CINEMASCOPE, which offered movies nearly three times as wide as they were high, was one of the more successful gimmicks Hollywood introduced in the early ’50s to compete with TV.
Special lenses were used to squeeze wide-screen images onto standard 35mm film, with corresponding lenses attached to theater projectors to show movies that dazzled audiences accustomed to watching TV-like square screens.
The romantic comedy “How To Marry a Millionaire” was the first movie made in the process by 20th Century Fox, but the studio decided a biblical spectacular it was already filming in the standard format would be a better way to introduce CinemaScope to the public.
So it made “The Robe” – starring Richard Burton as a Roman centurion who presides over Jesus Christ’s crucifixion – in both formats. The film was a huge hit when it debuted in CinemaScope in September 1953.
But the years took their toll on this historically important film, which is being released tomorrow in a spectacular restoration on the high-definition Blu-ray format as well as on standard DVD.
“We’ve worked on ‘The Robe’ a couple of times before in the last decade, but it’s never been more than passable,” says Schawn Belson, head of restoration for Fox. “The problem is that the original camera negative was damaged and faded, and it had been repaired with something like 18 different generations of dupes over the years.”
The painstaking restoration, which took four years, used materials from vaults all over the world. Thousands of hours were spent tweaking the audio track, where the pitch wavered noticeably in Alfred Newman’s score.
Belson said the restorers decided not to fix “obvious distortions on the far left and far right side of the image” after determining they resulted from the prototype lenses used to shoot the film.
“We could have made it look perfect, but that’s not the way audiences saw it back in 1953,” he said.
The Blu-ray release even allows viewers the option of simultaneously watching the version of “The Robe” not filmed in wide-screen, which uses radically different camera angles and blocking, as well as showing subtle differences in the actors’ performances.
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