Official launching of the film process developed by Fred Waller, a sort of more sophisticated version of Polyvision, the gimmick used by Abel Gance during the last minutes of his 1927 masterpiece "Napoléon vu par Abel Gance", during Napoleon's Italian campaign. To each side of the screen were added simultaneous projections, mostly of independent images, each tinted with one of the two colors of the French flag. Waller's Cinerama was a more evolved system, since the images from three projectors formed a single set of action. The two lines dividing the three projections were always criticized, but it cannot be denied that it was a great spectacle. "This Is Cinerama" is mainly a travelogue, starting with a roller-coaster ride to leave no doubt of the effect the system had on people when the camera moved. When it was static, there was no more difference from CinemaScope than size. Apart from the views of the United States, and Europeans locations, part of the film is integrated by pretensions of high art, like the boring section of Verdi's Aida. When somebody had the idea of "adjusting" the process to single-projection Cinerama, it faded quickly since the result was like any other wide-screen system on a huge screen. Films presented in single-projection Cinerama included, among others, "2001: A Space Odyssey", "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World", "Battle of the Bulge", "Ice Station Zebra", "Custer of the West", "The Hallelujah Trail", "The Greatest Story Ever Told," and "Circus World", but I also saw standard anamorphic 35mm copies released in Panama's Cinerama Lux Theatre, of "What a Way to Go!", "55 Days in Peking", "Cleopatra", "The Satan Bug", "The Cardinal", "Rio Conchos", "In Harm's Way," and many others.
Review of This Is Cinerama
