First, before I launch into my annual recap of this year’s Columbus Moving Picture Show, a heads-up and an apology. I’ve got quite a bit of vacation traveling to do in the next few weeks, and that will probably prolong the time it takes me to prepare and post my coverage. I ask Cinedrome readers to please bear with me; I’ll get as much posted as I can before I have to leave, and get the rest up as soon as possible after I get back.

Al rightie, then, that said, here we go:

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As has become traditional, the long weekend kicked off on the evening of Wednesday, May 22 with a screening, in conjunction with the Picture Show, at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the campus of Ohio State University. This year the main attraction was a digital restoration of Bwana Devil, the 1952 surprise hit that launched the original 3D craze. Produced, written and directed by the eccentric Arch Oboler, Bwana Devil was loosely based on the man-eaters of Tsavo, a pair of rogue lions who went on a killing spree in 1898, slaughtering enough native African and Indian workers on the Kenya-Uganda Railway to bring construction to a standstill for months (the story was filmed again, with slightly more fidelity to the facts, as The Ghost and the Darkness in 1996). Coming when it did, with Hollywood reeling from the onslaught of television and desperate to lure audiences back into theaters, Bwana Devil made 3D look like just what the faltering movie business needed.

For a while, anyhow. There was a flurry of 3D movies throughout 1953, and quite a few good ones: The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space from Universal; House of Wax (Vincent Price’s first foray into horror), Hondo (starring John Wayne in one of his many signature roles) and The Charge at Feather River from Warner Bros.; the survival melodrama Inferno with Robert Ryan as a husband left for dead in the desert by his scheming wife (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover (William Lundigan); Kiss Me Kate from MGM (with House of Wax, probably the best of the lot); Miss Sadie Thompson with Rita Hayworth from Columbia, and so on.

Plagued by quality-control issues, though, 3D proved to be a flash in the pan that first time around. The technology was cumbersome; the two projectors in a theater’s projection booth, normally used for changeovers from one reel to the next every 12 or 13 minutes, had to both run simultaneously to project the left- and right-eye images — meaning that even with the largest reels available, theaters couldn’t show more than about 50 minutes at a time, requiring an intermission in even the shortest movies. If one of the two films broke, the other reel would have to mutilated to match it. If the projectors weren’t perfectly synchronized, the 3D illusion would be lost and might never be set right. The glasses, while not nearly the inconvenience that legend has it, depended on everything running perfectly, and if it didn’t, the glasses themselves could take the blame when things went wrong. By the end of 1953 and the beginning of ’54, the fad had petered out.  There would be the occasional one-off in subsequent decades, usually from fly-by-night outfits, but it would take another 50 years, and the advent of digital projection and computerized systems, for 3D to make a comeback with various superhero and adventure movies, plus such truly great movies as Hugo (2011) and Life of Pi (2012).

But those days were far in the future when Bwana Devil hit screens and caused such a sensation. So how about it? Well, unlike Hugo and Life of Pi, Bwana Devil isn’t a truly great movie. Unlike Kiss Me Kate and House of Wax, it isn’t excellent. Unlike Inferno and The Charge at Feather River, it isn’t even good. Indeed, Bwana Devil is arguably the worst historically important movie since Fred Ott’s Sneeze.

Nevertheless, it is historically important, and the new 2K restoration they screened at the Wexner Center gives us Bwana Devil looking better than it has since…well, probably ever. I’ve only seen the picture once before, in 2013 at a 60th Anniversary 3D Festival at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. That was a film screening, and considering the picture’s age the print was in very good condition. But nothing like this. Kudos are due to the 3D Film Archive and its founder Bob Furmanek (who spoke at the screening) for spearheading the restoration.

Also on the program were two 3D cartoons from 1953: Hypnotic Hick with Woody Woodpecker, and Boo Moon featuring (who else?) Casper the Friendly Ghost. Both were good, with some effective stereoscopic moments, especially in Boo Moon. In addition, there was A Beany Story, a five-minute short that ran as a prologue to Bwana Devil, in which actor Lloyd Nolan, and an attractive starlet, Nancy Somebody, whose last name I didn’t catch, introduced us to the Natural Vision 3D process, aided by Beany and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent of the Time for Beany TV show. This, by the way, was the original 1949-54 incarnation of Beany and Cecil, as hand puppets manipulated and voiced by Daws Butler (Beany) and Stan Freberg (Cecil). This short is even available on YouTube. You can access it here, and if you happen to have a pair of anaglyphic (i.e., red/blue lens) glasses lying around the house you can even see it in 3D. (The screening at the Wexner, however, was Polaroid, not anaglyphic).

Before we move on, I want to share this photo with you. Maybe you’ve already seen it; it’s pretty famous. It’s a shot of the audience at the world premiere of Bwana Devil at the Paramount Theatre in Hollywood, taken by J.R. Eyerman and published in the December 15, 1952 issue of Life Magazine. I reproduce it here because, in one of those odd little coincidences that the universe throws at us every once in a while, this photo is the wallpaper in the bathroom of every room in the Columbus Renaissance Downtown Hotel, where Cinevent and the Columbus Moving Picture Show have been held since 2015. When you step into the shower at the Renaissance Downtown, depending on which way your room is facing, these 1952 moviegoers are either gazing off to your left or staring right at you. That can be pretty unsettling, and in nine years I’ve never quite gotten used to it.

Anyhow, with Bwana Devil looking brand-spanking-new the night before, and with this first-nighter Hollywood audience dressed to the nines the morning after (for some reason I find my eye drawn to those teenagers in the third row near the bottom corner; a first date, I imagine), there was a sort of continuity over the decades.

And with that we were off to the first day of the Picture Show proper. But we’ll get into that next time.

To be continued…