Cinerama films were basically extremely widescreen travelogues using 3 projected images placed side by side on a curved screen. Right before the end, however, Cinerama joined up with MGM to make 2 fiction features using the process. Still, I think the best use of the format, and certainly the one which appeals to me personally, since it returns film to one of its earliest functions as a way to show people what other places & peoples in the world look like, is as a medium for travelogues.

Recently, I was watching extras on the Criterion DVD of Jules And Jim where Truffaut talks about his dislike for documentary images. He says to isolate an image of say, the Nile Valley, is "suspect" because you are telling your audience this is beautiful. He says that if you put a story element like 2 people quarrelling in front of the valley then you can discover it's beauty by accident. I see his point but disagree. Images of nature, images we consider tourist, are attractions on their own. People don't fly to Peru and climb to Machu Picchu just to argue in front of it. They go to look. And since I for one cannot afford to make the trip or if I can cannot tour the whole world, I'm thankful for the travelogue and am sad that it has gone out of fashion.

The first Cinerama film comes from 1952 and the Cinerama films express a very Eisenhower-era view of the world with America at the center and all the rest of the world featured in a kind of stereotyped quaintness. Merian C. Cooper who helped work on the first film stated openly that he made the final America, The Beautiful sequence to stir patriotic feeling and this propagandistic aspect can be seen as an element in most of the Cinerama films.

And, when the focus turns away from America, other countries are still view through "Ameri-centric" viewpoints. The Japanese sequence in Seven Wonders of the World is a good example. While other American films of the same time period like The Bridges at Toko-Ri and House of Bamboo were more accurate in showing 50s audiences a view of a pushy, prostituted, neon Japan, Seven Wonders shows us nothing but beautiful kimono-clad "Madame Butterflys" dancing with umbrellas in some middle-class fantasy of Japan as a place of nothing but service geisha and easy sex tourism. It's a "picture-postcard" view of Japan and one that is completely false as a real representation of the place. In the same film there is a brief scene of the children of American oil company workers playing baseball in Saudi Arabia. It's another good example of the Cinerama aesthetic. Wherever Americans go they ignore the place and make it America. Cinerama is a kind of proxy, cinematic imperialism where if you aren't actually invading a country with troops or pipelines, you can mold it visually into a user-friendly form you'd like to have it be.

The films have fallen into the public domain so the Australian guy is able to release them. However, the dvds themselves were literally filmed off actual showings of the films in theaters so their visual quality is poor. The prints were often washed-out & patched together from various old original 50s prints to begin with and then shot on video besides. But even if it takes a strain to watch them, it's possible to finally see these rare films and even to imagine what it must've been like to originally see them in a theater. However, these are pale imitations of that. What great, clean colorful prints of Cinerama films were like as shown in Cinerama theaters can only be approximated by seeing these poorer versions letterboxed on your TV set.

However, their sound quality is quite good in some cases which allows for listening to their scores even if the images are washed-out.

The score to Seven Wonders is by David Raksin, Jerome Moross, Emil Newman, and Sol Kaplan!! The Moross sections are very obvious. They also sound better than the re-recording on Silva which comes close but misses the force of the music (as usual). The film is almost wall-to-wall scoring and both the score and the narration are very loud and in your face. The film kind of blares at you in the hope of overpowering you with sights and score.

Cinerama Holiday and Windjammer both have scores by Morton Gould. Louis de Rochemont produced both films and so they don't share the same aesthetic as the Lowell Thomas films. The narration, the images, and the scoring are much more low key, much less propagandistic (or at least the pro-USness of them isn't underlined twice). Both films still involve scenes with the US Navy, but they don't share the God-Country-Family format of the Lowell Thomas films.

There was no significant difference between Cinerama and Cinemiracle, both used 3 projectors showing 3 images side by side but Cinemiracle used special mirrors to blur the join lines where the images meet on the screen and the print on the DVD seems to have less trouble with the image breaking up at the join lines than the Cinerama films do.

Cinerama's Russian Adventure is the poorest of the lot as it comes from a Super 8mm filming of a rare screening of a washed out print made many years ago.

In response to Cinerama, the Russians created Kinopanorama, basically stealing the idea of the 3 screen process for their own use which they used for a series of films from 1958 into the early 60s. In the mid-60s, someone from Cinerama contacted the Russians and made a compilation film from the Russian films. The compilation was narratted by Bing Crosby and shown in the US as Cinerama's Russian Adventure. The Russian film covers a lot of different ground, but the editors put in too many dance and musical numbers which is a serious draw-back in all the Cinerama films. However, the footage of the Moscow Circus is absolutely amazing! The film concludes with the Bolshoi Ballet Corps but just about everything is an anti-climax after the circus sequence.

Picking up these 4 films from Australia isn't cheap as the guy charges a lot for them. But he should make you a deal if you buy them all which is better than nothing.

If you are interested, contact Peter Mansor at cinerama10@hotmail.com

This is the same address to use to pay him for the films via Paypal.

Just tell him you heard that he had Cinerama films available for sale on DVD and you'd like to know more information about getting them including pricing information and that should do it. Expect to pay about $35-40 each or less if you get 3 or 4 of them. Some of the films come with an extras dvd that has documentary footage about Cinerama including a short piece with Lowell Thomas interviewing Dimitri Tiomkin about the Search for Paradise score.