If you click on Thunder Road's technical specs, it says it was filmed with a spherical lens. That means "flat" (normal 1.37:1), not "scope" (2.35:1). Most movie theaters would have shown it "soft matted" (a removable plate in the projector aperture) with a screen ratio of 1.85:1, which is wide screen, but not as wide as CinemaScope. When transferred to video, they would use the "open matte" technique, removing the soft matte, which basically shows a little extra picture information at the top and bottom of the screen. The filmmakers would have had to "protect" this image area, so that no movie lights or boom microphones creep into the picture. Some spherically-lensed movies were made a "hard matte" built into the camera gate, so you can't open it up for TV. In that case, the film has to be shown letterbox (on a 1.33:1 TV screen), or with the sides clipped off (pan & scan optional). Bottom line: you probably saw it in 1.85:1 soft matted in the movie projector.
To learn more about "open matte" video transfers, go to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_matte
The page on CinemaScope is good, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinemascope
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jobla
9 years ago
The new combo Blu-ray/DVD set, scheduled to be released on April 7, 2015, is promising a widescreen 1:85-1 aspect ratio. This will be the first widescreen release on home video.
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