How the West Was Won
October 2008 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Cinerama! The word brings back childhood memories of a trip to Washington, D.C. with my parents. On our agenda were the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and This is Cinerama at the Warner Theater. To a 16-year-old, the film process and its demonstration movie seemed just as important as stone edifices, and immensely more entertaining.

In 1952, Cinerama had taken the country by storm, but due to its expense and the need for a huge theater, it was only showcased in larger cities. That’s why it became such a tourist attraction. The three-projector system promised to put you in the picture, and it surely seemed to do just that. Each projector was placed in a separate projection booth. In front of the middle booth was a mixing panel, where the seven-channel "stereophonic" sound (they hadn’t thought of calling it surround yet) was mixed nightly. In front was a huge screen, curved at 146 degrees. On close inspection, the screen was not one continuous piece but made up of individual strips about 7/8" wide. This was done to keep the brightness on one side of the screen from washing out the other.

Cinerama revolutionized movies. It started a widescreen craze that would be solved in different ways by different producers. Fox thought it too expensive and didn’t like that, due to its size, it was limited to a big-city market, so it adopted the anamorphic lens, which gave birth to CinemaScope and its many imitators.

It has perhaps been difficult for viewers born after 1970 to understand why CinemaScope was so revolutionary and grand. There were only two dramatic films made for three-projector CinemaScope, this one and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. When these were flattened out for home-video presentation, the seams between the three "panels" became painfully obvious and one needed to concentrate on the drama. And frankly, neither Cinerama film was made to be a dramatic benchmark. The producers dictated that the movies be set up to have scenes that would properly demonstrate the process.

Warner has now taken this ahead-of-its-time movie wonder and married it to modern technology to produce a print that eliminates the lines between the three panels. It’s not perfect. There are a few scenes where one can perceive color shifts at the point where panels join, but I can count these on one hand, and never did I see anything resembling a line. The colors are splendid, very rich and deep, helped along by the excellent detail provided by Blu-ray capabilities.

The sound has been mixed to a very good 5.1 Dolby TrueHD track, which is surprisingly robust in such scenes as the buffalo stampede and the Civil War battle scenes. There isn’t surround all of the time, but on more occasions than you might think.

To go one further, Warner has provided a second disc that uses Smilebox technology to present the movie in a facsimile of its original 3D presentation. Ongoing research found this process has been available longer than I would have thought. Check out: www.cineramaadventure.com/smilebox.htm. The picture is scalloped top and bottom, yet everything is still in perfect focus. The illusion of 3D is very good when you sit reasonably close to the screen. The buffalo stampede terrified my cat, who jumped off my lap and ran for cover. He’s never done that for any flat anamorphic film. The Smilebox version is the one I would watch (It has the same Dolby TrueHD tracks, by the way. And be aware on both versions that Dolby TrueHD is not the default sound format; you have to select it.)

The set is in one of those handsome book packages like Bonnie and Clyde and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and includes a few essays and some brilliant still-frame photos. The extras get a high rating here, not because there are so many of them but because they are so good. There’s a 90-minute-plus documentary on Cinerama that is exceptionally thorough and a commentary track that is most informative and entertaining. The movie? Seen this way, in something close to its original splendor, it comes across very well. John Wayne, James Stewart, John Ford, Henry Hathaway: It’s hard to go wrong with those names. And they have seldom been seen against such splendid scenery and only this once in a process that really made the audience seem like part of the cast.

I’d like to lobby for the same treatment of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and the handful of documentary-style films narrated by Lowell Thomas, one of Cinerama’s great champions. See this, and you might want to get out your soapbox, too.

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