Some Came Running

The wrong man: Billy Wilder, "The Seven Year Itch," and Frank Tashlin (Updated)

I'm not really one for speculative film criticism, or concocting alternative histories of cinema, but I have to own up to a thought that hit me while checking out the new Blu-ray disc of The Seven Year Itch, the 1955 comedy directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. Which was that the film really would have been better off having been directed by Frank Tashlin than Billy Wilder. 

Wilder, who'd later direct Monroe much more effectively (albeit under much tougher circumstances for the star) in Some Like It Hot, allowed to Cameron Crowe that he did not number Itch among his favorites. He didn't go into much detail, but admitted that he was under loan to Fox at the time. And Fox was Daryl Zanuck's house, and Zanuck was, among other things, all about the Cinemascope. As much as I admire Rudy Behlmer's essential book Memo From David O. Selznick, I rather wish that he had been able to do an equally exhaustive job with his similar book on Zanuck, then maybe I'd able to formulate a more supportable theory pertaining to the executive's ideas concerning comedy and Cinemascope. But it seems to me that just as early non-comedic Cinemascope pictures were all about Biblical pageants and historical drama (a cursory look at the largely abysmal 1954 Desiree, with Marlon Brando a Napoleon, reveals that, aside from snakes and trains and funerals, Cinemascope was a natural for coronation sequences), even to the extent that Zanuck himself got sick of it (writing to Elia Kazan with respect to some pitches the director had been obliged to send Fox, Zanuck passed on Oedipus Rex and allowed that he was "personally" "fed up with material of this sort"), Cinemascope comedy (and to a lesser extent, musicals) for Zanuck spelled S-E-X. Which of course seemed a natural fit for Wilder, except, let's say, for those capital letters. 

Reviewing the Monroe Blu-ray set for the New York Times recently, Dave Kehr, never what you'd call a Wilder man, calls The Seven Year Itch "ugly and shallow" and notes disdainfully that Wilder "doesn't even bother to give her a name." This is not quite fair to Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay with George Axelrod, adapting Axelrod's hit play. Itch came after two problematic pictures, Stalag 17 and Sabrina, and doesn't seem like a comfortable next step when looking at Wilder's filmography from an auteurist bent. Wilder told Crowe: "I was angry there." One wants to read a little more into that, but it turns out he was angry for a specific reason: he wanted a young actor named Walter Matthau for the part of the would-be errant husband, and Fox made him go with Tom Ewell, who, by Wilder's lights, "wasn't a bad actor[...][h]e was Tom Ewell." Wilder also wanted a scene that would make clear that the infidelity flirted with was actually committed. But no.

But there's also the matter of the broad allusiveness of Axelrod's farce, which, cinematically, Wilder approaches from a huge remove. The picture opens with a mock history of Manhattan which posits the "hunting season" for Native Americans once inhabiting the island was taken up by, um, squaw-hunting. The treatment of the "joke" is studio-flat:

Similarly, as Ewell is later reflecting on his own imagined magnetism, a reminiscence of a beachside tryst is rendered as a spoof of the then-infamous legs-together passion-in-the sand scene in 1953's From Here To Eternity; the most amusing visual signifier here is Ewell's Mack-Sennett-era swimsuit.

Wilder never made any bones of the fact that he became a director so that he could protect the integrity of his own scripts, and the visual interest of his films is inextricably tied to whatever cinematographer he was working with at the time. Some might argue that John Seitz deserved a co-director credit for Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, and Five Graves To Cairo, films he lensed for Wilder that happen to be among the director's most visually arresting. The Seven Year Itch was shot by Milton Krasner, hardly a slouch, but also someone who seemed to take his cues from the director, doing his best work with guys who were generally strong visually (Minnelli, Ray, Preminger). In any event, it's telling that the one pastiche scene that takes off is more of an overt character transformation than a pop-culture spoof. When Ewell's character imagines the effect that Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto will have on his potential conquest (it is an interesting sociological note that the petit bourgeois middlebrow of '50s NYC is painted as being conversant with classical music to the extent that it's a lingua franca, and that mainstream audiences are expected not to be alienated by this) the room darkens and Ewell turns into a gray-templed longhair while Monroe becomes a vamp whose vampiness is hammered into helplessness by the swoony notes. 

Later, when Ewell's character is confronted, in his paranoid fantasy world by gun-brandishing wife Evelyn Keyes (rather cruelly frumped up a mere four years after driving Van Heflin crazy with lust-rage in Losey's The Prowler), it seems as even the idea of giving the sequence some noir styling never even occured to Wilder and company. That sort of thing was just not his kind of comedy. Even the nudges togangster-picture genre conventions in Some Like It Hot were incorporated in an almost anti-pomo way. And when Wilder deploys some Vidor-quoting quasi-expressionism in the opening scenes of the widescreen black-and-white The Apartment, it's in the service of a pretty specific idea.

Which is not to say that Frank Tashlin's stylistic flourishes are empty. They are absolutely not, and in fact in a lot of cases they eventually serve the function of fleshing out the caricatures contained in his deliberately cartoonish movies. Kehr complains that Monroe is a "barely humanized set of body parts" in Itch, but then again, she's not a dislikable one. In any event, the one-dimensionality of Monroe's part can't be laid entirely at Axelrod's feet. Wilder told Crowe "the picture was good for the invention of that girl, The Girl who is always hot." In both The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? the oversized Jayne Mansfield is first made to serve that function in an exaggerated-beyond-credulity mode, AND revealed to be rather different from what he appearance suggests. It is no accident that both of those films represent the apex of the Fox Cinemascope-Technicolor comedies, which make it all the more frustrating that they don't figure in Behlmer's collection of Zanuck memos (Tashlin doesn't get a mention either.)  Where Wilder, as a default mode, kept character and dialogue at the forefront of his filmmaking, Tashlin's vision incorporated character and color and geometry in the same ball of energetically creative wax. The screen grabs from The Girl Can't Help It, in which an in-his-cups Ewell imagines ex-girlfriend (and client; he plays a music agent in the film) Julie London chastizing him with "Cry Me A River" will hint at the fluidity and vitality of what Wilder brought to his assignments. I certainly hope this film gets a Blu-ray treatment. (Speaking of which, the Itch screen caps are also from the standard-definition disc of the film; the new Blu-ray it quite an upgrade, and highly recommended). 

UPDATE: I was hoping these musings would kick up a good discussion, so I'm gratified that they have. I agree on the transcendent powers of Marilyn Monroe, and much else. I'm also glad to hear from my old friend Joseph Failla, who offers these thoughts:

For a better idea of how Tashlin might have tackled SEVEN YEAR ITCH,  why not take another look at SUSAN SLEPT HERE? Made a year before ITCH, SUSAN also incorporates the idea of an older man (Dick Powell) sharing his apartment with (in this case) a sexy teen (Debbie Reynolds), causing him endless frustration and turning his life upside down during her overnight stay. Although he's not married, he does have a sultry Anne Francis as his interfering girlfriend, adding even more pressure to his plight, rather than a non-present wife away on summer vacation as in Wilder's movie. 

I'm not unhappy with the way Wilder handled ITCH, although it may be a film that's better remembered than how it actually plays and the censors would have come down hard on anyone trying to make a film version of the original show. What I do like about it is how it clearly details what was really on most folk's minds regarding sex in the oppressive '50s. Everything seems to simmer in the summer heat, from the fans in motion, to the underwear placed in open ice boxes, until it spills over with Marilyn's more than suggestive bubble bath scene and the ever famous shot of her white dress billowing over the subway grating.

Incidentally, I did manage to see Walter Matthau's screen test for ITCH years ago on a television program promoting the film. As I remember, he was much more lively than Ewell, not sad or downhearted at all, if anything, he's overly giddy and self satisfied. Running up and down a staircase while managing a fair balancing act with a tray of items he's bringing to the girl waiting for him upstairs. He also worked that crick in his neck bit quite a lot, never missing a chance to bring attention to it. That said, this is one of those rare instances where Matthau can actually appear youthful in comparison to Ewell's droopy, wannabe rebel. 

The mother of all aspect ratio throwdowns, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Chantal Goya

From Masculin Féminin, Jean-Luc Godard, 1966, 1.33 aspect ratio, screen captures from the DVD issued by The Criterion Collection. 

Oh God No

Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, Roman Polanski, 1965; screen capture from 1.66:1 aspect ratio presentation on Criterion DVD, released in 2009. For more Repulsion, see here.

Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, Polanski, 1968; screen capture from 1.85:1 ratio on Paramount DVD, released in 2000.

For context, see here, if you can stomach it. For some reason the Happy Flowers song "They Cleaned My Cut Out With A Wire Brush" is running through my head right now. 

UPDATE: "Is it possible to troll your own blog? Cause that's what's going on here."

Stanley Kubrick's letter to projectionists on "Barry Lyndon" (with update)

I admit that my comportment during the recent online debate concerning the aspect ratio of Stanley Kubrick's 1975 Barry Lyndon and its new Blu-ray version was not always entirely pleasant or reasonable, or that it yielded entirely reliable findings. This is the sort of thing that can happen when one allows one's (entirely understandable, I'd say) desire to tweak Jeff Wells to override concerns of etiquette and/or common sense. I did try to employ due diligence in my research and turned up some documentation supporting a 1.77 or so aspect ratio, and I did ask for other citations that would demonstrate otherwise.

And now I have a document that should clear up quite a bit with respect to Kubrick's desires and intentions: a letter to projectionists signed by Kubrick. It came to me through the courtesy and kindness of screenwriter and critic Jay Cocks, who writes: "I knew Stanley pretty well for a while, but at the time of the Time Barry Lyndon cover I was in LA beginning preliminary work on Gangs of New York. So I had no hand in the Time  cover, but still managed to let Stanley know how great I thought the movie was. He replied with his usual gracious, funny note and enclosed this letter, because he thought I'd be interested. Bet you will be too."

Indeed. I thank Mr. Cocks. And I reproduce the letter below. 

 

I shared this document with a representative of Warner Home Video, who responded, "We stand firmly that we are 100% in compliance with Mr. Kubrick's wishes and edict" and that "the letter from Kubrick to projectionists was the reference for our 1.78 aspect ratio call."

UPDATE: Playing Hardcastle to my McCormick, Jeff Wells tracks down Kubrick aide de camp Leon Vitali and receives a detailed response that's well worth reading; check it out here. Nice work, Jeff. 

Leon Vitali on the "Barry Lyndon" aspect ratio issue (updated 5/26/2011)

Leon Vitali plays the role of Lord Bullington in Stanley Kubrick's 1975 film Barry Lyndon. During that shoot Vitali and Kubrick became friends, and Vitali collaborated with Kubrick as a personal assistant and sometimes casting director on all of Kubrick's films up until the director's death after the making of 1999's Eyes Wide Shut. Since that time Vitali has been closely involved in the adaptation of Kubrick's work for home video. He was in New York today to speak to the press in connection with both the 40th anniversary release on DVD and Blu-ray of Kubrick's 1971 A Clockwork Orange, and the upcoming Stanley Kubrick: Limited Edition Collection on Blu-ray and Stanley Kubrick: The Essential Collection on standard definition DVD. I took the opportunity to ask him about the controversy concerning the 1.78 framing of Barry Lyndon on Blu-ray, which caused me a certain amount of confusion and the online community of cinephiles and Kubrick fans a fair amount of concern/consternation. What follows below is the best I could get to a verbatim transcription of our exchange on the matter. 

Glenn Kenny: "Well, there’s already controversy brewing because the Barry Lyndon Blu-ray is 1.78 and there’s some feeling that it should have been 1.66..."

Leon Vitali: "Well I can tell you what now, okay; never was it ever 1.66, it wasn’t shot in 1.66, we never released it in 1.66 in any format whether it’s film or television or DVD. It was 1.77.  It was shot it…I mean , the difference between 1.77 and 1.78 is miniscule, you couldn’t see it with a magnifying glass. And anyone who thought it was meant to be in 1.66 is sadly delusioned. Seeing as I was there, at every stage of it; shooting and everything, I should know. I should know."

Glenn Kenny: "Well, that’s about as definitive an answer as we’re likely to get; so where does it come from, then? Where’s the 1.66 idea come from…?"

Leon Vitali: "It comes from people who think they know and weren’t there and have something to say about Stanley all the time. You know, when I first went to Los Angeles, I could go to a party, and somebody’s voice would go up saying, ‘Oh, yes, that’s Stanley,’ and ‘Oh, Eyes Wide Shut,’ and I thought ‘Do they know Stanley, is this common that people at parties talk about him in a loud voice?” But it wasn’t that, it was because they knew…I was there. And you get those idiots…truly, who think they know.  [adopts orotund voice] ‘Stanley was a very philosophical guy.’ I say: bullshit."

The interview took place at Manhattan's Essex House, which is reasonably close to the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, so I hiked over there to see if I could find any textual support to the idea of a 1.66 Barry Lyndon. Two biographies and five volumes of critical exegesis (including one actually subtitled "A Visual Analysis") later, and nothing. I shared Vitali's statement with a correspondent who I'll only refer to here as General Ripper, asking if he had any textual support for the 1.66 ratio, and he cited the old non-anamorphic standard-issue release of the film on DVD from Warner back in 2007, and added, "Vitali is on the WB payroll, not to be trusted." Okay, then. [N.b., there is no actual evidence to support General Ripper's surmise about the WB payroll and all. That's just General Ripper's surmise, reproduced here for your entertainment.]

In any event,the online Kubrick FAQ asserts, in an entry by David Mullen (question 11a), that Lyndon "was released theatrically in 1.66:1, even in the U.S. since Kubrick insisted on 1.66 hard mattes being sent to the various theatres showing the film (1.85 is the common 'flat' widescreen ratio in the U.S.)". There is no backup given for this, however, and many of the other questions on the FAQ have notes citing printed sources. And on the other hand, the massive Taschen book The Stanley Kubrick Archive, edited by Alison Castle "made in cooperation with Jan Harlan, Christiane Kubrick, and The Stanley Kubrick Estate" has a "Note About Aspect Ratios" on the contents page...which lists the aspect ratio of Barry Lyndon as...1.77. Not only that, all of the frame enlargements from Lyndon contained therein are in precisely that ratio. I don't recall all that many people on the internet gasping "oh my God where is that leaf!?!?" back when the book was first issued in 2004. 

I have more, but it's not what I'd call essential at this point in time, but it might come in handy later. I imagine this will turn out to be a fascinating thread. In the meantime, I think I'll check out a Blu-ray.

UPDATE: I asked for printed citations, as opposed to logorrheic, self-righteous spewings about Orwellian schemes, and reader Dwigt, in comments, was kind enough to provide one. He says, "There's an interview with the at the time Warner head of publicity for Europe in the Michel Ciment book where he states that Kubrick as curious about how the movie would be screened. He had a few questions for the theaters that were booked in France and Germany and discovered that most of them didn't own a 1.66:1 soft matte anymore, while it cost a few quids. So, they sent the matte to all theaters." 

Indeed, the interview is with Julian Senior, publicity director, and relevant passages are on pages 223 and 225 of the "definitive edition" of Ciment's Kubrick, published in the U.S. by Faber and Faber in 2001. Here is one passage on Kubrick's exacting methods: "He believes that every essential question can be answered through logic and common sense. I recall very clearly that, at the time of A Clockwork Orange, we drew up together what we jokingly referred to as a 'memory jogger' on releasing a film: how many prints should be made, how many trailers, does every cinema possess a projector with a 1.66 mask, do the TV networks prefer video or film, etc." (N.b., the Clockwork disc is in 1.66.) On Lyndon specifically: "For Barry Lyndon it was very important—given the experiments in lighting—for the projection equipment to be the best possible. Of course, we had neither the means nor the authority to replace them all, but what we discovered from checking all the principal cinemas in France and Germany was that two-thirds of them didn't have a 1.66 mask, something that costs no more than a few pounds. The projectionists told us that the image would overlap a little on the sides. So Kubrick's assistants had all the projectors equipped for a decent screening of the film—and at the same time for every other film!" 

So there's that. Is Senior still with us, and available for comment? I'm looking into it. 

Note that Senior's talking about Europe in the above cited-quote. A projectionist with whom I'm friendly had this to say about the situation in American cinemas: "I've read the stories about Kubrick sending 1.66 aperture plates during the initial release and I have to think they're a little apocryphal. In 1975, most USA theatres (other than maybe the major premiere houses in each major city, and that's a big "maybe") had fixed height screens with side masking adjustable for 1.85 and 2.39 scope only. Without a different lens (slightly longer in focal length than the 1.85 lens), sending a theatre with a fixed height screen a 1.66 aperture plate would be useless since all it would do is throw image onto the black masking above and below the screen. Of course, if the theatre did have the extra height and had adjustable vertical masking they could use the new plates and run it at 1.66 with their 1.85 lens."

The same projectionist also says, "I've handled a 35mm print of Barry Lyndon in 1993, and it was hard-matted to approximately 1.66 (I didn't get the calipers out to check it), and I ran it 1.85. The titles (which are the visual guide most projectionists use to center the framing) fit perfectly in the 1.85 area. My best educated guess is that it's designed for 1.66 (let's call it Kubrick's preferred ratio) and safe at 1.85 (since he had to know that most USA theatres would show it at 1.85). Warner, for some reason, chose to split the difference and put the DVD at 1.78." In a subsequent exchange, my friend says, "I pulled out the Taschen book last night as well and measured one of the storyboards—the one at the top of a right-hand page that is a montage of several photos and indicates the camera movements and timing. The 'blue box' drawn on the storyboard measures 1.77:1." The illo in question is on page 435, and is designated "BLY 20" for those who have the book. I took a photograph of the page in question and I apologize in advance for its poor quality:

This may never be what they call "settled law." And it wouldn't be the first time. 

How to tell an aspect ratio from a hole in the ground (Updated again and again to reflect the fact that I myself cannot, either)

So this morning Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells decided to get all apoplectic, largely because it's just not a full day for Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells if he DOESN'T get all apoplectic about something. Seriously, I'm surprised the guy doesn't give himself a stroke. Or maybe he already HAS given himself a stroke, and Hollywood Elsewhere is its aftereffect. In any event, I don't normally bring my little differences with him here, but it so happened he chose to get apoplectic about something I'm in the middle of examining first hand myself. "It's only just hit me that Warner Home Video's Barry Lyndon Bluray...has been masked at 1.85 to 1...storm the barricades!" Um, yeah, sure, whatever you say. Lest you wonder just how this "hit" him—something to do with the voices in his head, maybe?—he reproduces a bit of the liner tech-spec copy, which, sure enough, specifies a 1.85 aspect ratio, whereas Barry Lyndon itself is a 1.66, or something like that. After a bit of obligatory spittle-flecking ("and I know I'm in the right on this one," blah, blah blah) Wells goes on to quote one Tyler Williamson, writing on the standard-def DVD release, and wishing for "a Blu-ray remaster with Barry Lyndon's 1.59 or 1.66 image (the difference in more or less negligible, so I don't really care) in the center of a 1.78 frame -- which is how Blurays handle films with aspect ratios less wide than 1.78. All the 1.66 and 1.37 films on Blu-ray are done this way: Chungking Express, The Third Man, etc." (The 1.78 frame, incidentally...or really not so incidentally, when you come down to it—being the native aspect ratio of your 16:9 displays.) 

And, er, guess what, kids? I actually have the Barry Lyndon Blu-ray, and I've actually looked at the image from the disc rather than just what turns out to be the misprint on the liner specs, and that's pretty much exactly the way Warner handled the approximately 1.66:1 frame of Barry Lyndon! I even took some pictures off my plasma screen, which I'm presenting uncropped to give the full effect of the centering. I even took a picture from the Criterion 1.66 Blu-ray of Chungking Express for context/comparison. Hell, I even took a picture from a genuine 1.85 Blu-ray, Raging Bull, for comparison/contrast. Check it out!

Barry Lyndon. Boy, that Leonard Rossiter's a stitch, huh?

Chungking Express. Pay particular attention to the BLACK BORDERING AROUND THE ACTUAL FRAME! CONCENTRATE!

Raging Bull. Behold its 1.85 glory.

UPDATE: And by the way, the screencaps from the BluBrew "sneak peek" that have so many of the fellas at the Criterion Forum in a tizzy are inaccurate as well. Jesus. 

From the "sneak peek." I don't know who the hell cropped this, but he or she...cropped it.

On my display. Note bottom of tree. Come on, people. 

So. Hold off on storming those barricades, people. While this proves one more unfortunate "right as usual, sir" (see the paddleball scene in Blazing Saddles) moment for Wells, the news is good for Blu-ray-ready cinephiles, who may buy Barry Lyndon with relative confidence in the integrity of its aspect ratio.

FURTHER UPDATE (5/24/11): Well, this has been enlightening. And embarrassing. Prompted by the observations of several commenters, most prominently the one who calls himself "The Fanciful Norwegian," I have been looking into just how a 1.66 image resolves itself into a 1.66 image on my own personal display, a Hitachi P50V701 50-inch plasma. The Norwegian, citing the display from Chungking Express among other things, suggested a calibration issue. Well, the good news is I'm not sure that my set needs recalibrating. The bad news is that I've often been using the incorrect setting to watch my Blu-rays.

The P50V701 has two settings for "16:9 Standard." One would assume that the first one, "16:9 Standard 1," would be the most accurate. But no. According to the owner's manual, "Use this aspect mode to display 16:9 sources...preserving the original aspect ratio showing 95% of the size." Say what? Yeah, 95%. Hence the problem on the Chungking Express frame cited below by the frivolous one, not to mention the paucity of black bars on the side of the screen. As it happens, quite counterintuitively in my opinion, it is the "16:9 Standard 2" setting that is "preserving the original 16:9 aspect ratio showing 100% of the size." Now sorry to put up blurry shots of a TV screen one more time, but here's the Chungking on said display in "16:9 Standard 2," now showing more lightbulbs and more indications of its 1.66 aspect ratio:

And here's Barry Lyndon, in, yes, 1.78:1, goddammit.

My apologies to you all and particularly to the BluBrew people (although, yeah, what Joel E. said, too; also, why crop your thumbnails so severely, I wonder?), but none to my frenemy Mr. Wells, who went off even more half cocked than I, what with going from box copy rather than the disc itself. As disagreeable as 1.78 is, it still isn't 1.85. And this story isn't over yet. As it happens I'm interviewing Leon Vitali, a keeper of the Kubrick flame, tomorrow, and this issue will be on the agenda. Stay tuned...

More fun with aspect ratios

Over at his Hollywood Elsewhere website, the feisty Jeffrey Wells (pictured above—no, just kidding, we all know that J.W. doesn't wear that much makeup...) put up what I consider an eminently reasonable request to Universal—that, when the studio issues its Blu-ray edition of the Hitchcock classic, it include the film in both its 1.85:1 screening aspect ratio, and in what's sometimes referred to as the Academy ratio, which is a less pronounced rectangle of 1.375:1. The reason being in this case his personal aesthetic preference combined, one would suppose, or maybe I should say influenced by, a certain nostalgia for the television screenings of the film, which back in the days on non-widescreen television sets, were in fact...well, you know.

As is not unexpected in his vociferous realm, the specific tone of his comments drew some fire, with some very knowledgable folks citing various historical precedents to demonstrate that the film was, is, and has always been meant to be theatrically presented in 1.85:1 aspect ratio but was also "protected" for 1.375 for the purposes of television screenings...which is to say that Hitchcock, a master of technical stuff who by the time he had made Psycho had racked up a good bit of experience and expertise in the television realm, composed his frames so that they would say what they needed to say in both aspect ratios. Except for that bit in the shower scene where, were it not for a hard matte covering up the naughty bits, one could actually see the breasts of Janet Leigh, or rather, those of her body double. In any event, the whole thing devolved into one of those skirmishes wherein Godwin's Law was repeatedly flouted, and Jeffrey even "front-paged" one of his extra-feisty comment replies, so as to continue the fight. And there was great disharmony and misunderstanding in the land.

The fantastic, or maybe awful thing about this particular topic is that it can be argued about until the cows come home, leave home again, take a round-the-world voyage, and so on, and it'll still never be settled. Which is the reason that, as always, I am right. My position is: if you're doing a Blu-ray disc or pretty much any kind of home video presentation and there's any cinephile question concerning the actual or intended aspect ratio, it won't kill your bandwidth to present both versions if they are in fact available. 

But of course this leads to the question of cinephile questions. Most folks with a good understanding of the history of theatrical film projection will tell you that 1.85 matting came in pretty much in the wake of the introduction of Cinemascope, the 2.35 aspect ratio, itself. This does not necessarily answer the question of which directors really applied themselves to actively composing their frames for 1.85 in the wake of that. The most controversial example pertaining to this question applies, of course, to Orson Welles' 1958 Touch of Evil. (And, yes, the above image, of Akim Tamiroff as poor Uncle Grandi, chilling out after a disagreement with Welles' Chief Hank Quinlan, is from that film.) Of all the things Welles said about that storied film, including interviews, and of course the lengthy memo he wrote to Universal which formed the basis of the 1998 restoration undertaken by Rick Schmidlin and Jonathan Rosenbaum, he never discussed the aspect ratio in which he intended it to be screened. And hence, that question has become quite the bone of contention among cinephiles, with quarrels about both intention and headroom becoming quite fervent whenever the issue comes up. 

As far as the home video realm is concerned, Universal, the company responsible for releasing the various iterations of the film therein, could certainly tamp down such arguments merely be putting out an edition the presents the film in both aspect ratios. But the controversy does not sufficiently penetrate into the market as such to warrant the company's concern. That's one way of putting it, I presume. So it's left to collectors and concerned parties to address the issue. Let's look at two separate shots from one particularly fraught scene in the film: the one a little over a half hour in, in which honest Mexican cop Vargas (Charlton Heston) tries to conduct an intimate phone conversation with his lovely, and soon-to-be explicitly endangered, wife (Janet Leigh) under the watchful ears of a particularly Buñuelian blind shop owner. The 1.375 screen grabs are from a source prepared by one of the concerned parties alluded to above. 

 

The resolution from this source is fuzzy, I know, but bear with me. Here's the same setup in 1.85:

 

Here's a followup shot, which shows the sign that is, in a sense, the scene's punchline:

 

And, again, in 1.85:

 

Now, as we can see, both compositions can be considered entirely correct in that they both contain the necessary information to put across what each shot seems to want to put across. The discomforting foregrounding of the blind shop-owner in the first shot, and the equally discomforting and somewhat heartbreaking words of the preemptively admonishing sign about stealing from the blind—a portent or a reminder that in the world of this film, guilt is the dominant condition—it's all there. Yes, the top of the sign is cut off in the wider version of the first shot, but as anyone can see, that's not the shot in which we're meant to be concentrating on the sign anyway. 

The situation becomes even more complicated when we consider a film made for Universal a couple of years prior to Welles' Touch of Evil, that is, 1956's There's Always Tomorrow, directed by Douglas Sirk. Two recent home video editions—European issues from Carlotta in France and Eureka!/Masters of Cinema in Great Britain, respectively—have issued very handsome-looking versions of the film in a 1.85 framing that is so precise and elegant that it's pretty much taken for granted that the wider ratio is the one it was meant to be shown at. But should it be? Well, as it happens, domestic Universal, in its recently issued collection of Barbara Stanwyck films, included a pretty dingy transfer of Tomorrow...in 1.375 framing. And, yes, Virginia, there are some cinephiles who argue that this framing is good and true and correct and appropriate. I happen to vociferously disagree, and here's why. First, the 1.85 frame:

 

Now, the 1.375 frame:

 

To me it's just no contest. The tight precision of the wider frame is not only more pleasing to the eye, but it's more in keeping with one of the film's major themes, which is the Fred MacMurray character's imprisonment in a family life that is utterly indifferent if not actively hostile towards his needs and happiness. And for all that, when the Stanwyck collection was reviewed by Dave Kehr in his invaluable New York Times DVD column, much space in the comments threads of his website was devoted to an argument over which was the correct framing. 

Of course, intention counts, and with Sirk, who went on to create some of the most distinctively gorgeous widescreen films of his time (see, for instance, the sublime A Time To Love And A Time To Die), the notion of widescreen consciousness was a given. Not so much, though, with the sublime Welles, who never even dabbled in Cinemascope and whose two subsequent completed features as a director, 1962's The Trial and 1973's F For Fake, [UPDATE: Aargh, my initial post neglected to cite 1965's also-completed—and masterful!—Chimes at Midnight, not that it would have disproved my point, as to the best of my knowledge it, too, is a 1.66 picture] were presented in the very European ratio of 1.66. 

Adding to the excitement here is that fact that Welles' Evil and Sirk's Tomorrow have the cinematographer Russell Metty in common. Metty and Welles never worked together again, but Metty and Sirk were a pretty consistent team with a staggering visual output from 1953 on. Metty in fact shot most of the films that we (okay, some of us) consider Sirk's masterpieces, including A Time To Love... and All That Heaven Allows. Widescreen pictures, as we know. And away from Sirk, Metty continued with a run of films which some might argue are only watchable on account of their widescreen cinematography. I myself get an awful lot out of the hall-of-mirrors rendition of "I Enjoy Being A Girl" in Flower Drum Song, for instance. So I'd argue that the preponderance of circumstantial evidence weighs pretty heavily toward the notion that the 1.85 framing of Touch of Evil is the correct one. 

However. There really is no definitive way to settle the argument. Which is why, to my mind, it makes sense for the issuing distributor to provide the consumer with an option. And I understand that there may be valid arguments against this idea. The Eureka!/Masters of Cinema producers, for instance, have a very strong perspective on issuing their films in the correct aspect ratio and reminding their consumers that their monitors need to be set properly so as to display the correct aspect ratio. Whether or not they believe that the 1.375 framing of There's Always Tomorrow constitutes a "travesty [of] the integrity of both the human form and cinematographic space" is something I'd love to hear from Nick Wrigley or Craig Keller (if Craig is in fact still speaking to me). But for me, the most practicable and desirable solution to this dilemma might just be more choice...when the choice is pertinent. Which is a whole other kettle of fish. We haven't even gotten into the Kubrick perplex here...

Tales From the Warner Archives #6: Preminger's "Saint Joan" and the bedeviling aspect ratio issue

Ah, Preminger. The obstreperous Otto. Is that an apt description of the man? Probably not entirely, but some sort of alliterative description sometimes seems de rigueur when contemplating such figures. Almost a quarter-century after his death, and thirty years after he made his final film (and almost eighty years since he made his first!) he's still a hugely contentious figure among cinephiles. As a recent sort-of-contra-Otto piece by the divine Siren attests. 

I come here this morning not to praise Otto nor to bury him but merely to comment on a film reproduction matter of some concern, concerning a film bearing the man's name. That film is 1957's Saint Joan, adapted from the Shaw play of the same name, and long unavailable on domestic DVD, let alone any home video format. I wrote about a rather atrocious Spanish-edition disc of the film at my old blog back in 2008, saying the transfer rendered Georges Perinal's "silkily gorgeous" cinematography with "all the detail and contrast of a 16mm print that's been gnawed on by beavers after being washed through a mud bath." Hyperbolic, I know, but why should that surprise anyone. 

That being the case, I expected great, or at least good, things from the recently released Warner Archive version of the disc. And I largely got them. Got something else, too. 

Here's a screen cap, featuring the beguiling Seberg and the entirely impeccable Richard Widmark (in one of his most unusual portrayals), from the Spanish version: 

 

and here, the same shot from the new Warner Archive disc: 

 

Inceed, the Warner version has better contrast and detail and all that good stuff...and is also wider, out to a near 1.85 aspect ratio. And that widescreen wasn't achieved by cropping an "academy ratio" image—as you'll note, there's more picture detail in the wider version, e.g., the rest of Seberg's ear. All the sources I've seen say that this film is in fact a 1.33 one—Preminger is well known for his expertise with Cinemascope and other widescreen formats, but didn't hesitate to revert to a less rectangular picture shape when he so desired—so could the Spanish 1.33 image have derived from a further reduction of a wider 1.33 picture? Curiouser and curiouser.