It was a time of huge movies: huge curved screens, huge stereo sound, huge visual spectacle, and huge profits.
In the ’50s and ’60s, audiences who were lucky enough to be near a spherical Cinerama theater were treated to sprawling documentaries shot in this elaborate three-camera process — later streamlined into one large camera with three lenses — and projected in an equally elaborate three-screen process with coordinated projectors, later streamlined into one projector for all three film strips.
Some of these films are slowly being restored by Flicker Alley for Blu-ray / DVD combo packs, and even for resurrected Cinerama theatres and festivals. Two of the last travelogues were released in the ’60s just before this three-strip process would be replaced by the 70mm format, and here they are freshly restored as the latest in the series.
If you’ve been following the previous Cinerama restorations, 1962’s The Best of Cinerama will evoke déjà vu, as it’s a compilation of highlights from the previous five travelogues with slightly updated narration by Lowell Thomas. We get the rollercoaster, the Thunderbirds, the Papal mass, the Venice canals, La Scala, the amazing Darjeeling railroad, Florida’s Cypress Gardens, New Orleans jazz, the South Seas, Watusi tribal dancers, the Pyramids and other wonderful places through whirlwind stops. It could just as easily be called the “That’s Entertainment” of Cinerama, and you might watch this one as a substitute for sitting through all the others. To sweeten the deal, historian David Coles offers an informative commentary track on the production of all five films with details of these highlights.
Extras include trailers and making-ofs that are actually informative, both for the original feature and the reconstruction. It turns out that the first film, This Is Cinerama, has been completely restored and rescanned in order to use its footage in this compilation; restorer Dave Strohmaier goes into great technical detail with illustrations on the process. A 2012 short, shot with restored Cinerama equipment, profiles the Battleship Iowa arriving at San Pedro, and there’s older footage of a Texas cheerleader squad that got deleted from one of the features.
The disc also offers two ’60s shorts celebrating modernity. Shell Oil’s Shellarama (1965), in Super Technirama 70, celebrates its refinement process in a dialogue-free series of images from South American jungles to sleek highways and bikini’d motorcyclists, making you glad you live in a world of petrochemical products and fabulous consumption. Like the Cinerama spectacles, it’s a hymn to speed and power, though it pauses to glimpse a mosque, a Buddhist temple, and the Vatican. It’s quite a hypnotic job from British director Richard Cawston, propulsively scored by the brilliant and prolific John Scott under his jazz name of Johnny Scott.
NASA’s 1968 film Bridge to Space crosses the lyrical pastoralism of Florida everglades and waterfowl with a trip inside the technical work at Merritt Island and Cape Canaveral as part of the Apollo program. I could be wrong, but it sure sounds like it’s narrated by Jim Davis, later of TV’s Dallas, pretending to be the tour bus driver. As it celebrates the space program with a vision of hard work and massive technology, it’s politically conscious enough to drop in close-ups of white and black women and black men amid the sea of crewcut white-shirted white male wonks to convey a united modern America. The editor keeps going back to those birds and their piano theme. The uncredited score is counter-intuitively gentle and non-triumphal, only quietly majestic.
From Russia’s Cinerama Adventure
From the mid-’60s, Cinerama theaters played a new compilation film, but one where audiences hadn’t previously seen the films being compiled. The Russians had devised their ’50s equivalent, Kinopanorama, and produced at least six films in the process. In 1966, American producer Hal Dennis edited the highlights into Cinerama’s Russian Adventure. Bing Crosby’s narration makes the wildly disparate subject matter into a cohesive tourist spectacle that might have been presented by a Soviet Chamber of Commerce, if there were such a thing.
As with the other Cineramas, which are all tourist movies, speed is of the essence. Where the others open with rollercoasters or trains, this opens with the camera racing along on a troika, or three-horse sleigh. Later we see skiing and races with dogs and reindeer, and then such athletic activity as scuba diving (excellent underwater photography) and swimming in semi-frozen rivers and naturally heated pools.
We get scientific study at the North Pole and, in the opposite direction, a few icebergs in the Antarctic Ocean preparatory to a whale hunt. Its efficiency, compared with Ahab’s day, is presented with an admiration that wouldn’t attend such footage today, but the carving of the carcass remains a fascinating spectacle you probably haven’t seen.
The cultural part of the program includes colorful professional folk dancing, street festivals, dazzling circus equestrians who look like they might be killed in their daring, and other circus acts from dog and monkey routines to an incredible stunt on stilts. Whereas US Cineramas kept the camera static unless it was strapped to something that moved, some of this footage features spectacular camera moves, especially during the circus acts. Later, we go on nature walks and indulge some slapstick with trained bears, and more animal footage somehow leads to gloriously designed productions of the Bolshoi Ballet.
What’s remarkable is the deliberate avoidance of politics or propaganda. The only point that Bing Crosby’s narration makes is that it’s all very normal and recognizable. This neutral packaging was part of a State Department effort to counterpoint the Cold War only a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both American and Russian officials were involved in encouraging Dennis to produce this good will picture, according to the memories of his two sons.
As with Strohmaier’s previous restorations, the results are dazzling and gorgeously colored, with seams sometimes unavoidably visible. The three-screen image is presented in a “Smilebox” process, which can’t really replicate theatrical Cinerama (unless you have a concave TV screen) but gives an idea. Actually, most viewers in 1966 saw the film in 70mm, but this restoration uses the original three-strip sources. It leaves us wondering how some of the unused footage from those six Russian films looked.
Besides the trailer and making-ofs, the disc offers two shorts loaded with aerial footage. Fortress of Peace (1964), an Oscar-nominated paean to the Swiss Army’s firepower, offers lots of peaceful explosions knocking down trees. From 1966 comes a preview of the new supersonic airplane called Concorde — “shapes like the perfectly balanced lines of a sonnet which will knit together as a perfect whole” enthuses the narrator of this jazzily scored eye-catcher. Kudos to French writer/director Pierre Jaullaud, whose IMDB page doesn’t currently list this item.