By Ed Lowry
With the release of Filmways' Comin' at Ya, 3-D returns to the American movie screen, but it's anybody's guess whether it's here to stay. What's really comin' at ya is a trial balloon and a lot of industry hype.
If Hollywood soothsayers have their way, that quintessentially 50s Life magazine photo of a theater full of bespectacled movie watchers may not seem so quaint any more. Banking on the hope that we're all anxious to don 3-D glasses, United Artists Theatres announced last April that they would be spending $60 million over the next four years to produce six major 3-D features. A process they call "Stereospace 3-D" will supposedly revolutionize the stereoscopic process, eliminate audience eye- strain and open a new world to the creative filmmaker. But we'll still have to wear those glasses.
Back in the early 50s, when TV was taking its toll and movie attendance hit its deepest slump, 3-D was marketed along with such gimmicks as Cinerama and Smell- O- Vision in an attempt to give audiences what they couldn't get from the video tube.
Soon everybody wanted to cash in on 3-D movies. The process was used to enhance the horror effects of House of Wax and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Alfred Hitchcock even shot Dial M for Murder in the third dimension. By the time Dial M was ready for release in 1954, however, the public was tired of wearing their shades, and the studio execs decided to send the movie to the theatres flat. In fact, Dial M was never shown publicly in 3-D until a couple of years ago when a resourceful New York revival theatre located an original print and screened it to an enthusiastic reception.
Technology has definitely improved, though. Those famous red and blue glasses are a thing of the past. They were only good for black & white movies anyway, since one image on the screen was projected in red and the other in blue, producing a volatile orange glow somewhere on the viewer's retina so that nothing like natural color could be simulated. The process for color movies is much more satisfying. It employs glasses with each lens polarized in an opposite direction so that only one of the polarized images on the screen reaches each eye and colors come through almost perfectly. If we are to believe United Artists, all the bugs have been worked out. But United Artists didn't get there first.
The new harbinger of 3-D is Comin' at Ya, a stereoscopic Italian Western purchased by Filmways. Presented in "Dimensionscope 3-D" and filmed in something called "Optimax III," the film melds 3-D effects with the operatic stylistics of the spaghetti Western. Its star, Tony Anthony, is a big name in Italy with only a handful of fans west of the Mediterranean. So, as indicated by the film's American title and its ad campaign, Filmways decided to push the 3-D instead of the movie.
In fact, Comin' at Ya is not "the first major feature film to be shot in the 3-D process in more than 25 years," as its press material claims. Ten years ago an X- rated extravaganza called The Stewardesses thrust three- dimensional body parts into the faces of its audience, and in 1974 Andy Warhol's cohort Paul Morrissey gave us the ultra- gory, high- camp Frankenstein with some of the cleverest 3-D effects ever foisted on the public. 3-D never went away entirely.
Hopefully, this time we'll find out what 3-D is good for, and that means putting the process in the hands of those who might think as much of the movie they're making as the process they're using. Halloween II was originally supposed to be shot in 3-D, but those plans fell through--and anyway, John Carpenter isn't even directing it. There was also an unsupported rumor George Romero might do a 3-D version of Part III of his Living Dead trilogy. And just imagine what might happen if a whiz kid like Stanley Kubrick decided to turn his high tech genius to stereoscopy. If the 3-D craze develops according to plan, we can only hope it lasts long enough so that somebody gets a chance to develop a 3-D aesthetic before they're caught short like Alfred Hitchcock.