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HOLLYWOOD PUT ON HOLD  That's John Wayne leading a wagon train in his first starring role in 1930's "The Big Trail," filmed in the widescreen Grandeur process that almost nobody saw when Fox studios first released the film. |
Five major studios made widescreen films in 1930
of TheColumnists.com
Just about everybody knows that Warner Bros. revolutionized the movies in 1927 when it released "The Jazz Singer," the first "talkie" feature film. All the competing studios HAD to come up with their own "talkies"--and they all did by late 1929.
But not many people know that a similar revolution was going on at the same time in terms of the size and shape of the movie screen. Starting in the mid-1920s, all the major studios also began to experiment with widescreen presentation of movies--and by 1930 Paramount, Fox, MGM, Warner Bros. and United Artists studios all had made widescreen movies.
But something awful happened. Only a handful of theaters ever played those movies in their widescreen versions and every single one of the big screen processes developed by the studios was abandoned. It wasn't until 1952--that's 22 years later--that the studios began to think widescreen again. A year later, in 1953, 20th Century-Fox premiered "The Robe" in a "new" widescreen process called CinemaScope that actually had been invented way back in the 1920s.
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sequence filmed in a process the French called Polyvision. |
So, why did the studios collectively desert the widescreen concept by 1930? Why did they put this technological revolution on hold for more than two decades? Today, when ALL feature films are made in widescreen formats, it seems ludicrous that Hollywood walked away from a significant advance in the viewing experience that was ready to happen at the same time movies began to talk.
Well, the answer to that puzzle is simple: It was the economy, stupid!
In 1929, the Wall Street stock market crashed, sending America--and soon most of the rest of the world--into the worst economic depression in world history. In those days, most of the studios owned their own chains of movie theaters. Theater operators had just taken on enormous debt in order to install sound equipment. Teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, the theater chains just couldn't afford to remodel their theaters once more to accomodate the big screens the studios had in mind.
Because the studios themselves weren't sure what would happen with their own theaters as America settled into The Great Depression, they agreed to kiss the widescreen baby goodbye.
As is turned out, they might have been
able to afford it after all. Movie attendance didn't tumble anywhere
near as much as they'd feared. It seems people were willing to
spend the dime or quarter it cost to see a movie just to escape
the dreadful reality of their own lives. Millions flocked to
see Shirley Temple's films for Fox. Millions jammed theaters
showing Warner Bros. hard-hitting crime dramas. Universal had
big crowds for its first round of monster movies of the early
1930s. RKO narrowly escaped financial ruin on the broad shoulders
of "King Kong" and celebrated to the sound of the dancing
feet of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. And so on.
 King Vidor filmed this 1930 MGM western in the Realife widescreen process. The widescreen version may no longer exist. |
 his 1926 silent classic "The Bat" in a 1930 widescreen film called "The Bat Whispers." It survives today in a DVD edition. |
In the meantime, the "talkies" got better. The synchronized phonograph records the Warners had used for "The Jazz Singer" gave way to the sound-on-film talkies introduced by Fox studios in 1928. The studios began to prosper again, so they didn't really need to spend the big bucks required to bring about the widescreen revolution that finally came about in the 1950s when competition from television and the big profits being made by the independent widescreen picture "This is Cinerama" started them off on a short-lived love affair with 3-D movies just before Fox's CinemaScope blazed the trail for everyone into the widescreen era.
How far advanced were the widescreen experiments of the late 1920s? Very advanced indeed. In 1926, Paramount showed its huge nautical adventure film "Old Ironsides" s in Magnascope, a widescreen process using 65mm film. Magnascope also was used the following year for certain aerial sequences in Paramount's "Wings," the first Oscar-winning Best Film, taking the prize for 1927-28.
Standard film was 35 millimeters wide, so the extra width permitted a much bigger imae to be put on the screen. Until then, movies were filmed in the so-called "Academy" standard, which was close to a square image. The widescreen image would be taller as well as wider. When soundtracks began to be put on the edge of the film, it reduced the space available for picture, so other experimenters in widescreen, like Fox studios, opted for a slightly wider film gauge of 70mm.
Very few theaters ever played the Magnaxope versions of "Old Ironsides" and "Wings" because it meant putting in much wider and taller screens. Nobody wanted to spend that much money just to show one or two films. If the whole industry wasn't going to commit to a standard widescreen format yet, what theater operator would go to all that trouble just to play a film he could get in the standard 35mm. size?
William Fox, who had licensed his Movietone sound on film process to other studios and made a fortune from it by the early 1930s, was a real entrepreneur and invested $2 million of his personal fortune in a 70mm. widescreen process for Fox called Grandeur.
At first, Fox filmed only newsreels and short subjects in Grandeur and equipped a few theaters in New York and Los Angeles to show them. Happy with the results, he commissioned two feature films to be made in Grandeur: "Happy Days," an all-star musical with a cast headed by Charles Farrell, star of the studio's hit "Seventh Heaven," and "The Big Trail," an epic western from director Raoul Walsh, starring a young man the studio had great faith in--John Wayne.
 Warner Bros. turned out this 1930 musical in a widescreen process known as Vitascope. |
United Artists had come up with its own 70mm. system called Magnifilm and used it for a remake of the great silent horror film by Roland West called "The Bat." The remake would be called "The Bat Whispers."
Meanwhile, the French had taken an entirely different approach with a system called Polyvision. In Abel Gance's spectacular 1927 silent picture "Napoleon," the spectacular Waterloo sequences opened the screen up to the width of three normal screens and showed three images simultaneously in a "triptych" style. MGM released "Napoleon" in America, beating several of the American widescreen features out of the starting gate.
MGM also had experimented with a widescreen process called Fanthom Screen and used it on the 1928 western epic "The Trail of '98" (1928). Unhappy with the results, it turned to another process it called "Realife" and filmed "The Great Meadow" in it.
But once MGM learned Fox was pushing his Grandeur process with a giant western, MGM announced its own super western--"Billy the Kid." This 1930 production was directed by King Vidor, then perhaps Hollywood's top director after his smash hit of the silent era, "The Big Parade." Since Fox signed an unknown lad named John Wayne, who had been a college football star at USC, to star in its big screen western, MGM would trump that move by signing its own college football star, this time from the University of Alabama: John Mack Brown for "Billy the Kid."
The Brothers Warner weren't about to let the competition get the jump on them. They'd already been burned by the industry rejection of their "talkie" system called Vitaphone, so they launched their own widescreen process called Vitascope and filmed two big musicals in the new process--"Song of the Flame," which pulled together such top Broadway talents as George Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Harbach, and "Kismet," starring Broadway's Otis Skinner. Both films were released in 1930.
Also headed to theaters in 1930 was RKO's entry in the widescreen derby--"Danger Lights," a fast-paced railroad drama that starred Jean Arthur, Louis Wolheim from that year's Oscar-winning hit "All Quiet on the Western Front" and Robert Armstrong, soon to star in the studio's "King Kong." Their movie was using a 65mm/ process it called Natural Vision and had a much talked about sequence: The head-on crash of two locomotives!
But, alas, only a few theaters were ever equipped to show any of these films. Few of them survive in their original widescreen versions, but several have been around for years in the standard 35mm. versions that were filmed at the same time to protect the studio's investment in case nobody installed the equipment needed to show the widescreen versions.
"The Big Trail" in Grandeur was restored in the 1980s and I was privileged to attend a celebrity screening of it at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences that also was attended by most surviving members of John Wayne's family and by dozens of big names associated with the western genre. Seated around me were Clint Eastwood, author Louis L'Amour and old cowboy star Bob Steele. The film was simply stunning in its widescreen version and, though John Wayne received some poor reviews for his performance, I think he did a fine job for a man with virtually no acting experience. You could see the screen presence he soon would develop.
Today you can buy or rent "The Big Trail" in its original widescreen format on DVD. It's well worth sitting through, though it's black and white. The sequence in which covererd wagons are lowered by pulleys over a steep gorge is sensational.
Also preserved and available on DVD today is "The Bat Whispers." Based on the creaky "old dark house" stage play that was adapted from Mary Roberts Rinehart's classic novel "The Circular Staircase," this movie is hard to sit through, but the widescreen process is remarkably good.
I don't believe the Magnascope versions of "Old Ironsides" and "Wings" still exist. Both films are good for their time and have been available on VHS video. I own tape copies of both. "Danger Lights" has been available for years on video, but only in its standard format. It's not much. I have no idea of any of the other 1930 era widescreen films still exists in that format, but I recently acquired "The Trail of '98" in its standard version from the online Warner Archive--and it's a very good silent picture.
And, of course, Abel Gance's "Napoleon" still exists and I have that on videotape with the Polyvision sequence intact. It was fully restored by Kevin Brownlow and shown on the big screen in the early 1980s with a new musical score by Carmine Coppola. This is a silent masterpiece everyone should see, although the three-panel wide sequence is not very impressive on a TV screen, even a big one.
Perhaps it was best for Hollywood to wait two decades to finally get around to the widescreen revolution. Ironically, the anamorphic CinemaScope system Fox used to re-launch the revolution was an old one that had been around since the silent era.
Knowing what we know now, though, it's tantalizing to imagine what a producer like David O. Selznick would have done with a process like Grandeur when he finally got around to filming "Gone With the Wind" in 1939. Past efforts to convert that spectacular film into a widescreen movie have been disastrous because that requires sawing off either the top or bottom of the original image so the whole thing can be blown up into a wider shape.
But the burning of Atlanta in Grandeur? Wow, how majestic that would have been! And the sad part is that they had the technology and could have done it if somebody had just thought about it with a little notion of what the future of movies was going to be like.
©2009 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Oct. 5, 2009.
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