A Few Words About A few words about...™ How the West Was Won -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[Dennis Nicholls]

Same here. I saw it during the original release at the Cinerama theater (I forget the actual name) in San Francisco, and haven't seen it since. I would have been 11 years old at the time.

Costco.com has the BRD HTWWW for $23.49 so it's likely to be that price in the stores.

 

[Brian-W]

For those that attended the screening today (I did), the first 100 attendees received a copy of the BD release of HTWWW. I commented on the screening itself in another HTWWW thread in this forum.

 

[RolandL]

Same here. I saw it during the original release at the Cinerama theater (I forget the actual name) in San Francisco, and haven't seen it since. I would have been 11 years old at the time.
QUOTE]

That was probably the Orpheum - Orpheum Theatre .

 

[DeeF]

I'm having my first AHA moment watching the smilebox presentation of this movie on my 60" Pio Kuro plasma.

AHA! THIS is what High-Def should look like. This is a sensational experience on Blu-Ray.

 

[Robert Crawford]

I watched HTWWW on a Cinerama screen in NYC when I was a kid back in 1963. My memories of that experience aren't vivid except for a couple of parts in the film, particularly the buffalo stampede and the train robbery. Since then I've seen this film probably 20 times over the years with the last time being about five years ago at the Cinerama Dome in LA with my good friends Ron Epstein and Steve Simon. It was a great experience, but this viewing came before the restoration. So as I watched the BRD today, I had tears of joy in my eyes as I viewed this film twice today. Once with the Smilebox version and then a second time with the letterbox version and the audio commentary turned on. There have been greater films made than HTWWW, but films like this movie is why I got into HT in the first place. I had a great six hours experience today that will continue later this week when I viewed the documentary. I give Warner kudos for doing a great job with this home video presentation. One day, I hope I'm lucky enough again to watch this restored film in the Cinerama Dome.






Crawdaddy

 

[CraigF]

This sounds like an "event" BD. I honestly can't remember if I've seen this movie since it was practically "new", and with RAH's grand seal of approval, I'll have to get it for sure. In the last few years I've really been enjoying the westerns, thanks to DVD and BD.

 

[John Hermes]

Robert, which version did you enjoy the most in your home theater, Smilebox or standard?

 

[Bleddyn Williams]

I had this preordered with Warner. Last week, having a "Too much money on films!" moment, I emailed Warner to cancel. Needless to say, they didn't. It arrived yesterday.

And am I glad it did! The packaging is great - I'm a fan of the digibooks, and was impressed by this double-sized beauty.

When I put the first disc in to take a look, and saw the aerial shot over the mountains, it looked like it came from Planet Earth! So clear and detailed, all the spots on the lens in plain view. I jumped around and was absolutely thrilled by the detail in the PQ of the segments I saw. This looks like an awesome release!

Then I put in the Smilebox version. Although my set is only 53", I found the curved screen simulation, coupled with the awesome PQ, to be really inviting. The shot of Jimmy Stewart canoeing down the river seemed good enough that you could just jump in!

I can't wait to watch this one - and it'll be the Smilebox version.

 

[Paul_Scott]

I was under the mistaken impression that this release would only include the smilebox version. I was thrilled and grateful to find that isn't the case.
Unfortunately for my particular constant height set-up, both versions fail slightly to achieve the impact they should. But I was very suprised to find that I'm able to fudge the smilebox version enough to strike the best compromise. If I zoom this version out so that the 'smileboxing' starts about 1/4 of the way in on each side, I have a good balance between height and width. It isn't ideal, but otherwise both the full smilebox image and the full 2.89 image incorporate too much unused space that I can't mask off (it's a CH set to a 2.4:1 max ratio).
Even with some of the outer edges clipped, the distortion at the sides, coupled with the smaller center panel still give off that quasi fisheye vibe.
Beyond all that, this is as impressive a presentation of a classic film as has been released to this point- probably not a big stretch to say THE most impressive due to what was accomplished with making the three seperate panels look as near seamless as they do.
I know Robert has put a lot of effort into Godfather and I'm sure that will be another beauty, but I don't see anything on the horizon this year that will challenge it.
Bravo, Warner!

 

[Robert Harris]

CRITIC’S CHOICE
New DVDs: ‘How the West Was Won’

By DAVE KEHR
Published: September 8, 2008
HOW THE WEST WAS WON

Warner Home Video

The best reason for buying a Blu-ray player right now is Warner Home Video’s high-definition version of “How the West Was Won,” a film made 46 years ago in the highest-definition moving picture medium the world had seen: Cinerama. With its three strips of 35-millimeter film projected side by side with a slight overlap on a gigantic, curved screen, Cinerama offered six times the resolution — which is to say, six times as much visual information — of the standard film of 1952, when it was first used commercially.

Not even the finest home theater installation will be able to reproduce the scale and resolution of the Cinerama experience, or anything close to it. But moving from standard-definition DVD to Blu-ray generates a shock analogous to what the audiences of 1952 must have felt when the curtains parted to reveal the panoramic screen.

The images are so crisp as to feel almost unreal; the depth of field seems dreamlike, infinite, with the blades of grass in the foreground as sharply in focus as the snow-capped mountains in the distant background. Unfortunately, there is no way to bend even a flat-panel monitor to imitate the immersive experience of Cinerama’s curved screen, which tried to fill every speck of the viewer’s peripheral vision. But sit close enough, and that sense of enveloping depth returns. It feels like a three-dimensional experience, and in some ways is a more convincing illusion (and a much less visually painful one) than that provided by the two-camera 3-D processes that followed in the wake of Cinerama’s popular success.

The first Cinerama features were travelogues, transporting 1950s spectators to parts of the world most would never see. (Many of the earliest Edison and Lumière films, at the turn of the 20th century, fulfilled a similar function.) Released in the United States in 1963, “How the West Was Won” would be the first — and, as it turned out, the last — narrative film to be shot in the three-strip Cinerama process.

In a sense the film’s guiding aesthetic is still that of the travelogue, but instead of visiting various scenic locations, it makes brief stops at most of the symbolic locations of the western genre, from the embarkation points of the Erie Canal to the California mountains of the Gold Rush.

The script, by James R. Webb (“Vera Cruz”), does its best to touch all the thematic bases of the genre too: the male characters include a mountain man (James Stewart) and a river pirate (Walter Brennan); a wagon master (Robert Preston) and a riverboat gambler (Gregory Peck); a builder of railroads (Richard Widmark) and a frontier marshal (George Peppard). The main female characters are even more broadly archetypal: a pair of sisters, portentously named Lilith (Debbie Reynolds, who becomes a saloon singer and budding capitalist) and Eve (Carroll Baker, who stakes out a farm on a Mississippi riverbank and mothers two boys).

As a dramatic narrative “How the West Was Won” doesn’t work all that well. Few of the characters are on screen long enough to establish identities beyond those of the stars who play them. Most of the episodes are thinly developed, and over all the film has a jerky, stop-and-start rhythm, perhaps because it is the work of three different directors.

Henry Hathaway (“True Grit”) reportedly was in charge of the project and directed three episodes (“The Rivers,” “The Plains” and “The Outlaws”). John Ford directed one (“The Civil War”), and George Marshall another (“The Railroad,” although Hathaway later said he had to reshoot much of Marshall’s material).

Instead this is a movie of visual epiphanies, ingeniously realized in the face of crippling stylistic challenges. The Cinerama camera — an 800-pound behemoth that resembled a steel-girded jukebox — could move forward and backward with ease and elegance, resulting in some of the most impressive moments in the film (like the long tracking shot through a river town that opens “The Rivers”). But it couldn’t pan from side to side without creating registration problems, and close-ups were all but impossible to achieve with the system’s short 27-millimeter lenses.

Moreover, characters couldn’t move freely across the wide screen, because crossing the two join lines — where the images overlapped — would create a distracting jump, and the action (beyond the broad movements of rushing trains or stampeding buffalo) had to be restricted to the center of the screen.

Hathaway and Marshall are resourceful and craftsmanlike in dealing with these limitations, finding ways to position the actors so that the join lines are hidden, or filling the unused space beyond the center frame with vertiginously detailed landscapes that fall off into infinite distance.

But it is John Ford who rises to the challenge most poetically, chiefly by ignoring it. “The Civil War” is an exquisite miniature (unfortunately padded out by some battle sequences lifted from “Raintree County,” an earlier MGM Civil War film) that consists of only three scenes: a mother (Ms. Baker) sends a son (Peppard) off to war; the son has a horrible experience as night falls on the battlefield of Shiloh; the son returns and finds that his mother has died. The structure has a musical alternation: day, night, day; exterior, interior, exterior; stillness, movement, stillness.

In the first and last scenes the famous Fordian horizon line extends the entire length of the extra-wide Cinerama frame. In the aftermath of the battle the horizon line disappears in darkened studio sets. The sense of the sequence is profoundly antiwar — Generals Sherman and Grant, played by John Wayne and Henry Morgan, briefly appear as a couple of disheveled, self-pitying drunks — and it gradually becomes apparent that the elderly Ford is revisiting one of his early important works, the 1928 drama “Four Sons.”

The expressionistic middle sequence, with its studio-built swamp, refers to F. W. Murnau, whose “Sunrise” was one of the great influences on the young Ford, while the open-air sequences that bracket it, with their unmoving camera, long-shot compositions and rootedness in the rural landscape, recall the work of the American pioneer D. W. Griffith.

When, in the final panel of Ford’s triptych, a gust of wind tousles Peppard’s hair in the foreground and then continues across to the forest in the middle distance and on to the stand of trees in the most distant background, it seems like a true miracle of the movies: a breath of life, moving over the face of the earth. No less formidable a filmmaker than Jean-Marie Straub has called “The Civil War” John Ford’s masterpiece; for the first time, thanks to this magnificent new edition, I think I know what he’s talking about. Birth, death, rebirth. (Warner Home Video, $34.99, Blu-ray; $59.98, three-disc standard-definition collector’s edition; $20.98, two-disc standard definition edition, not rated)

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Got my copy today from Amazon.

I really wanted to sit and watch the film tonight but I had a two
week's worth of Tivo to catch up on, and of course, the forum is
a constant diversion.

Anyhow...

The biggest choice for me to make tomorrow is whether to watch
the smilebox or widescreen version.

Yeah, I mean how stupid I can be? It would seem natural that the
smilebox version would be the way to go as it shows more picture
information than the widescreen version.

However, I wanted to be absolutely certain I was making the right
choice on which version to see, as I don't have time to watch both
versions back-to-back.

One more thing...

I really am touched by Robert Crawford's post above. This may seem
a bit overdramatic to some, but being introduced to How The West
Was Won by Mr. Crawford and having the opportunity to see it at
the Cinerama, was an experience I will always cherish and never forget.

I fell in love with this film for no other reason that its story, its
cast and being immersed in the Cinerama experience.

If you own ONE title on Blu-ray this year, this is the film to buy.

 

[Steve Tannehill]

Ron, I am going with the Smilebox version first, if for no other reason than it emulates the deeply-curved look of the Cinerama screen.

I ordered from Amazon, but UPS claims that the package is out for delivery as of this morning. It never showed up on the doorstep tonight. Sigh. Maybe tomorrow.

- Steve

 

[Robert Harris]

That may be overstating the case a bit. Anything interesting coming out in two weeks?

Happen to have a pet?

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Not that it really matters, but are the seams removed equally on
both versions?

My next question would be, if it is the same picture information
on both discs, what would be the main reasons to watch the
smilebox version over the widescreen?

Just trying to understand better the difference in the two.

 

[Robert Harris]

The smilebox is a quite remarkable concept that gives the feeling of viewing on a huge 90 foot screen, except now a bit smaller, and without 800 people around you crunching on popcorn.

And hopefully your feet won't stick to the floor when you stand.

 

[Robert Crawford]

After watching both versions, I can't say one way or another which version I preferred except the Smilebox version had a newness to it that the letterbox version didn't have for me. Perhaps because I viewed that version first.

 

[DavidJ]

Dang it, I must stop reading this thread. I keep telling myself that I'm not going to blind buy anything and that I must rent first, but I keep coming here and my resolve weakens. This sounds like a great presentation and package.

 

[Derek M Germano]

Ron,

I reviewed the Blu-ray over the weekend. Go for the SmileBox version. It is as close as one will ever come to experiencing Cinerama at home- a truly amazing home presentation.

Enjoy!

 

[Mike Frezon]

It's not the popcorn crunching I mind so much. It's the cell phones and constant chatter that are getting harder and harder to take. But that's a discussion for another thread!

Thanks for asking those questions, Ron about the differences between versions. I am still not sure which one I will turn to first. But the smilebox sounds pretty cool.

 

[Vincent_P]

The lack of Sticky Feet Syndrome and the crunchy sound of popcorn consumption surrounding me clearly are inaccurate to a correct reproduction of the original theatrical presentation. This release is a travesty!

Vincent