the audiences back into the cinemas.  By 1955 3D was finished and the wide screen was king.  The studios had their research and developement departments busily trying to find ways around Fox's patented anamorphic system and thus avoid paying their exhorbitant licence fee, which eventually they did.  And of course, Mike Todd's 'Cinerama out of one hole' Todd-AO was only months away. 

3D might have been down, but it was not quite out.  Several years later 3D would return - this time in widescreen, too!  And some years after that a system called IMAX would be born; and when IMAX would eventually be combined with 3D we would be treated to 3D presentations that could only be described with one word: Awesome!

But all that was yet to come - and you can read about it in the next issue of WSMM when we conclude: "You see them WITH glasses!"...A Short History of 3D Movies.

J.H.