3-D Classics on Blu Ray: Inferno (1953)

There is a very odd thing about the existence of Roy Ward Baker's 3D color noir Inferno, and that is the fact that it was made by 20th Century Fox. When 3D movies went big in 1953, most studios eagerly jumped on the bandwagon. Fox, however, was putting their money on CinemaScope, a widescreen process where the image was roughly 2 1/2 times as wide as it was high. Fox did a ton of press for the new process and even snarkily referred to it as "The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses". And then they turned around and made a movie that is not only one of the top 10 3D movies of the 1950s, it's a top 10 3D movie for all time.

Robert Ryan is Donald Carson III, an arrogant and not particularly likeable businessman. He goes on a trip to the desert with wife Geraldine (Rhonda Fleming) and speculator Joe Duncan (William Lundigan). What he doesn't know is that Geraldine and Duncan are lovers, so when he breaks his leg at the top of a cliff, they take the opportunity to make it look like he got drunk and ran off, effectively abandoning him to die in the desert. Carson realizes that if he's going to get back to civilization, it's going to be on his own.

The performances in this movie are great. Ryan does a lot with just a voice over and his facial expressions. The look of increasing desperation turns him into a more sympathetic character. While he starts the movie as fairly hateful, by halfway through we're completely on his side. In contrast are Fleming and Lundigan. While Lundigan is straight unapologetically evil, Fleming is far more sinister. She seems to be uncomfortable with what they've done, but is totally willing to abandon her lover in the desert the same as her husband. It's equally interesting since this isn't the type of role I'm used to seeing Fleming in. Those three are the majority of the film, but TV fans will get a kick out of seeing Larry Keating (Mr. Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies) as Carson's concerned business manager. Universal monster fans will equally enjoy seeing Henry Hull (Werewolf of London) as the desert old timer who ends up helping save Ryan in the end.

Inferno features one of the most stunning uses of 3D ever. Like several great 3D westerns of the era (Hondo, Gun Fury), the movie makes the most of its desert setting. The screen seems to stretch on forever, letting us know just how isolated Carson really is. There's one absolutely dizzying shot from the top of the cliff looking down that gives us a very good idea of just how precarious Ryan's position is. On top of that, the movie employs a trick that most 3D movies of the era did: concentrating on depth, but having gimmick shots during big movies. In fact, most of the gimmick shots in the movie show up during the climactic fight between Ryan and Lundigan. The only knock on the gimmick shots is when Ryan throws a lantern at the camera towards the end, it comes off a bit as a 3 Stooges style 3D effect.

U.K. company Panamint released Inferno on 3D Blu Ray last year, initially only Region B but later making it Region Free. The Blu Ray comes from a restoration done by the late Dan Symmes in which all the misalignments in the film were corrected. The result is a beautiful looking and practically perfect 3D Blu Ray of one of the all time great 3D movies. Only the credits are in reverse 3D and that's the way they were in the original film. Any true 3D fan needs this movie in their collection.

3-D Thursday: Amityville 3-D (1983)

Amityville 3-D holds the distinction of being the last of the major 3D releases of the 1980s. A few more independent films limped out in 1984 and 1985, but this November 1983 release was the effective end of the road for the process for nearly 20 years (a couple of minor 1990s releases notwithstanding).

It also holds the distinction of being on Siskel & Ebert's Worst of 1983 list. I'm not entirely convinced I agree with that distinction, however. After all, 1983 also gave us The Man Who Wasn't There and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn, both of which threaten to make this film look like Casablanca.

The funny thing about this is the fact that, like so many other bad movies, one watches Amityville 3-D and is left wondering just how it went so wrong. It shouldn't be as bad as it is. It has a decent enough cast, a pretty good idea for the story, and the director of such classics as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fantastic Voyage, and Tora! Tora! Tora!. Despite all this, the film manages to lay an absurdly sour egg.

The story has magazine journalist John Baxter (Woody Allen alumni Tony Roberts) buying the Amityville Horror house. As he makes his career debunking hoaxes, he doesn't believe in the stories about the house. So far so good. I can dig a guy with cajones buying up a haunted house. Of course it doesn't take long for weird stuff to happen and people to start dying. Baxter, for his part, just blows it all off.

The Realtor who sold him the place dies in the house? Happens all the time!
Baxter's photographer partner Melanie gets attacked by the house and later is burned to a crisp in her car? Mere coincidence!
Baxter's daughter drowns after a séance where the house threatens her? It's tragic, but what can you do? That's life!

Sheesh, is this guy boneheaded! In fact, Baxter is hilariously boneheaded even after he's attacked in an elevator. Me? I would have been suspicious after the realtor, concerned after the elevator, and convinced after my photographer died. But then, I'm not the victim of bad screenwriting.

The script is just one of the frustrating things about this film. There seem to be two types of people in this movie: stupid people and whiney people. As stupid as Baxter comes across, it can't beat the stupidity of paranormal investigator Eliot West (Robert Joy). This genius decides that the best way to save Loughlin's spirit from the demon in the well is to lean near the well and, when he sees the demon coming up yell to her spirit to save herself. That's it. Naturally, the demon gets him instead. Good plan, there, bub. Didn't think to bring any holy water or anything, did you?

While it's true that none of the 1980s 3D movies are what you would traditionally call "good movies", this one should have been. Besides Roberts and Joy, Candy Clark plays Melanie, Lori Loughlin is the daughter, and Meg Ryan her best (only?) friend. Yes, that Meg Ryan. So this isn't exactly the cast of a Friday the 13th movie. I know, I know. Someone is going to point out that some of those movies have good casts. They don't. What they usually have is one or two (if that) good actors and a bunch of nobodies. This cast isn't a bunch of nobodies. They're a good cast doing a lousy job.

The only one who almost acquits herself is Loughlin and she doesn't get much to do. Even worse, almost all of her scenes are with Ryan, who is embarrassingly bad here. How bad is Ryan? Her performance has all the subtlety of a nuclear explosion. It's bizarre to think that by the end of the decade she'd being doing movies like When Harry Met Sally. Watching her here, however, you would swear she was never going to be anybody.

You can almost excuse those two, however, since they actually were nobodies at the time. Candy Clark, on the other hand, had been in American Graffiti ten years earlier, so she has no excuse. She starts out okay but as the film goes on her performance gets steadily worse. Her next to last scene, where Roberts tries to find out what happened to her in the house is so bad it's painful. Her death by spontaneous combustion scene is so over the top ridiculous as to be unintentionally funny.

Roberts ex-wife is played by an exceedingly shrill Tess Harper. Literally, all she seems to do is whine her way through the part. In fact, she is so annoying, you actually wish she was in the car with Clark when it goes up in flames.

As far as Roberts goes, he plays Baxter in such a blasé manner as to defy belief. You would think that an actor who worked with Al Pacino and Woody Allen would be able to bring some life to his character. But he doesn't, which makes it impossible to feel anything for him but contempt for being so stupid and banal a character. Not good for an actor who has to carry a whole movie. It's like watching a Friday the 13th movie where the character stands by the open door screaming while Jason slowly walks over to them instead of running like hell. They literally deserve what they get.

True, it's not necessarily the fault of any of the actors as the characters themselves are written that way. But the fact that none of these people--except for Ryan who goes way over the top--can make their characters the least bit interesting damns the whole project. And Ryan isn't interesting, she's just goofy and over the top.

Director Richard Fleischer had worked in 3D 30 years earlier with a movie called Arena, so he was better qualified to work with the process than any other director of an 80s 3D movie. He knows plenty about depth and it shows since the depth in the movie is fantastic, far better than most 3D movies today. But the film suffers from what all 80s 3D movies seem to suffer from: so many gimmick shots that many of them are just plain silly. Clark's charred corpse is pretty effective but it's hard to take a movie seriously that spits straws and Frisbees at you. Especially when the Frisbee effect is handled pretty clumsily. Still, if you have a 3D TV and are going to watch this movie, the 3D Blu Ray is the way to go.

In the end, Amityville 3-D ends up being only moderately better than most of it's contemporaries. This, Jaws 3-D, and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone remain the best of the 80s 3D movies. But that's not really saying much.

Though I will give the movie this: there is at least one effectively creepy scene in the movie. Harper is in the house and she sees a very wet (and silent) Loughlin walking up the steps. She follows her right up to the attic and gets the door slammed on her. What she doesn't know is that outside at that very moment, Roberts and some paramedics are trying desperately to revive the already dead girl. It's a well done sequence which shows what the movie could have done with a little more effort. Shame there weren't more scenes like it.

3D CLASSICS COME TO BLU RAY

This month has seen the release of two classic 3D movies on 3D Blu Ray for the first time--and no, I don't mean AVATAR and THE AVENGERS (which came out last month anyway). Last week Universal released CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON in 3D as part of the UNIVERSAL MONSTERS Blu Ray set and this week Warner gave us Alfred Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER. I've only spot-checked the two discs--ok, I've watched half of DMFM already--but I'm impressed with what I've seen. This is what 3D should look like. Outside of a few titles like HUGO and THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN, most modern 3D movies aren't that impressive in terms of depth and/or effect shots. So if you think of THE AVENGERS as the ultimate 3D movie, you've seen nothing.

The 50s films were not shy about either depth or effect shots. This is not to say that those films were like their 80s counterparts throwing everything including the kitchen sink at the audience. They concentrated mostly on depth and keeping things behind the stereo window. However, when there was a gimmick shot, it was usually a memorable one. A perfect example of this is in DIAL M FOR MURDER.

For the better part of the first 45 minutes all of the action takes place behind the screen.  All this time we follow along as Ray Milland plots the murder of his wife, peering around lamps as if spying and being a co-conspirator. Then comes the movie's big moment when Anthony Dawson tries strangling Grace Kelly. Kelly desperately reaches out of the screen, almost as if imploring the audience for help. When she reaches it, it's a creepy and effective moment. We go from being in on the plot to being begged for help by the victim and not being able to do anything. It is, perhaps, the ultimate in audience manipulation and something completely lost in 2D showings.

Admittedly, DIAL M is far more subtle than CREATURE in terms of both depth and gimmick shots. But this does not make either film better or worse. CREATURE is a decent movie in it's own right and has an excellent use of 3D, especially in the underwater scenes, which are better than what JAWS 3D pulled off nearly 30 years later. The 3D really pops in this one, with fantastic levels of depth throughout and CREATURE even manages to be deeper than DIAL M. In fairness, Hitchcock confined his film to a Lomdon flat while director Jack Arnold has a jungle/water setting to play with. Arnold also uses more gimmick shots than Hitchcock. But, there's an important thing to bear in mind with Arnold's 3D films: (again) unlike their 80s counterparts, the gimmick shots related to the movie. For those who grew up seeing yo-yos and popcorn being tossed at the audience in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3, the idea of 3D movies not just tossing any old thing out of the screen may seem like a weird idea, but it's the center of both of these releases. I mean, Jack Arnold decided that a primary 3D effect for CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON should be the Creature himself clutching and clawing at the audience. Who knew? Then again, most modern 3D movies don't bother much with gimmick shots themselves. Then again, all too many of the modern ones are converted from 2D.

 This Blu Ray marks the first time CREATURE has been released (officially)  on home video in 3D since MCA put out a rotten anaglyphic VHS in 1980. I admit to having loved watching that release for years, but after seeing the Blu Ray, I'm convinced I was on good drugs I didn't even know I was on for all those years. This is the way to see CREATURE, unless you happen to get a chance to see it in dual strip polarized in the theater sometime. I got to see it that way twice myself and it's quite a treat. But this is definitely the next best thing. As for DIAL M, this is the first time since the Japanese VHD Disc in the 1980s that Dial M has gotten a home 3D release. Both look great on 3D Blu Ray, though CREATURE has some vertical misalignment issues. Depending on things, some eyestrain may be had while watching CREATURE. But that's the way the film has always been. It's also worth noting that both of these releases are the first time on home video that either film has been shown in it's original 1:85 aspect ratio.

In both cases, the image detail is beautiful. I noticed for the first time the bruise marks on Grace Kelly's neck the day after the attack. Okay, it was make up to look like bruise marks, but the point is that detail was never noticed by me before. Similarly, details in the shirts Julia Adams wore in CREATURE were made more apparent. Of course, that's the beauty of Blu Ray to begin with--that details you normally wouldn't notice become apparent. Both films look just fine and are well worth getting.

In fact, that's the bottom line. If you have a 3D TV, you seriously need both of these releases. They are truly top of the line films and ones you want to show people to show off your 3D system. The only one I can think of that can compare to them is HUGO, point in fact. And both releases have the promise of future classic 3D movies being brought to Blu Ray. Warners has already announced HOUSE OF WAX and Universal seems to be working on IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE and REVENGE OF THE CREATURE. Now if Paramount would only correct their error and put HONDO out on 3D Blu Ray, all would be right with the world. Sort of. Kind of. Not really.

Everything You Wanted to Know About 3-D Movies

Okay, not exactly everything. But a great deal of information at least on how the various technologies work. Being a 3-D filmmaker and buff, I figured I'm at least somewhat qualified to write this blog and maybe even set a few myths straight.

HOW 3-D VISION WORKS
First thing worth mentioning is how we see in 3-D at all. Humans are a rare species of animal as we are one of the few to have two eyes in the front of our face. A large number of animals have their eyes on the sides (such as fish). As a result, we see stereoscopically and they don't. For it takes two eyes in front of the face to see in 3-D. Each eye sees the world slightly differently and our brain tricks us into seeing the image whole.

Here's a little demonstration of the above. Hold your finger up roughly 12 inches in front of your face. Now blink each eye. You'll note that the left and right eye each see a slightly different part of the finger. This is also why when you were a little kid and you used to bring the pencil real close to your eyes, it seem to split into two.

Euclid and Leonardo Da Vinci had various theorems about stereoscopic vision and how our eyes work and there are books and websites all over the place on it, so I'm just going to skip ahead and get into the actual movie technologies of 3-D. One book, if you're interested, available as a free download online, is Foundations of Stereoscopic Cinema by Lenny Lipton. In the early part of the rather lengthy book, Lipton goes into the history of the science of our stereoscopic vision.

In terms of the movies, 3-D movies operate on the same basic principle as our vision. The average movie is shot with a single camera and a single lens, or eye if you will. 3-D movies are shot with either two cameras or a single camera with a special attachment, usually known as a beam splitter. The left and right eye views of each shot look just slightly different from one another and when viewed through the 3-D glasses, our brain tricks us into seeing the two images as one.

In terms of movies and TV there have been four main types of 3-D done throughout the last 90 years. They are anaglyphic, polarized, field sequential, and the pulfrich illusion. Field Sequential and Pulfrich are mostly for TV, so I'm not going to bother with them here. Maybe in a future blog.

ANAGLYPHIC MOVIES
Anaglyphic 3-D is probably the most familiar type of 3-D out there. I once referred to it, in fact, as the stereotype of 3-D. It's the type that has been used not just in movies, but in comic books, magazines, posters, T-shirts, photographs, and just about any other type of print form of 3-D. This is the type that uses opposing colored glasses. Most people say red/green, but actually red/cyan is the more commonly used type for movies and red/blue for comic books. Yellow/blue--which is tradenamed ColorCode--was used for the 3-D Super Bowl commercials and the Chuck episode earlier this year and magenta/green has been used on some recent 3-D DVDs (while others use red/cyan, go figure). This is, in some ways, the projectionist-proof form of 3-D in that no projectionist can screw it up (unlike polarized 3-D). The two images are printed on the same strip of film using the opposing colors. The glasses cancel out their color and our eyes each see the opposing color. We then put things together in our brain for the 3-D image. Pretty simple. Again, no projectionist can screw up the showing and no special screen are necessary. It can even be shown on TV. But, there are plenty of cons associated with this form of 3-D.

For one thing, though no projectionist can screw it up, any printing lab can. The colors have to be printed precisely or else the effect won't work. This goes for the glasses as well. This is also why until recently it has rarely worked on TV. The tubes in the standard CRT based tv vary their colors ever so slightly and therefore almost never match. Computer monitors and modern flat screen TVs have better color control, so 3-D, if printed right, does work on them.

Also, color anaglyph (sometimes called polybiochromatic!) plain out stinks. The glasses weaken the other colors in the film and if you're going to shoot a color anaglpyh film, you have to watch your color scheme (which people rarely do). I'm also not convinced that the depth in the color anaglyph image is as good as it is in the black and white image, but that might just be me.

The other big knock on anaglyphic 3-D is the amount of misinformation that swirls around it. For several years now, no end of so-called experts--just including one Roger Ebert (who must have been traumatized as a child by a 3-D movie since he so passionately hates them)--have posted over the internet and other media that all previously made 3-D movies were in the anaglyphic format. WRONG!

Now, first off, Ebert should know better since him and Siskel were reviewing films like Spacehunter and Jaws 3-D on their TV show in 1983. Come to it, if you look hard enough, their reviews of those movies might even be on Youtube. I still have my Jaws 3-D glasses and they were not red/blue, they were polarized. Beyond that, showings of 3-D movies from past years pop up every so often. The glasses are almost always polarized.

It is true that the earliest 3-D movies were anaglyphic. I've seen a couple from the 1920s and the three Pete Smith shorts (1936-1941) were all anaglyphic. There were a couple of early 1950s shorts shot that way, too. And post the 1950s, there has been a handful of movies released in anaglyphic format (the most recent being the two from Robert Rodriguez). But, every 3-D feature of both the 1950s and the 1980s, and most of the ones from the 1970s and 1990s, were polarized, not anaglyph. So where did this stupid rumor come from?

Two sources, I think. In the 1960s and 1970s, Columbia and Universal released to the home market on Super 8 and 8mm a couple of titles in anaglyphic 3-D. They were digests of Creature From the Black Lagoon, It Came From Outer Space, The Mad Magician, and the two 3 Stooges shorts. Likewise, in 1972, Universal had an idea to reissue Creature and ICFOS and did so in anaglyphic format. And in the late 1970s, Universal's 16mm rental outfit, Swank, rented anaglyphic prints of Creature, Revenge of the Creature, House of Wax, Dial M For Murder, and ICFOS. Similarly, another outfit called Kit Parker films released The Mad Magician, The Maze, and the two 3 Stooges shorts. This is also around the time the 7 anaglyphic porns made by Stephen Gibson were in circulation (met Steve, once. Nice guy and a 3-D enthusiast, but his choice of subject matter is unfortunate). And in the early 1980s, a company called 3-D Video Corporation--headed by, among other people, Dan Symmes (a 3-D expert)--coverted several 1950s titles to anaglyphic 3-D for broadcast on TV (none of which work, btw). The last of the 1950s films to show up on TV in anaglyph format was John Wayne's Hondo in 1991. So, that could explain where the rumors come from. But they are still wrong.

POLARIZED 3-D
Polarized 3-D is the better version of the format. There's been 3 major variations on it over the years: dual strip polarized, single strip polarized, and digital polarized (which is the modern form).

The 1950s movies were shown in dual strip polarized. This is arguably the best form of 3-D you can find. Each eye is shown through a separate projector. The two projectors are locked together with a mechanism and are (supposed to be) running in perfect synchronisation. The images are each shot through a cross polarized lens onto the screen and the glasses do the rest. The primary benefit to all this is since each image is going through it's own projector, loss of light is minimized. The image is brighter and sharper looking, which also makes for better depth. The primary con is that any lazy projectionist and/or theater owner can (and frequently did) screw it up.

For one thing, polarized 3-D requires an actual silver screen. White screens de-polarize the light which destroys the effect. And the screen needs to be silver and not just silver painted. But there were cheap theater owners who simply applied a paint of silver coat to their screens thinking that would work. It didn't. Also, the projectors, as noted above, needed to be in synchronisation. Projectionists would let them go out of synch and then not bother to fix them. To give you an idea of what that might look like, imagine watching a scene of somebody talking. Now imagine your left eye seeing them with their mouth open or their arm raised and the right eye seeing the arm down and the mouth closed. It's what's called retinal rivalry and it was the leading cause of the infamous 3-D headaches. Not the glasses, but the projection of the image.

In 1966, Arch Oboler, the man who started the 1950s craze with Bwana Devil, thought he had the synchronization problem beat. He developed a system where the two images were printed on the same strip of film (known as single strip polarized!). The images could be printed side by side or over and under (the more common version) and then shot through a special box known as a beam splitter. The beam splitter contained both polarized lenses. Oboler's idea also eliminated the necessity of having an intermission, which every 1950s film had (so the reels could be changed). While Oboler's idea looks good on paper, what he failed to take into consideration is the stupidity of the American projectionist and/or theater owner. If they could screw it up, they would.

For one thing, we were back to needing the silver screens (all polarized 3-D films need silver screens actually). If the theater didn't have one, you knew the effect wasn't going to work. Projectionists would fit the beam splitter on incorrectly in any sort of manner, including reverse 3-D (the background would pop out and the foreground would recede into the screen!). Think that's funny? I've seen it. At a 1996 showing of Dial M For Murder, the first 40 minutes were shown in reverse 3-D. Very aggravating. Also, if the film broke and the projectionist spliced it, if they didn't splice the corresponding left and right images, we were back to non-synched 3-D. Yuck. Combine that with the truly crappy 3-D movies released in the 1970s and 1980s and it's no wonder it didn't last.

Digital polarized might well be idiot--I mean projectionist--proof. The modern form uses a digital projector, a screen set up in front of said projector, and a silver screen along with circular polarized 3-D glasses. The film is made up of jpegs and put on a hard drive. The image alternates 144 times a second--6 times faster than the standard 24 frames per second film projector. Each second is composed of 72 movie images (36 left, 36 right) and 72 black images. The left image is shown, then a black, then a right. The special polarized screen in front of the projector also alternates the 144 times a second, changing the polarizing filter. Persistence of vision and the sheer speed of the projector allow us to see the 3-D image. And with the circular polarized glasses, you can do the one thing no other form of 3-D allows--tilt your head. Again, this seems to be projectionist proof, or maybe I've just lucked out and seen some competent showings. Only time will tell.

Okay, I hope you all took notes. There will be a test later. ;)

Next time I'll sing the praises of Hitchcock and/or Spielberg. See ya at the movies!