Cinemascope
Was this the last American film made in Cinemascope?
shareYes, until Don Bluth revived the format with Anastasia (1997)
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MovieChat Forums > Caprice (1967) Discussion > Cinemascope
It was probably shot with Panavision lenses anyway, so it is really CinemaScope in name only. Fox had contracts with Bausch & Lomb to use their lenses under the CinemaScope name. But increasingly from 1960 onwards, productions would use the better Panavision lenses, yet release films under the CinemaScope name.
shareI believe you are correct. I always wondered why Fox did not continue to use CinemaScope in their movie credits as they used to say Cinemascope lenses by Bausch & Lomb. Just exchange B & L for Panavision. They have gone back to using the CinemaScope extension in their fanfare in the last 10 years or so. This extension showed that the movie was to be in CinemaScope, I believe back in the fifties and sixties.
shareCaprice was shot with B&L lenses. You can tell on big close-ups faces are very distorted (CinemaScope mumps). Also, if you look on the DVD there are photographs of the film being made, with Leon Shamroy standing next to the camera that is clearly fitted with B&L lenses.
shareFox was too cheap to invest in new camera equipment and lenses so they were the last studio to use CinemaScope well into the 1960's.
By the mid 1960's all the other studios used Panavision or Techniscope for their 35mm widescreen releases.
It was at the insistence of actor Frank Sinatra (Von Ryan's Express) and director Robert Wise (The Sand Pebbles) that Fox relented and discontinued CinemaScope in favor of Panavision by 1967.
Funny thing. "Lucky Me" a 1954 Warner Brothers film starring Doris Day was touted as the "first musical filmed in CinemaScope." What a coincidence. I saw "Caprice" in the theatre and it was certainly shown on a very wide screen which looked like CinemaScope to me.
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