Word: cinerama
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...moviegoer will soon know all about Khartoum. That's where the well-known dervish leader Sir Laurence Olivier and thousands of white-turbaned extras rode out of a Cinerama desert in 1885 and did in Her Majesty's General Charlton Heston (see CINEMA). The movie stops there, but the British did not. Thirteen years later, they recaptured the city and slaughtered 11,000 dervishes, including all known male descendants of the character Olivier portrays, the fierce prophet El Mahdi...
Khartoum looks something like the fall of the Alamo as told by Lawrence of Arabia. Three months in the filming in the desert along the Nile, this Cinerama spectacle enlisted the services of 2,500 Egyptian army troops for some of the noisiest slaughter scenes ever filmed. It took 70,000 gallons of water a day just to keep the cast from evaporating, and United Artists sent enough medical equipment out on location to serve a division in Viet Nam. Nonetheless Khartoum is not just another exercise in wide-screen warfare: emphasizing subtlety rather than savagery, it convincingly retells...
...Cinerama's Russian Adventure. "Who are the Russians? What is Russia? We couldn't possibly supply answers to these questions, but we're going to have a lot of fun trying," drawls Narrator Bing Crosby, fingering a balalaika. Bing thus introduces this Russian-made travel triptych, a cultural exchange import aquiver with evidence that the Soviets lack Cinerama's skill at matching seams. In Kinopanorama-an equivalent three-screen process-cities, rivers, mountains and ice floes all hump up at the center and slope away precipitously...
Comedy relief is supplied by a wilderness fantasy in which big brown bears chase chickens, steal honey and drive off in tractors. As ever, Cinerama achieves its surest effects in direct relation to its forward velocity, now hurtling along a snowy course with a fleet of troikas pulled by frenzied horses, now navigating with loggers on the turbulent Tisza River. The viewer may not feel that he has been through Russia, but he will almost certainly feel that Russia has been through...
Director Ken Annakin (Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines) skillfully deploys the tanks across the Cinerama playing fields, but the end result is just another run on the bloodbank of the war. Bulge's sole achievement is that veterans may emerge from it feeling at least as affronted as Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, defender of Bastogne, whose imperishable reply to German surrender demands was simply, "Nuts...