The Broad View

For a while it seemed that thoughtful Christmas shoppers would give gifts of personalized Polaroid glasses. After Robert Stack in the pioneering 3 D film Batana Devil, nauseated millions by coming "right out of the screen to kiss you," there was a spate of 3-D films. Besides being terrible in their own right, they employed the crudest possible devices to remind audiences that they were witnessing something new in entertainment. Finally, when everyone was getting mighty tried of locomotives, spears, chairs and other doodads hurtling at them in mediocre technicolor, fox announced its new program of CinemaScope, opening new vistas of poor taste.

The great problem for most directors, few of whom were exactly in the Eisenstein (or even Kazan) league, was to find something to put in the wings of their shots. One series of pictures solved the problem by putting Victor Mature on one side of the screen and photographing his profile, close-up. Much more entrancing was the technique of stretching Marylyn Monroc across the screen.

The directors still weren't satisfied. Having plied the public with promises that wide screen photography would add new breadth to the screen, they just had to figure out some useful thing to put in the new or at least, extended-dimension. When photographing a Roman chariot, the hack director would merely requisition a few more horses. But this was not Art, and Oscar was considered a step brother to art (their mother wasn't married-giving an indication as to what kind of Art we are discussing). Adding more extras to fill in the blank spaces was no real innovation, so pageantry was not the answer.

Finally, motion pictures have taken the final stride toward valuable utilization of the extra screen area at their command. The big selling point of The Black Widow was that it represented the first time a "Crime of Passion has appeared on Wide screen." Mood setting is obviously the proper function for the embarrassing space on either side of CinemaScope action. Unfortunately, this particular picture just drudges along with extra chairs, rugs, lamps, desks, and the other paraphernalia of interior films. What might have been done confounds the imagination.

Tasteful borders of carved wooden or plaster masks, expressing the emotion under examination, would have really done wonders for the film. In future, this is the direction that wide films should take. Carved decorations in the awkward borders, for one thing, would relieve actors of projecting emotion. Henceforth, when a pretty young friend of some producer wants to register anger, instead of furrowing her generally marble brow, she need only point, with languid grandeur, toward the appropriate mask. Her charm need not be destroyed by the necessity of acting. This could mean great things for the future of television.