Word: screens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...last week's NBC-TV Macbeth was a triumph. The camera work was so carefully plotted that, on the screen, the play had a novel air of extreme fluidity. Oddly enough, because of the narrow range imposed by the color-TV control board, Director George Schaefer used only three cameras on the set and one on a platform, instead of the five cameras that handled the black-and-white telecast of Hamlet two years ago. However Schaefer achieved his remarkable mobility by keeping his camera moving into and out of the scene during each long sequence...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...