by Mark Kermode
Alongside such high-kicking anomalies as Kiss Me Kate, the two 3-D titles that everyone seems to remember and revere from this period are House of Wax, the first 3-D film to boast stereo sound, and Alfred Hitchcock’s allegedly epochal Dial M for Murder. In 2005, my partner Linda Ruth Williams and I programmed a ‘History of Horror’ season at London’s National Film Theatre in which we included a 3-D screening of House of Wax, the film which had briefly established horror legend Vincent Price as the reigning ‘King of 3-D’ (he went on to star in The Mad Magician, Son of Sinbad and Dangerous Mission, all shot and widely projected in 3-D). The print we showed was old and somewhat colour-faded, and we’d had some difficulty securing the rights to screen it since Warner Bros. was in the process of remaking House of Wax and had therefore withdrawn the old version from circulation – a traditional marketing ploy designed to prevent a remake being unfavourably compared to the original. As it turned out, the new version of House of Wax (which was made in 2-D) was notable only for a scene in which Paris Hilton is violently dismembered on-screen, a gruesome highlight that drew uncomfortable murmurs of approval from audiences. Anyway, in my introduction to the 1952 House of Wax I pointed out that the audience, who were all peering at me through their retro 3-D glasses, were about to watch a movie the director had never seen, because (as any fule kno) André de Toth famously had only one eye, and was therefore monocular. Significantly, this didn’t stop him from helming what was to become one of the most respected stereoscopic movies of the period, a ‘Natural Vision 3D’ production, publicity for which promised that ‘Beauty and Terror meet in your seat’ with the movie coming ‘Right at you!’ to ensure that ‘The hand is at your throat … The kiss is on your lips …’ Not for de Toth, however, who could only see the film in 2-D but who always said that it looked just fine to him that way. Vincent Price later remembered that de Toth would ‘go to the rushes and say “Why is everybody so excited about this?” It didn’t mean anything to him.’
Is there not a lesson to be learned here?
As for Dial M for Murder, there’s no doubting the film’s enduring artistic stature, and it’s easy to see why today’s 3-D pioneers constantly refer to it as a format-justifying landmark. In my own experience as a 3-D-sceptical film journalist, I have had everyone from John Lasseter to Martin Scorsese attempt to convince me that stereoscopy is an artistically valid cinematic process by citing the precedent of Dial M for Murder. With Hitchcock at the helm, Ray Milland and Grace Kelly as the leads, an already proven stage-screenplay by Frederick Knott and a soundtrack by Dimitri Tiomkin, Dial M for Murder was always going to be a cut above the exploitation schlock on which 3-D thrived, and its champions still point to it as proof of the ‘immersive’ qualities of the format. No one, they argue, complained about being alienated by the usual pointy-pointy clichés of 3-D when it came to Dial M; on the contrary, audiences were drawn into the story, which continues to thrill and engross viewers to this day. It’s a good argument, sadly undermined by the fact that the main reason no one complained was that almost no one ever saw Dial M in 3-D. Released simultaneously in 2-D and 3-D versions, the film promptly became a flat-screen hit, with 3-D prints being left to moulder on the shelf until they were nostalgically revived in the eighties. And, as far as anyone can tell, the audiences who lapped up the 2-D version didn’t go complaining to theatre managers that the movie was in any way ‘non-immersive’. Because it wasn’t. As for Hitchcock, he significantly never went near 3-D again, having clearly decided that the whole thing was a waste of time and money. (Six years later Hitchcock would make Psycho – recently voted the Greatest Horror Film of All Time – in black and white. So much for the inevitable march of technology.)
The reasons 3-D failed to set the world alight during its so-called ‘golden age’ in the early fifties were pretty similar to the reasons it still sucks today. Although the initial novelty value was high, audiences and critics soon started complaining about the eye-strain, headaches and smudgy darkened pictures that inevitably resulted from the donning of 3-D glasses. (The Russians had experimented with a lenticular screen 3-D process which worked without glasses in the forties, but the strict viewing angle significantly limited audience size.) More significantly, the fleeting rise of 3-D happened alongside the emergence of CinemaScope’s anamorphic widescreen system which was itself referred to in publicity puffs as offering an immersive 3-D experience due to the sheer size and scale of the projected image. Promotional materials for Fox’s CinemaScope flagship The Robe showed the actors’ faces apparently breaking the boundaries of the screen in the manner of 3-D posters, while the tagline called it ‘the miracle you can see without glasses!’ Unlike Cinerama, which had made the front pages in 1952 with its curved screen and interlocked triple projectors, CinemaScope’s anamorphic systems compressed a widescreen image (later standardised at 2.35:1, nearly twice the width of the traditional ‘Academy’ 1.33:1) onto a single 35mm film strip, thereby rendering it both impressive and (more importantly) widely available. Although Cinerama would continue to offer a deluxe viewing experience akin to today’s IMAX theatres, it was Fox’s more populist system which effectively killed 3-D, proving that ‘immersion’ in a picture had nothing to do with stereoscopy and everything to do with ’Scope.
In the wake of ’Scope and the subsequent competing anamorphic systems that made widescreen pretty much standard fare, 3-D crawled back into the cupboard, and audiences got on with enjoying cinema in all its immersive monocular glory. Oh, stereoscopy never went away: in the sixties, the 3-D novelty was used to flog a number of cheapie anaglyph exploitation creature-features, while the development of the ‘over/under’ process that printed two widescreen images, one above the other within a single square frame, allowed for polarised projection from a single strip of film (although the image remained dark and less than pin-clear). In 1966, Bwana Devil helmsman Arch Oboler enjoyed some ‘Space Vision’ success with the sci-fi romp The Bubble (‘The picture floats off the screen and over your head!’), while in 1969 The Stewardesses promised to ‘leap from the screen onto your lap’ thanks to the miracle of StereoVision, which squished two anamorphic images side by side on to the same frame. Costing a mere $100,000, The Stewardesses went on to serve up a hefty $27 million at the box office, making it (in terms of cost-to-profit ratio) the most successful 3-D movie ever. Think about that; with its conservatively estimated price tag of $250 million, Avatar returned its initial investment costs at a paltry profit ratio of 1:12, while The Stewardesses raked in an arousing 1:270. Forget Smurfs in Space, when it comes to 3-D nothing sells like Hooters on a Plane. And if the success of stereoscopic knockers doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the ‘artistic validity’ of 3-D then, frankly, I don’t know what will.
This delightful downward trend continued into the seventies, the decade’s stereoscopic highlight being Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein, to which Andy Warhol lent his moniker (but nothing else, as with its 2-D sibling Blood for Dracula) in the manner of a man signing a blank canvas for a) the hell of it and b) profit. Flesh for Frankenstein is actually my favourite 3-D film because it perfectly showcases the format’s novelty trash aesthetic, boasting Udo Kier dangling offal in the audience’s faces whilst imploring them to ‘fuck life in the gall bladder!’ In the eighties the Italian stereoscopic Western Comin’ at Ya! and the Charles Band cheapie schlocker Parasite 3-D (Demi Moore’s first starring role, folks) were followed by a slew of horror sequels, all of which appear to have been released in 3-D largely because producers realised they already had the numeral ‘3’ in the titles. First out of the gate was the somewhat clumsily named Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D, which was swiftly retitled to the rather more punchy Friday the 13th Part 3-D, thus kicking off a titular triptych trend. Linda and I showed Ft13thPt3-D (which people forget marks the first time Jason actually dons the now iconic hockey mask) alongside House of Wax and Flesh for Frankenstein at our NFT horror season as part of a 3-D triple-bill. I mention this again in order t
o offer proof that, despite everything, I’m not just a total killjoy when it comes to the daft pleasures of stereoscopy. On the contrary, I think there’s something stupidly fun about watching horror film-makers throw eyeballs out of the screen at you and flip dripping gizzards (and, of course, gall bladders) in your face – but that’s all it is: stupid fun. Trashy, schlocky, stupid fun.
At least, that’s what it is at best. At worst, it’s Jaws 3-D, which followed hot on the heels of Ft13thPt3-D but entirely lacked the sleazy charm of its dumbo, trendsetting predecessors. Whereas Parasite cost less than $800,000 and Ft13thPt3-D really pushed out the exploitation boat at $4 million, Jaws 3-D was a big-budget family-friendly venture which cost over $20 million and featured neither extreme gore, whacko weirdness nor cheesy T&A – the only real reasons to watch a 3-D film. Set, boringly, in a SeaWorld theme park, Jaws 3-D was an utter stinker that is meant to have begun life as a spoof script entitled Jaws 3: People 0. According to legend, the story was about a studio struggling to flog a second dead-horse sequel to Jaws, and opened with author Peter Benchley being eaten alive in his swimming pool. There were also roles for a naked Bo Derek and some space aliens in shark suits, apparently. Joe Dante, who had helmed the Jaws rip-off Piranha (recently remade in 3-D with more gratuitous nudity and blood), was tipped to direct but then Universal got cold feet when they realised that spoofing their biggest hit would be akin to ‘fouling in your own nest’. So the joke was over – more’s the pity. Instead, cameraman Chris J. Condon (who shot The Stewardesses and handled the stereoscopy on Parasite) was enlisted to lens a dull-as-ditchwater straightfaced Jaws knock-off which respected writer Richard Matheson (who had worked with Spielberg on Duel) would subsequently disown, commenting that ‘the so-called 3-D just made the film look murky. It had no effect whatsoever. It was a waste of time.’
Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
In fact, the most interesting thing about Jaws 3-D is the way in which it perfectly illustrates the other great technical flaw of forced stereoscopy – namely, the bizarre phenomenon of miniaturisation. As fans of Father Ted will know, there are ‘cows that are small, and cows that are far away’, and our brains are usually able to distinguish between the two thanks to a range of visual and aural information that is no way hampered by monocularity. Occasionally we can be fooled; there are loads of monster movies which have attempted to convince audiences that giant beasties are terrorising normal-sized people by (for example) holding a lobster very close to the camera and getting the actors to stand very far away and scream into mid-air. It may work for a moment, but pretty quickly our brains do the maths and realise it’s just a crap perspective trick – which is why so many monster movies only show their monsters for a very short time indeed. With 3-D cinema, the problem is compounded by the fact that eye-catching stereoscopy only really kicks in if an object is really quite close to us, way in front of the point of convergence upon which the right and left images match up. Although forced parallax can make backgrounds seem comparatively far away, it’s only foreground action (on or in front of the point of convergence) that audiences actually tend to notice, justifying the use of those bloody silly glasses for which, incidentally, they’ve just paid a bloody silly price. Thus 3-D film-makers traditionally like to wave things right in front of our eyes at regular intervals – hence the (in)famous paddle-ball sequence from House of Wax which has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, but which is invariably the one 3-D trick everyone remembers after seeing the movie.
In the case of Jaws 3-D, director Joe Alves clearly understood that (given the crap title) people were going to come to see the shark in 3-D, and thus he and Chris Condon set about making the fish leap out of the screen at the audience in time-honoured tradition. The problem was that this particular shark was meant to be about 35 foot long, a whopper even by Great White standards, and conveying this sense of size whilst making the most of the 3-D illusion was never going to be easy; the more three-dimensional the shark got, the closer it appeared to be, and therefore the smaller it looked. Only in the long shots, where the stereoscopy had little effect other than depth, did the shark look suitably sizeable; in all the close-ups, it just looked like an angry guppy attempting to bite your nose off whilst hanging in mid-air about three feet in front of your face. The effect was hardly jaw-dropping. Watching the movie in 1983 at the Cine City cinema in Withington, Manchester, I remember actually attempting to swat the irritating minnow-like monster out of my immediate field of vision; the 3-D was clearly ‘working’, but not in the way the film-makers wanted.
Jaws 3:‘D’ Nil.
Having proved a thoroughly damp squib at the box office (the film took less than $90 million worldwide, compared to the $470 million taken by the 2-D Jaws, or even the $209 million by the utterly rubbish Jaws 2) and been kicked around town by critics (it was nominated for five Razzies, including Worst Film), Jaws 3-D sank without trace, taking stereoscopic cinema down with it – the third time the process had tried and failed to become the new future of cinema.
Considering its previous failures, one may ask why any major studio (such as Universal, who owned the Jaws franchise) would have tried to revive 3-D in the first place. The last time, the answer had been television; this time, it was home video. Toward the end of seventies, VCRs – which had been around as an unwieldy and hugely expensive accessory for some time – gradually started to look like a viable and affordable home-viewing option. Although initially thrilled that they could sell feature films to video stores at around £80 a pop, the studios soon realised that the prospect of staying at home and watching a movie was rapidly becoming more appealing than paying through the nose for the privilege of seeing a film in a multiplex screen the size of a shoebox. If you could rent a video for £1.25 or £2.50 a night and invite your friends and family to watch it with you, then why on earth would you pay to go the cinema where the screen was the same size as your TV? I remember coughing up £4.00 to see The Evil Dead in a barely functioning cinema at the Screen 1–5 in Manchester in the early eighties, and then passing a video store on the way home which would have rented it to me (and my assembled mates) for a quid! Luckily, I didn’t have a video machine at the time, but if I had I would have gone straight back to the cinema and demanded my money back. (Some patrons did just that, and in the wake of the popularity of The Evil Dead on video, cinema distributors started demanding a fiercely guarded ‘theatrical window’, the length of which remains a hotly contested issue to this day.)
As had happened in the fifties, the solution to the problem of exponentially declining cinema ticket sales was to attempt to make the theatrical experience something worth paying for. If you’re old enough to remember just how lousy most British multiplexes were in the early eighties, then you’ll remember how rapidly they smartened up their act as the age of video dawned. Whereas in the seventies single-screen cinemas had simply been partitioned off to run more films on smaller screens, the later eighties saw a return to the kind of spectacular widescreen entertainment that had saved the day 30 years earlier. This was the decade in which Lucas and Spielberg served up such circus-like fare as the Indiana Jones movies, which revelled in unabashed on-screen spectacle and went to town with stereo and surround sound. Lucas may be a terrible director, but he was a brilliant producer who really understood the art of noise, and the rise of his trademarked THX-certified sound systems put paid to the godawful tinny whining most people had come to expect from disheartening trips to the movies. While cinema in the fifties had widened its horizons by widening its screens, in the eighties it promised to immerse the audience further in a blissful sea of sound. For, as radio graduate Orson Welles famously observed, the best pictures are the ones you see with your ears.
Once again the small screen had apparently threatened the future of cinema. Once again cinema had responded by upping its game and offering audiences a more immersive and spectacular theatrical experience. And once again 3-D turned out to be nothing more than a dead-end – the wrong answ
er to the eternal question of what people really want from the movies.
‘But wait!’ I hear the massed ranks cry. ‘Aren’t you just being a miserable Luddite? A facetious technophobe? An old fart who longs for the good old days and hates any form of change? If you’re so against 3-D, then why not rail against the advent of colour? Or sound? Weren’t these once little more than exotic “gimmicks” which the naysayers claimed would never catch on? What about the cynics who complained that the arrival of “talkies” would herald the death of “proper” cinema, or that the shadowy majesty of monochrome cinematography could never be matched by the fancy-schmancy addition of reds and greens and (heaven forbid!) blues? Why don’t we just go back to black-and-white silent movies with live musical accompaniment? That would make you happy, wouldn’t it, you miserable curmudgeonly old bastard?’
Well, to be honest, yes it would. At least up to a point. As someone who’s spent quite a lot of time accompanying silent movies, I have indeed been thrilled by the resurgence of interest in these oft-forgotten works that seems to have flourished since the turn of the century. Spurred on by the retrospective fervour that attended the 100th anniversary of the ‘invention of cinema’ (a moving feast, which seemed to last from 1996 to 2003 depending on whose history books you were reading) many modern movie-goers were inspired to seek out reissued silent gems and to experience the wonder of a live soundtrack first-hand. It wasn’t just cineastes who got in on the act. In 2004, the Pet Shop Boys unveiled their new score for Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin at a free concert and screening in Trafalgar Square, at which packed crowds heard the Dresdner Sinfonika accompany a movie many of them had very probably never seen before. In 2007, I introduced Robert Ziegler conducting The Matrix Ensemble for a live performance of Joby Talbot’s newly written score for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger at the popular Latitude Festival, where a packed field of revellers was hushed in awe by the spectacle of sight and sound. And earlier this year (to my enormous pride), I got to introduce a screening of Blackmail at a packed Barbican Centre, where the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra played Neil Brand’s spine-tingling (and often wonderfully comedic) score, the first new orchestral score to have been commissioned for a British silent drama since the advent of sound. I was even persuaded to look again at Giorgio Moroder’s attempts to make Metropolis relevant to a modern audience by slapping a blooping synthpop score (interspersed with offerings from the likes of Adam Ant) all over it – although I must confess that I remain unimpressed by its alleged charms.