CMBA Blogathon: Kitty (1945)

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This post is Cinedrome’s contribution to the Classic Movie Blog Association‘s first blogathon of 2013, Fabulous Films of the 1940s. (Now there’s a topic; CMBA could probably do five such ‘thons, with all members taking a different title, and never exhaust the possibilities!) Go here for a complete list of entries; you’ll find my colleagues holding forth on a mouthwatering array of movies legendary and obscure, long-remembered and half-forgotten. 

Before I get into my own contribution to the blogathon, here’s a bonus: I can’t make it an official entry because I’ve already posted on this picture before. But if we’re talking about Fabulous Films of the 1940s, I can’t forgo mentioning one of my absolute favorites, Henry Hathaway’s Down to the Sea in Ships (1949). As I said in my post (which you can reach at the link), I simply don’t understand why this one isn’t one of the best-loved movies of all time; sooner or later (and if I have anything to say about it), I’m sure it will be. (UPDATE 2/18/13: Reader David Rayner of Stoke-on-Trent, England, whose admiration equals my own, has written to tell me that Down to the Sea has been released on Region 1 DVD in the US and is available here from Amazon. Don’t miss it!)

But now, getting back to the blogathon at hand — drumroll, please — here’s another one of my particular favorites from that embarrassment-of-riches decade…

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Paulette Goddard is one of the great also-rans of movie history. As she never tired of saying, she was the front-runner for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind — that is, until some pert little nobody from England came along. In an interview late in life, Goddard told how she had been finally offered the role and, understandably excited, decided to throw a party to celebrate. Selznick came, she said, and so did the English actor Laurence Olivier, in town shooting Wuthering Heights for Sam Goldwyn. Olivier (again, according to Paulette) brought along his girlfriend Vivien Leigh, Selznick took one look at her, and that was that.

The story is nonsense, of course. Goddard never had Scarlett nailed down, certainly not enough to throw a party over it. David Selznick’s first sight of Leigh is well-documented, and it wasn’t at Paulette’s house. Just about everybody knows that story, so I needn’t go into it here; suffice it to say the near miss on Gone With the Wind haunted Paulette Goddard for the rest of her life — through her 1940s peak at Paramount (when she never quite made it into the top rank of Hollywood stars), and especially through the long years before her death at 79 in 1990, years during which GWTW‘s fame grew even as her own dwindled.

There’s another sort-of connection with Gone With the Wind in Goddard’s career. It’s a bit of a stretch, I admit, but here goes: As you probably know, during the second half of the 1930s, Scarlett O’Hara was the most coveted role in Hollywood, and the novel’s millions of fans waited breathlessly for the movie David Selznick would make of it. Warner Bros. decided to cash in on the moss-magnolias-and-the-old-plantation fever by dusting off a 1933 Broadway flop by playwright Owen Davis called Jezebel, which also happened to be about a flirtatious and headstrong southern belle. Warners worked it up as a vehicle for Bette Davis and triumphantly swept it to the screen a year ahead of Gone With the Wind.

Fast-forward a few years to 1944. Another novel has set the hearts of America’s female readers a-flutter and got every actress in Hollywood rubbing her hands. The book is Forever Amber by 24-year-old Kathleen Winsor, about an ambitious village girl’s sexual exploits during the Restoration of Charles II of England, up to and including a liaison with the king himself. (Like Gone With the Wind, Forever Amber sparked a vogue for naming newborn girls after its heroine that endures to this day.) When this racy, titillating book by an unknown housewife sold 100,000 copies the first week (on its way to 3 million), Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox wasted no time nailing down the movie rights. Undaunted, the boys at Paramount decided to steal a march on Zanuck the way Warners had on Selznick, and the beneficiary of their ploy was Paulette Goddard.

The book they chose was Kitty by Rosamond Marshall, which had been published the year before Amber, but without gaining anywhere near the same amount of sales or notoriety.
 
Born in 1902, Rosamond Marshall wrote some 16 novels altogether between her first, None But the Brave: A Story of Holland in 1942 and her last, The Bixby Girls, published in 1957, the year she died. Her books sold pretty well during her lifetime — especially in paperback reprints with semi-lurid covers and titles like Duchess Hotspur, Rogue Cavalier and The General’s Wench — but only two of them ever made it to the screen: The Bixby Girls (filmed in 1960 as All the Fine Young Cannibals with Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner) and Kitty.
 

Actually, though, not quite all of Kitty did make it to the screen. Marshall’s novel was what we now call a bodice-ripper, the tale of a 14-year-old London prostitute blithely sleeping her way up the social ladder during the days of King George III. As the story opens, Kitty — she doesn’t have a last name, or at least doesn’t know it — lives with and works for Old Meg in the wretched slums of Houndsditch. Old Meg sold Kitty’s virginity when the girl was only nine, and now Kitty spends her days thieving and her nights whoring, turning her loot and her earnings over to Old Meg in return for squalid shelter and crumbs of food.

One day Kitty indulges a common ploy: stealing the shoes of a gentleman as he’s being carried piggyback on his footman across a muddy street. When she’s caught and brought back to the man’s doorstep, he finds her face interesting and invites her in. He’s the painter Thomas Gainsborough, and he wants Kitty to pose for him. Once he’s had her washed and decently clothed he’s surprised to see that she’s not a child but a rather attractive young woman; she in turn is overawed by his studio, especially one portrait, which she impulsively dubs “Blueboy”.

Kitty also catches the eye of a visitor to Gainsborough’s studio, Sir Hugh Marcy. Sir Hugh is an impecunious ne’er-do-well, impoverished but charming. In time, through the picture Gainsborough eventually paints of her — “Portrait of an Anonymous Lady” — Kitty becomes the talk of London society. During the same time, Sir Hugh and his gin-sodden aunt Lady Susan take her under their threadbare wings, passing her off as Miss Kitty Gordon, the orphaned child of a dear friend. Day after day, they subject her to a crash course in proper speech and manners — while at night, Sir Hugh schools her in the unsuspected pleasures of orgasmic sex.
 
As years pass, Kitty blooms under their tutelage and her prospects improve. She marries a wealthy shipping merchant, bringing a welcome dowry to Sir Hugh and Lady Susan — although Lady Susan soon succeeds in drinking herself to death. Not long after, Kitty’s husband dies and Hugh arranges a second marriage to the aged Duke of Malminster. Kitty thus becomes a duchess, and she soon gives the duke an heir. The old boy never suspects that “his” son is really Sir Hugh’s; Kitty’s affair with him has continued throughout both her marriages.
 
That’s as much of the novel’s plot as we need go into here, because that (aside from the endless rounds of sex with Sir Hugh) is what remains in the movie Paramount released on October 16, 1945. Between publication and premiere, however, Rosamond Marshall’s story had to undergo a major overhaul at the hands of writers Karl Tunberg and Darrell Ware and director Mitchell Leisen. 
 
Darrell Ware had been a prolific journeyman since 1936, turning out an array of dramas (A Yank in the R.A.F.), comedies (Charlie McCarthy, Detective) and musicals (Down Argentine Way, Orchestra Wives, My Gal Sal), none of which were particularly praised for their writing. Karl Tunberg’s career lasted longer, and he at least has the distinction of receiving sole screenplay credit for the 1959 Ben-Hur; his script was heavily doctored by Gore Vidal, Christopher Fry and others, and was conspicuous for being the only Oscar nomination that Ben-Hur didn’t win. Still, in Kitty, both Tunberg and Ware rose to the occasion with what was easily the best screenplay of their otherwise rather undistinguished careers. (Both men received associate producer credit on the picture — although their producing duties may not have amounted to much, at least not in Ware’s case: he died at age 37 in May 1944, nearly a year-and-a-half before Kitty‘s premiere.)
 
Their task with the novel’s plot was daunting. To begin with, of course, the idea of a prostitute as a heroine, let alone a 14-year-old one, was obviously out of the question. So Kitty was advanced to somewhere beyond the age of consent — and relieved of the need to have anything to consent to.
More important, Tunberg and Ware (with perhaps the collaboration of director Leisen) realized what Rosamond Marshall evidently did not: that next to Kitty herself, by far the book’s most interesting characters are the rakish cad Sir Hugh Marcy and the alcoholically haughty Lady Susan. In the novel, Lady Susan is dead halfway through; Sir Hugh disappears from Kitty’s life with far too many pages left to read, while Kitty rather unconvincingly transfers her affections to the now-adult subject of Gainsborough’s “Blueboy”. In the screenplay, both Sir Hugh and Lady Susan are kept around, to far more satisfying effect.

By the way, there’s a curious side note to this business of the painting: In reality the subject of Gainsborough’s famous portrait is not known for certain, but is believed to be one Jonathan Buttall, son of a wealthy London hardware merchant. In Marshall’s novel, this is the name of Kitty’s hot-tempered first husband, while the Blue Boy (a more accurate rendering of the portrait’s title) is named Brett Harwood, a cousin of Buttall’s. In the movie, all this was changed. The importance of the painting in Kitty’s life is downplayed, and Brett Harwood becomes a rival to Sir Hugh for Kitty’s heart. Meanwhile, her first husband is renamed Jonathan Selby — no doubt to avoid offense to any living descendants of the real J. Buttall.

But I digress.

Ware and Tunberg’s solution to Kitty‘s story problems — and its glaring conflicts with the Production Code — was elegantly inspired: They expanded and emphasized the scenes of Sir Hugh and Lady Susan schooling Kitty in ladylike comportment, thus changing Kitty‘s plot from the meteoric rise of an adolescent whore into an 18th century adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion, with Kitty (Paulette Goddard) as Eliza Doolittle, Sir Hugh Marcy (Ray Milland) as Henry Higgins, Thomas Gainsborough (Cecil Kellaway) as Col. Pickering, and Brett Harwood (Patric Knowles) as the sweetly besotted Freddie Eynsford-Hill. Shaw’s Mrs. Higgins, of course, became Lady Susan, and the role was entrusted to that grand dowager dragon of the British and Broadway stages, Constance Collier.
 
Bernard Shaw’s reaction to all this is unrecorded. I like to think the old boy would have been amused, but he may never have even seen the picture — and he almost certainly never read Marshall’s novel.
 
In addition to the “associate producers” credit for Darrell Ware and Karl Tunberg, Kitty is also billed as “A Mitchell Leisen Production”. In the mid-’40s Leisen was Paramount’s reigning arbiter of elegance, having begun his career as a set and costume designer for Cecil B. DeMille, the only Paramount director who outranked him in prestige. Leisen (it’s pronounced “Leeson”, by the way) has taken a beating from auteurists in recent decades. I suspect this is mainly because those two auteur darlings Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges both claimed to have turned director out of dissatisfaction with Leisen’s treatment of their scripts. But an unbiased look at the pictures Leisen made of Sturges’s screenplays for Easy Living (1937) and Remember the Night (’40), or Wilder’s (and Charles Brackett’s) for Midnight (’39) and Hold Back the Dawn (’41), makes them sound like a couple of whining prima donnas. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad and grateful that Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges moved into directing their own stuff; but they had no grounds whatever to complain about Mitch Leisen.

 

David Chierichetti’s 1995 book Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director does much to correct this injustice to Leisen, but its information on Kitty is sketchy and unreliable. Chierichetti calls it the story of “a filthy cockney street waif of Restoration Era England”; in fact it takes place in Georgian England a full 125 years after the Restoration in 1660. Leisen himself, interviewed, says: “I spent two years researching Gainsborough and the way he painted. We determined that the picture took place in 1659, and there’s nothing in the picture that was painted by him after that year.” Au contraire, Gainsborough wasn’t even born until 1727, and this frame from the picture states explicitly the year the story opens. Clearly, Leisen (who died in 1972) had not seen the picture recently when he discussed it with Chierichetti, nor had Chierichetti when he wrote about it. Leisen’s claim of spending two years in research is also plainly implausible: Kitty was ready for release by the end of 1944 but was held up a full year by Paramount’s backlog of product; two years of research would have had Leisen beginning in 1942, a year before Rosamond Marshall’s novel was published. Altogether, these facts cast doubt on much of the information in the seven pages Chierichetti devotes to Kitty.
 
But there is one point on which Chierichetti is absolutely right: Kitty “was precisely the kind of picture Leisen could do better than anybody else, and its mixture of mannered comedy and gutsy drama suited him perfectly”. The picture is a sumptuous feast for the eye, evoking 18th century London’s riot of teeming streets and Rococo decor as sharply as a series of engravings by William Hogarth. It’s a pity the picture couldn’t have been made in Technicolor — thus evoking Gainsborough rather than Hogarth — but Paramount was notoriously frugal on that score; among the major studios, even cheapskate Universal was more generous in their use of color. But even as it stands, Kitty richly deserved its Oscar nomination for art direction — for Hans Dreier and Walter Tyler; the production design was by Raoul Pene Du Bois. (Kitty lost; the award went to Anna and the King of Siam.)
 
Over and above its gorgeous look and elegent style, and entirely in keeping with it, Kitty gave Paulette Goddard the opportunity to deliver the performance of her career, and she came through with a performance nearly as good as Wendy Hiller’s in 1938’s Pygmalion (and considerably better than Audrey Hepburn’s in My Fair Lady). Always a conscientious actress rather than an inspired one, Goddard worked hard on her cockney accent. According to Chierichetti, Leisen credited Phyllis Loughton and Connie Emerald (mother of Ida Lupino) for this, adding that for Goddard’s diction as the new-and-improved Kitty, “we moved Connie Emerald out and Constance Collier in”, and the old girl coached Goddard/Kitty as much off screen as Lady Susan did on. There’s not a false note in Goddard’s performance, nor in any of the rest of the cast, which was surely one of the largest and best either she or Leisen ever worked with: Milland (against-all-odds charming as Sir Hugh, a more unsympathetic rotter than Henry Higgins ever was), Collier, Knowles, Kellaway, Dennis Hoey (as Kitty’s first husband), Reginald Owen (as her second), Sara Allgood (Old Meg) and the ever-popular Eric Blore as Sir Hugh and Lady Susan’s querulous manservant Dobson. (Blore has one of the picture’s best lines, which I hereby spoil for you: On Kitty’s first night in Sir Hugh’s household, Dobson hands her a tea tray and orders her to take it up to Lady Susan. Kitty: “‘Ow will I find ‘er?” Dobson: “Drunk, as usual!”)
 

Kitty is another of those pre-1950 Paramounts now owned by Universal. Like others I’ve written about before (MissMiss Tatlock’s Millions, Alias Nick Beal, Night Has a Thousand Eyes), it was often available in TV syndication during the 1960s and ’70s. Unlike them, however, Kitty hasn’t entirely vanished into the Universal vault. It’s turned up recently on Turner Classic Movies thanks to TCM’s agreement with Universal, so it’s out there somewhere for you to find, and to savor Leisen, Goddard, Milland et al. all at their best. There’s no “official” DVD yet — only ones of varying quality available here from Amazon and here from Loving the Classics. A full-scale DVD transfer, doing justice to those Oscar-nominated sets and Daniel L. Fapp’s cinematography, is long overdue. We can only wait, and hope, for Universal to come through.

UPDATE 2/14/18: Universal has come through. Kitty is now available in a very nice DVD transfer from the Universal Vault series (Universal’s answer to the Warner Archive). It’s bare-bones, of course, like all such issues from Warner, Universal and Fox, with no extras (if Universal is interested in adding a commentary, I’m happy to volunteer), but well worth having. You can get it here from Amazon. 

 

The Man Who Saved Cinerama

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Let us now praise John Harvey.

Somewhere in my scattered stacks of pre-digital photographs, I have a picture I took of John Harvey posing proudly beside one of his Cinerama projectors. I’ve been ransacking the house for over three months now, all the time I’ve been preparing and posting this series on Cinerama, and I absolutely cannot find the damned thing, or any of the other pictures I took on my visit to John’s home town of Dayton, Ohio in 1996. So I’ve given up and decided to make do with this image from the supplemental materials on the This Is Cinerama Blu-ray. I’ll keep looking, because it’s important: I knew from the start that this whole series was going to culminate in a grateful tribute to John. Besides, those pictures aren’t just important to me. They’re historic.
 
Not to mince words or beat around the bush, John Harvey is the man who — virtually single-handedly — preserved Cinerama for posterity. His service to movie history can scarcely be overstated.
 
This is not in any way to minimize or overlook the efforts of others who have often worked above-and-beyond to ensure the survival of Fred Waller’s marvel. Just a few examples: The International Cinerama Society was instrumental in seeing that Cinerama was installed at the National Media Museum (formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television) in Bradford, UK. John Sittig, who recently retired as Director of Projection and Sound for ArcLight Cinemas, performed a similar service for the installation of Cinerama at ArcLight’s Cinerama Dome in Hollywood (he also capped his career by putting together last month’s 60th Anniversary Cinerama Festival at the Dome). David Strohmaier’s 2002 documentary Cinerama Adventure was — besides being one of the best movie-themed documentaries ever made — a major step in retrieving the forgotten process from the memory hole of the 1950s and ’60s (Strohmaier also wrote, directed and edited the 30-minute short In the Picture [2012], the first picture in Cinerama since How the West Was Won).
 
And Australian collector John Mitchell has done much at his end of the globe — it was his prints of Search for Paradise and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm that screened at the festival in Hollywood. But before any of them except John Mitchell Down Under — back when the ICS was still scouring the world for parts to put in that museum in Bradford, when David Strohmaier was just beginning to wonder what ever happened to Cinerama — John Harvey had been hosting screenings of This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won for years. In his living room. 
 
Harvey’s interest in the movie projectionist’s craft began at an early age in Dayton. At the age of 10 he’d tag along when his older brother went to work at the local drive-in theater, and he began to wonder about the kind of machine it would take to project movies onto that massive outdoor screen. The projectionist noticed him peering in the windows night after night, invited him in to have a look around, and became his mentor, eventually sponsoring him into the projectionists’ union when John turned 17.
 
Meanwhile, when John was 16, his father (a loyal fan of Lowell Thomas) had taken the family to see This Is Cinerama when it opened at Cincinnati’s Capitol Theatre in 1954. For a boy with a budding interest in movie projection, here was movie projection on steroids; in time he would travel the 54 miles to Cincinnati to see all the Cinerama features at the Capitol. And when Dayton’s Dabel Theatre converted to Cinerama in 1963, John — now a union projectionist — worked backup to the Dabel’s crew, seeing How the West Was Won for 38 straight weeks and getting hands-on experience running a Cinerama setup.
 
When three-strip Cinerama was abandoned after HTWWW, Harvey missed it. He saw clearly the difference with the “new” Cinerama movies like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Greatest Story Ever Told (really only UltraPanavision — a big picture on a curved screen, but the viewer was no more “in” the picture than if he were standing in front of a billboard by the side of the road).
 
Harvey’s home cinema began as a a sort of laboratory where he experimented with ways of keeping a single wide-screen frame in focus on a deeply curved screen. He enlarged his living room three-fold by knocking out the walls of two unused bedrooms and raising the ceiling, installed a 35mm projector, and began tinkering with lenses, mirrors, beam-splitters and screen surfaces. Eventually — and I’m speculating here, but it may have been when he finally realized that classic Cinerama was never coming back — he decided to convert his home theater to Cinerama. “One day,” he remembered, “I finally took the initiative: ‘I’m gonna build my own projectors; I’m gonna run that film.’ Because it hadn’t been seen for years.”
 
And he did. It took him years of patient accumulation and painstaking work, but he eventually installed three full-size Cinerama projectors — sometimes having parts made from scratch when he couldn’t find them — and a Cinerama sound console the size of an armoire (the set-up even encroached on his kitchen). He tracked down snippets of film all over the world, splicing them together as they came into his hands (the sheer magnitude of that chore is mind-boggling). In time he had complete prints of This Is Cinerama, Cinerama Holiday and How the West Was Won. That’s at the very least; I seem to remember reading somewhere that he acquired, bit by bit, all seven features, but I can’t document that now. At any rate, he also amassed an impressive array of Fred Waller’s original test footage from the 1940s, and even a print of a Renault car commercial made to play with How the West Was Won in France. In addition, he had a museum’s worth of Cinerama memorabilia: posters, programs, lobby cards, stills — he even served guests popcorn in baskets lined with Cinerama napkins. Throughout the 1980s, to put it bluntly, John Harvey’s suburban Ohio home was one of only two functioning Cinerama theaters in the world; the other was in Australian John Mitchell’s backyard, 9,400 miles away. (It was about this time that I read of John and his happy obsession; I daydreamed about meeting him and wangling an invitation for a screening or two. If I had only known: I probably had only to look him up in Dayton directory assistance and drop him a line. In the end it didn’t come to that — but I’m getting ahead of my story.)
 
In the early 1980s a mutual friend invited Larry Smith to a screening at John’s home and introduced the two men. Smith remembered seeing Cinerama at the Dabel at the age of six, and his experience that night was a reunion with one of his most vivid childhood memories. He told Harvey that if there was any way he (Larry) could help bring this to a wider audience, he wanted to do it. In 1986, Smith became the manager of the New Neon Movies, a cozy little 300-seat art cinema nestled in one corner of a huge parking garage in downtown Dayton, and began a ten-year campaign to persuade Harvey to install his Cinerama equipment at the New Neon. (This picture, by the way, is a rather misleading likeness of Larry. It’s from a 1997 interview taken while Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet was playing at the New Neon, and Larry had bleached his hair and grown the moustache and soul-patch to emphasize his slight resemblance to Branagh as the Melancholy Dane.)
 
In John’s search for film and equipment, he had made the acquaintance of Willem Bouwmeester of the Netherlands. Like Harvey, Bouwmeester discovered Cinerama as a teenager and never lost his enthusiasm for the process. He grew up to work for IMAX in Europe and become a founding member of the International Cinerama Society, and from the Continent he had helped Harvey in his search. In 1993, when the ICS installed Cinerama at the Bradford museum, they sought and received advice and assistance from John Harvey. So now John’s house was no longer the lone outpost in a Cinerama-bereft world. But the only true Cinerama theater was in England; Cinerama remained a prophet without honor in the country of its origin (where it had once proved to be an honor without profit).
 

As 1995 became 1996, the landlord of the New Neon Movies announced plans to split the already-modest theater down the middle and turn it into a two-screen venue. Larry Smith at last persuaded John it was now or never, and they hatched a plan that was brilliant simplicity itself: Before the remodel, the New Neon would install John Harvey’s screen, projectors and sound equipment. The theater would continue showing its standard art-house fare every evening, but on weekends there would be full-Cinerama matinees of This Is Cinerama (on Saturdays) and How the West Was Won (Sundays). The landlord was doubtful the scheme would pay for itself, but he agreed to let Smith solicit a letter-writing campaign; if he could get 1,000 writers to pledge to come to Dayton for Cinerama, then they could talk.

Ads went out in movie-buff publications all over the country, things like Classic Images and Films of the Golden Age, soliciting interest. By the deadline Smith had received 1,200 expressions of interest and pledges to attend; the next day another 200 arrived. “Can you say ‘no’ to fourteen hundred people at once?” Smith asked. And so the project got a green light — but only for an eight-week run. 
 
Smith, Harvey and the New Neon staff had thirty days and almost no budget to retrofit the theater for Cinerama — something that had often taken months and as much as 200,000 1950s dollars to do when Cinerama was new. They did it with long hours and volunteer workers (“We can’t pay you,” Smith said, “but we can give you all the popcorn you can eat.”), ripping out 80 of the 300 seats to make way for the screen and auxiliary projection booth spanning the full back of the auditorium. As opening night drew near the story of their project made the Associated Press wire, drawing interest from all over the continent: Texas, Florida, Canada, New Orleans, Washington DC. “It just didn’t stop,” Smith remembered. “We had so many interviews that first week, we wondered if we’d ever get around to showing the movies.”
 
This Is Cinerama premiered a second time in America — and for the first time in over 30 years — at the New Neon on Thursday, August 29, 1996. The date was chosen to take advantage of the long Labor Day Weekend, but Harvey and Smith were in store for an eerie surprise. The guest of honor that night was Marianna Munn Thomas, widow of Lowell, and they learned from her that they had, without knowing it, brought This Is Cinerama back to America on the fifteenth anniversary of Lowell Thomas’s death. 
 
Now that’s what I call some kinda Karma.
 
I’ll never forget how I learned about the project. That summer of ’96, when my girlfriend LuAnn and I returned from vacation in Illinois and Indiana, we were picked up at the Sacramento airport by my uncle, himself on vacation from his home in Muncie, Indiana — the same uncle who had taken my parents and grandparents to see This Is Cinerama in San Francisco in 1953. As I sat down in the car, he dropped an issue of Classic Images in my lap, open to an ad announcing the eight-week return of This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won. I stared, gobsmacked, for a few seconds, and once I realized it wasn’t some kind of trick, I turned to my uncle and said, “Let’s go.”
 
In October ’96, midway through the (supposedly) limited run, that’s what we did. I flew to my uncle’s home in Muncie, and from there we drove the 84 miles to Dayton. That’s when I met John Harvey and Larry Smith, and when I took all those pictures that I can’t find now.* And that’s when I had an experience I never expected to have again: seeing This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won in honest-to-goodness Cinerama, the way Fred Waller and Lowell Thomas and Merian C. Cooper and Hazard Reeves and Henry Hathaway and everybody else intended them to be seen.
 
Improvements in projection technology — and John Harvey’s almost supernatural rapport with his own equipment — made it possible for him now to do alone what had once taken an entire team of projectionists, and both movies came off without a hitch. John’s print of How the West Was Won was simply flawless: richly brilliant colors without a scratch, splice or line from the first frame to the last. I saw HTWWW four times in Cinerama in 1963 and ’64, and I’ve seen it four more times since the revival of the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, but I never saw it looking better — or even as good — as it did that Sunday in Dayton. 
 
This Is Cinerama was more variable, having clearly been assembled from more disparate sources. There were a number of splices, a few scratches, and a second or two here and there (no more than 10 or 15 seconds overall) when a section of one of the three panels couldn’t be found and had to be filled in with black slugs. (There were even a few seconds, in the canals of Venice if memory serves, imprinted with Danish subtitles — this footage no doubt obtained through the efforts of Willem Bouwmeester.) Even so, it was the real article, no doubt about it; for 23 years I had carried the unhappy memory of the picture’s misbegotten 70mm reissue in 1973 — which should have been called This Isn’t Cinerama — and this erased it completely.
 
Chatting with Larry Smith in the lobby, it was clear that, no matter what the ads said about “for 8 weeks only”, he intended to keep Cinerama playing at the New Neon until the landlord dragged the projectors, the sound console and the screen out the front door and threw them into the street. And that’s pretty much what happened. 
 
People came — no exaggeration — from all over the world; the original eight weeks got extension after extension. After a year, the New Neon’s Cinerama matinees were still selling out seven and eight weeks in advance, and the shows continued. On at least one occasion Smith and Harvey screened John’s print of the second feature, Cinerama Holiday (rather badly faded Eastman color, but complete) and the guests of honor were the Marshes (now divorced) and the Trollers, the couples who had starred in it back in 1954. Ultimately, the New Neon’s Cinerama engagement lasted nearly four years of weekends and special occasions, finally drawing to a close in April 2000. 
 
 
 
Eventually, the landlord followed through on his original plan, and the New Neon is now a two-screen cinema incapable of showing Cinerama. Larry Smith has moved on; he now lives in Culpeper, Virginia, where he works in the film preservation unit of the Library of Congress, specializing in the salvage and preservation of nitrate film.
 

John Harvey suffered a series of health issues in the early 2000s, and was forced to sell off his Cinerama equipment, prints and memorabilia to pay his medical bills. He finally lost his battle with those issues on May 3, 2018, at the age of 81. But the seeds of his quest and crusade to preserve Cinerama have borne priceless fruit. His and Larry Smith’s phenomenal success in Dayton from 1996 to 2000 sparked renewed interest in Fred Waller’s lifework. Now, in addition to the National Media Museum in Bradford, there are the ArcLight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and the Cinerama in Seattle; both had been slated for demolition before public enthusiasm for Cinerama saved them from the wrecking ball, and both were fitted for Cinerama with John’s advice and assistance. Those two theaters owe their new lease on life — and the one in Bradford owes its very existence — in no small measure to the dedication, enthusiasm and practical know-how of John Harvey.

 
 
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*Those pictures may yet turn up; stranger things have happened. If they do, I’ll add them here.

 

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UPDATE 8/4/13: As always seems to happen, the photographs I took on my trip to Dayton in October 1996 turned up when I least expected to run across them. Here are a couple of good examples.

 

 

First, a shot of my uncle standing in front of the New Neon Movies as we arrived for the Sunday matinee showing of How the West Was Won. He’s holding one of my souvenir programs for the picture.

Just so there’s no confusion about the marquee over the box office: The New Neon ran This Is Cinerama on Saturday and How the West Was Won on Sunday afternoons. The rest of the week, and Saturday and Sunday evening, was devoted to current art-house fare. The marquee shows that the (regular) feature is Big Night, the 1996 hit starring Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub as brothers operating a failing Italian restaurant. Opening on the coming Friday will be Robert Altman’s jazz-flavored Kansas City.

 And here, finally, is the picture I originally wanted to open this post. This was taken the day before, in the “auxiliary” projection booth set up at the rear of the New Neon’s auditorium. It’s after the showing of This Is Cinerama, and John is carefully monitoring the rewinding of the second half of the feature.

Returning to Lost London (Reprinted)

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Just for the fun of it, I think I’ll make this an annual Halloween
event here at Cinedrome: reposting
my series on the lost Lon Chaney picture London After Midnight
(1927), and on Marie Coolidge-Rask’s novelization of Tod Browning and
Waldemar Young’s scenario. I first posted these four parts in October 2010, then again last year. London After Midnight wasn’t really a Halloween movie — it actually opened closer to Christmas, on December 17, 1927 — but it’s ghostly and creepy enough (most of the way, anyhow) to qualify for the season. So, whether you read it last year or the year before and were thinking of looking it up again for a good chill, or are coming to it now for the first time, here is my series The Fog of Lost London. Be sure to read the
posts in order so you don’t get ahead of the plot.

Have a fun and safely spooky Halloween, everybody!

Nuts and Bolts of the Rollercoaster

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At This Is Cinerama‘s premiere on September 30, 1952, historian Greg Kimble tells us, Lowell Thomas and Merian Cooper were as nervous as expectant fathers. But not Fred Waller; he sat quietly confident, and as the cheers and bravos echoed at the end, he allowed himself only the slightest of smiles. “I knew 16 years ago,” he said, “it would be like this.”

Even so, Waller never considered that night’s showing to be Cinerama in its final form; this was, in a sense, only the “third generation” version. Just as he had refined Vitarama’s 11 cameras and projectors down to five, and those five down to Cinerama’s three, he fully expected that the process would continue to evolve, and that he would be there to see it was done.

Truth be told, there was room for improvement, and Waller knew it.

Some of Cinerama’s technical problems can be discerned in this frame (frames, actually) from Search for Paradise — although to be fair, by the time this picture was shot most of them had been considerably alleviated. Most often complained about were those dividing lines between the three panels. The panels overlapped by a degree or two, which meant that the overlap area would inevitably get the light from two projectors. To minimize this over-exposure, the sides of each projector’s film gate were supplied with little devices called (spellings vary) “gigolos”. These were serrated, comb-like assemblies mounted on cams that moved them up and down, once for each frame (i.e., 26 times per second) as the film passed through the gate. This was intended to cut down on the excess light hitting the overlap, and to blur the sharp division from one panel to the next. As a matter of fact, this worked reasonably well.
 
Actually, when people remarked on Cinerama’s join lines, they were reacting not so much to the lines themselves, but to other technical peculiarities that tended to draw attention to them. The resolution isn’t very high on this illustration of a shot from This Is Cinerama (photographed live in the theater), but it shows some of what I’m talking about. There were often variations in color and intensity from one panel to the next (particularly noticeable in the sky here). Several factors could contribute to this: minute differences in the emulsion on the three negatives, or in the processing and printing, or in the intensity of light from the carbon-arc projectors. The carbons burned away during operation, like fireworks sparklers but more slowly, requiring constant adjustment and frequent replacement (that’s a major factor in why carbon arc projectors and searchlights became obsolete). Cinerama’s carbons multiplied the problem by three, and all three had to be closely monitored during each show to keep the light output as uniform as possible. Also contributing to this was the three lenses of the Cinerama camera, each of which was “faster” (admitting more light) at the center than at the edges. Another occasional peculiarity that can’t be shown by a still illustration was a perceptible “jiggle” between the frames, caused again by minute variations — this time in the film perforations, the sprockets in the separate camera and projector movements, or a combination thereof.  

 

Most noticeable of all was the parallax effect caused by the fact that the Cinerama camera was really three cameras, each with its own vanishing point. (“parallax [pár-a-laks] n. 1 the apparent difference in the position or direction of an object caused when the observer’s position is changed.”) Imagine yourself looking out at a vista: First you look straight ahead; then you take a step to your right and turn your head left; then two steps left and turn your head right. You’re looking at the same view each time, but from three ever-so-slightly different places. That’s parallax. Take this frame on the right, from the last scene of How the West Was Won, flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. The join lines and the difference in color textures from one panel to the next are glaringly obvious, but even more pronounced are the “elbows” in the bridge; everyone knows that the Golden Gate travels in a perfectly straght line between San Francisco on the left and Marin County on the right.

Here’s a similar frame, on the left, from the same scene as it appears in a later DVD issue. The digital clean-up crew has been busy: Join lines have been digitally erased,  the color has been made uniform, and the “elbows” have been smoothed out. But the digital wizards couldn’t do anything about how the three lenses saw the bridge. That’s how it was with the Cinerama camera. The parallax wasn’t always obvious — especially when you were careening up and down rollercoaster tracks or swooping over Niagara Falls or through Zion Canyon in Utah — but when it was, it was impossible to ignore.

These were the things, as Cinerama opened in September ’52, that Fred Waller expected eventually to fine-tune. Early in 1953, as 20th Century Fox was beginning to beat the drum for CinemaScope, Cinerama announced plans for a single-booth, single-projector system. But that may simply have been a blue-sky announcement intended to take some of the wind out of CinemaScope’s sails. In any event, nothing ever came of it, at least not until It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World ten years later — which, despite sporting the name, wasn’t Cinerama at all. 
 
Also, by spring ’53, the Stanley Warner deal was in the works, and was finalized in August. Stanley Warner’s penny-wise-and-pound-foolish attitude toward Cinerama in general extended into the area of technical research, and Cinerama Inc., the manufacturing wing of the operation, was forced to eke out what technical improvements it could under the circumstances. New camera and projector assemblies were developed for the second feature, Cinerama Holiday, which had much greater registration accuracy than the industry standard, thus reducing considerably the jumping and jiggling of the three images. These new cameras also had improved focal ratios on the three lenses — from f/4.5 to f/2.8 — making them more sensitive to light.
 

As for the problem of slight variations in color, that was dependent on printing standards, which in most laboratories, as Hazard Reeves admitted, “have never been tight. If necessary,” he went on, “we’ll do our own printing.” But once again he ran up against the cheapskates at Stanley Warner. Not until 1958 did they agree to allot $200,000 for research into improved printing standards, and it wasn’t enough; Cinerama’s special in-house printers never materialized.

 
On May 18, 1954 Fred Waller died, and Cinerama lost its creator and conceptual genius. For all practical purposes, Cinerama remained, for the next (and last) nine years of its existence, what it was when Waller left it; the continuing evolution he envisioned would never happen — because there were no more Fred Wallers to drive it.
 
Waller left behind one final concept, designed to address the parallax problem inherent in Cinerama’s three-lens camera. This was a radically modified camera using a single lens that would duplicate the entire 146-degree field of vision of the three-lens camera, but on a single strip of film running horizontally through the camera 16 sprocket-holes at a time — the rough equivalent of a 102mm frame. This would eliminate the three-lens parallax, producing an image with a single vanishing point. That 102mm image could be divided in printing into three strips for projection (still necessary to cover Cinerama’s deeply curved screen) — and, as a bonus, could also be printed single-frame in any other format for conventional projection. The lens had been developed and a prototype camera was under construction in 1960 when the order came to abandon any further development.
 
In 1962, under Nicolas Reisini, Cinerama Inc. acquired the Photo Instruments Division of Benson-Lehner Corp. in Los Angeles, renaming it the Cinerama Camera Corp. Reisini might (and maybe should) have dedicated the new corporation to resolving the technical problems in Cinerama, perhaps even reviving that 102mm camera. But he didn’t. Instead, Cinerama Camera Corp. attempted to move into consumer products: a still camera that took 360-degree panoramic pictures, a wide-angle home movie projector, even (and I’ll bet you never knew this) a home videotape recorder. All of these ideas lost money in research and development (the videotape recorder was 20 years ahead of its time), and by 1964 Reisini had been ousted from Cinerama. The untapped potential of that single-lens, 102mm, 146-degree camera — Fred Waller’s last brainchild — is one of the great what-ifs of motion picture technology.
 

Cinedrome Wins 2012 CMBA Award

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I interrupt my series of posts commemorating the 60th anniversary of Cinerama at this point because the 2012 CiMBA Awards from the Classic Movie Blog Association have been announced — and Cinedrome has been honored with “Best Classic Movie Article” for my six-part series on Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons.

I won’t bore everybody with an endless Oscar-style acceptance speech, but I do want, gratefully, to thank my fellow CMBA members for this recognition, and to acknowledge the work of the many Welles biographers and scholars, especially Simon Callow and Prof. Robert L. Carringer, whose previous work contributed so much to my own and made my research such a pleasure. My conclusions may have differed from theirs, but I couldn’t have done it without them.

Links to the six parts of my Ambersons article are below. Meanwhile, you can go here for a complete list of CiMBA winners and nominees. Warmest congratulations to them all — and again, a grateful “Thank you!” to my colleagues for this honor.

Minority Opinion: The Magnificent Ambersons (January 13 – March 28, 2012):

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