Theatrical Aspect Ratio
IMDb lists Claudine's aspect ratio as 1.85-1 but all the versions I can find are 4-3. Now, played in VLC on your computer it's easy to crop the image to 1.85-1. Does anyone know whether *that's* how the theatrical projection went, i.e., whether what we've got on dvd etc. is just the open matte version of the theatrical presentation, so that what people saw in 1974 was the cropped/matted to 1.85-1 of teh image we have? The alternative is that the theatrical image was genuinely wider so that what we've got on dvd is a pan-and-scan TV version.
I ask this question because, frankly, the cropped version on my computer looks bad - it often chops off heads and even when there's no head-chopping (and there is lots of headroom in many shots) the loss of information at the bottom of the frame is significant. More generally, to me at least the cropped frame just feels crowded and unnatural. So, is there a genuine wider version of this important film out there?