Who saw this before they saw the Airplane spoofs?
Reason I ask is it is hard to take this seriously when each scene as parodied and I am looking for that rather than watching it for its own sake.
Overall, not bad.
I saw it many times for around 18 years before Airplane!, so I always took it seriously, though I was a kid during the time I saw it the most, in the early-to-late 60s.
But I understand what you mean. Even though I saw it long before Airplane! was ever conceived, when watching THATM now some of the scenes do seem to have lost their edge! Of course, Airplane! was a direct parody of Zero Hour!, but there's enough stuff reminiscent of The High and the Mighty in it to undercut THATM's dramatics.
Having Robert Stack in both films doesn't help either, I suppose.
Thanks.
The lady in THATM who is doing her make up is an okay scene.
However, as soon as I saw it I thought about the woman in Airplane who is being knocked around in all the turbulence yet is determine to put on her lipstick no matter where it lands on her face; Funny stuff and it took me out of the mood for this film.
Well, Airplane! doesn't do any significant harm to my appreciation of The High and the Mighty. The fact that not much of THATM is directly parodied in Airplane!, and that I saw it so often long before Airplane!, helps me still enjoy THATM as is.
Zero Hour!, on the other hand, is significantly ruined dramatically for me because not only the plot but huge reams of the exact same dialogue were lifted verbatim by Airplane! -- things that were said in absolute seriousness in the one become hilarious in the context of the other.
I never though about the two women doing their make-up in The High and the Mighty and Airplane! but you might be right, the latter may well be a deliberate riff on the former.
The woman in THATM is Jan Sterling, who received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her performance. (So did her co-star Claire Trevor, the middle-aged floozy; both lost.) Unfortunately her scene in the existing prints of this film is missing approximately 10 seconds where she utters her best line. After removing her make-up and telling the drunken scientist (Paul Kelly) to look at her, she says something to him like, "Are you satisfied, mister?" In the current print the camera immediately cuts back to Kelly, who says "I was mistaken. You're a very courageous young lady."
But in the original film, just before cutting back to Kelly, Sterling added, "Or do you feel like a -- like a bored priest hiding behind a curtain?" For some reason that little snippet is missing from the restored print of the film. I still have a tape of it I made off the air in the 80s, though, with that line intact. I'm sorry it appears to have been lost. I think it was pretty shocking in 1954.
That's fascinating about that vanishing line. I can't say I specifically remember it. In between the time I first saw THatM on TV in the late '50s* and its much-belated release on home video, my only viewings of it had been a late-'70s CBS broadcast and an early-'90s museum screening.
Owing to what I know about storage of films' picture and sound elements, not to mention the cleanness of the cut, I have to assume this deletion was intentional upon its home video release.
On the other hand, I know little about Michael Wayne beyond his zealous guarding and iron-fisted control of his late father's legacy (and product), insofar as it's been within his legal power to do so. Do you think it's merely wild speculation to theorize - given what might be assumed about his upbringing - that, in spite of what was most assuredly his father's approval of the line's inclusion, it offended some personal sensibility of his?
*About that late-'50s broadcast: I believe it was on KHJ Los Angeles' "Million Dollar Movie" (they'd run the same film daily all week long) and I remember distinctly that it was shown letterboxed (long before the term was even coined).
I recall that because of the way my mother, sitting beside me in front of the old 21-inch Kaye-Halbert, complained about the black bar below the image on the screen: "Every time they show the plane descending like that, I keep thinking that's the ocean at the bottom of the picture and they're ditching!"
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I first saw this movie in the mid-60s on NYC's channel 9 (then WOR), which ran it incessantly, though almost always cut. I saw that CBS broadcast on September 5, 1979. (I remember the date because it was my grandfather's 79th birthday, and after the movie was over I called him in Arizona, where thanks to the time difference he and my grandmother were still watching it!) Then HBO ran it a number of times in 1982, which is when I made my off-the-air tape that's still in good condition.
That "bored priest" line got me even at age 12. It may be the one line (certainly one of the few) that I'd instantly know was missing.
I read that the negative of THATM that was kept in Wayne's house was so carelessly stored that it was soaking in a bucket of water or something and they feared the film would be lost. I'm astounded it was so badly handled but obviously they were able to salvage it.
Whether the deletion of that scene was out of necessity, or done deliberately, I can't say, but it occurs to me that the print Wayne had may indeed have had that scene deliberately cut, not because of Wayne or his survivors, but because it was a print used in places where local censors objected to the line. It's just too neat a cut to be the result of mishandling -- of that one portion being ruined and unsalvageable. But a print with that scene must exist somewhere, and I'd like to hope it'd be restored, even if imperfectly, in some re-release. Forlorn hope, I know.
They ran it widescreen in LA. in the 50s? Amazing. I suspect it was a modified aspect ratio, not the full 2.55:1, which really would have looked tiny on your 21-incher!
...because it was a print used in places where local censors objected to the line. It's just too neat a cut to be the result of mishandling -- of that one portion being ruined and unsalvageable.A much better theory than mine.
I suspect it was a modified aspect ratio, not the full 2.55:1, which really would have looked tiny on your 21-incher!The image I have in memory would put it at probably around 2:1. Even at that young age, I'd been to enough movies to have noticed the difference in what I would later learn was called "aspect ratio" between theater and television screens, and seemed to understand instinctively why it was being presented as it was (and thought my mother's confusion rather silly; a thought I kept to myself).
My guess is that, inasmuch as it was early days for TV broadcasts of 'Scope films, the vandalous pan-and-scan process had not yet been settled upon as the method of choice for broadcasts of such films.
But it's a funny thing about screen or image size: although I'd never choose to watch a film on something like a smartphone, I've seen enough of them on YouTube (or similar) windows to realize that it's not a barrier to being pulled in completely, and can be easily forgotten once that's taken place. Well, by me, anyway.
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Of course, eventually we (meaning those of us fortunate to have been present at the creation, small c) all grew up watching w/s movies in p&s formats on TV. Did you know, the guys who invented pan & scan won a special Academy Award in 1961 for their "achievement", or should I say brainstorm? Do I get a prize for all the abbreviations I managed to cram into that first sentence?
But I have to say that, given the format, the first-generation p&s prints were mostly fairly reasonable in the choices made about which parts of a film to record. They usually took care to cut back and forth between actors on the screen, not just for dialogue but even reaction shots. So while I wanted to see these movies in their proper widescreen format (and until the 80s, even the 90s, never thought I would), I had at least gotten some sense of what was going on in the films. The second generation p&s prints weren't as good in this regard.
Today, of course, we would never put up with this. Quite unreasonable of us, ain't it?
But I vividly recall what made the greatest impression on me when I finally saw some films in widescreen that I'd only seen in p&s for 30 years or more -- in the early 90s on the old, and good, AMC. It wasn't the width -- it was the clarity. That's what immediately leapt off the screen at me, from the moment the studio logo came on, even before the picture. Of course, in a p&s print you pick up the grain of the film, and there is no way to get around that. It's not horrendous, but when you see the same film properly the difference instantly hits you. I knew to expect it, but had no idea it would be so pronounced and immediate, especially since I wasn't thinking about that aspect at all, only seeing it letterboxed.
This also happened to me when I saw THATM in w/s on TV before getting the DVD, only then I was expecting it. (How about all those abbreviations?)
Widescreen story: Back in the late 90s I went into Manhattan to see a showing of World Without End (1956), one of my favorite 50s sci-fi movies and the first science fiction film shot in CinemaScope. I had never seen it widescreen, but when I got to the theater they had a note up that they had been unable to find the last reel in 'Scope and would instead show a p&s print for that final ten minutes. (No refunds, of course.) When the time came, the movie stopped for a few moments, the curtains were drawn back to standard-screen size, and the film resumed in the p&s print. Not surprisingly, it was at first a bit blurry, so naturally somebody yelled, "Focus!" Whereupon, from somewhere deep in the darkness, another voice called out, "Width!"
Actually, I had seen that film in its widescreen format -- in the early 60s on good old channel 9's Million Dollar Movie, which always ran a single film 16 times in one week. But while they showed the whole image, they didn't show it "unsqueezed". It was the original print but not reformatted anamorphically. So everyone and everything looked about nine feet tall and six inches wide -- but, I did see the full image! At that time I was too young to know what the heck was going on, and I never saw it shown that way again, but I look back on it as a bizarre childhood memory that probably scarred me for life somewhere.
You know, I've never watched a movie on YouTube or on line at all. Individual snippets, yes, but never anything near an entire film. I guess I'm still wedded to more physical media. I know, I know. I'm just so 19th century.
Although individual titles would often be released in both P&S and letterboxed versions, LaserDiscs had adopted the latter as the preferred configuration by the mid-'80s. We bought our first LD player a year after our first VCR (Beta, of course), and became spoiled letterbox snobs early on.
Part of the image clarity phenomenon you observed may have had something to do with many P&S broadcast prints being 16mm (at one company at which I worked, we were still delivering 16mm prints to many stations as late as '88). Another had to do with the nature of the anamorphic formats themselves, which increased apparent film grain in the stretching process (it suddenly occurs to me you no doubt already knew that). And over time, finer grain film stocks and better lenses continued to be developed.
There is some irony in the increased clarity of letterboxed images involving a lower actual resolution, utilizing nearly 40% fewer lines - or pixels, as we say today - than a full screen image. But it's all pretty much akin to a snapshot that looks fine as a 3X5 print, and not so hot as a 12X14 one. But there I go again, saying something you already knew.
Your World Without End experience reminds me of a screening of East Of Eden that was done at my high school: they had only a P&S print, but the projector they used had only a 'Scope lens. You can imagine the result (giving James Dean and Julie Harris roughly the proportions of William Howard Taft and Kate Smith).
I've resorted to YouTube and the like only when the film involved was something I simply couldn't find anywhere else. And the video quality has usually been such that expanding to full screen made them unwatchable, so I bear with the little window. But as I say, I can still lose myself in it. I remember an occasion when David and I spent the weekend with friends, and watched The Birds in bed on a five-inch color TV perched on one of our tummies. It was surprising how quickly we forgot about the screen size.
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Actually, you've told me some things I didn't know, at least not in the details, so thank you for that, it explains much. I hadn't considered the idea that the "stretching" process itself would also have an impact on "grain", though it makes perfect sense. But having to focus a camera on half of a film, meaning the recording camera was obliged to zoom into the original print, would also pick up on the grain. But while I suppose at some level I understood this, consciously none of it occurred to me for many years, until I really began thinking about the nature of the widescreen format and the pan & scan process. But there is something of a paradox in the fact that as you said the television resolution of a widescreen film is actually less than for something in so-called full screen.
I never got into LD because of the expense (and the fact that you couldn't record on them, vs. videotape), and also because by, what, circa 1990 or so I was reading about the digital revolution that would one day bring what turned out to be DVDs. So I just waited. The same held for getting a dish antenna system. I knew people who bought those huge dish antennas (antennae?) to get satellite signals but a friend, an ex-president of NBC, told me that within a few years the much smaller dishes we have now would be coming along, and not to waste money on a soon-to-be-antiquated technology. I actually hadn't intended to, but I was glad to know for once I was doing something right, especially since it imparted the illusion of my being uncannily prescient.
I don't know about this business of watching The Birds on a five-inch set balanced upon one's tummy. The pecking sequences might seem a bit pointed.
Anyway, how would a film with a really wide aspect ratio, such as The High and the Mighty (which you will note I labored high and mightily to get in here someplace), look on such a small screen? Have you ever considered what might happen if the plane ditched on your stomach? Think how many ships and aircraft they'd have to commit for a navel rescue.
But I never knew that William Howard Taft and Kate Smith starred in an earlier f[l]atscreen version of East of Eden. Huh. Who played the Ray Massey role? Roscoe Arbuckle?
Have you ever considered what might happen if the plane ditched on your stomach?The sort of belly-flop you suggest is abs-olutely beyond my ability to contemplate.
Speaking of tiny screens and aspect ratios, what do you think of these people who hold their smartphones vertically to record video? 'S'matter with 'em?
Could abandonment of the wide screen in favor of the tall screen be the shape of things to come (ten-foot-wide theaters with twelve balconies..."Filmed In VertiVision")?
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The sort of belly-flop you suggest is abs-olutely beyond my ability to contemplate.
I was just ribbin' ya. Actually I was ripped on a six-pack when I wrote that.
Could abandonment of the wide screen in favor of the tall screen be the shape of things to come
I saw the BFI restoration of that shape of Things to Come in its original Highscreen version and it was awesome. That plastic bubble over Raymond Massey's head never looked so imposing as when it's seven feet tall and Massey himself is both massive and, if I'm not mistaken, even more bubbly.
But I can see why, like 3-D and Emerg-o, Highscreen and its US trademarked version Vertivision never caught on. The audience was in just too much discomfort having to crane their necks to see the entire film as, in the words of the cliché, "it was extended to be seen", and filming itself required the use of too many crane shots to make it affordable. The attempted Russian revival of the process for The Cranes are Flying ran into the same problem: two of them in fact, since during filming the cranes kept running into the tall buildings constructed to convey the film's message, and the director finally realized that the process eviscerated that message by changing his deep meaning to a tall story. Eventually all these films had to be released "short", but by then the damage had been done, and the studios had to cease their no-longer-profitable short films divisions, which explains why The Three Stooges moved into features. Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk. share
I'm a week late, but still wish to offer a round of applause for those tall tales.
Onward and (ahem) upward!
Poe! You are...avenged!