Page 26 - CINEMARECORD-100

FILMED IN 70 mm … OR WAS IT?

by Earl Martell

it in that format, so it was released world wide
in 35 mm Panavision with an aspect ratio of
2.35:1. It was released in Australia in 1958, so
presumably it was first shown at the Metro
Bourke St in Melbourne and the St. James in
Sydney.
The next film made in MGM Camera 65 (Ultra
Panavision) was the biblical classic, Ben Hur,
in 1959. Again, it suffered a similar fate to
Raintree County. Whilst it was shown in the
wider Ultra Panavision ratio in some theatres,
not enough 70 mm equipped picture theatres
had the anamorphic lens needed for the process,
so a “cropped” (a bit cut from the picture on the
left and right hand sides) version in standard
70 mm aspect ratio (2.20:1) was also released.
This “narrower” 70 mm version is still being
shown around the world (at both the Astor and
Sun theatres here in Melbourne)!
How the West Was Won was a three-camera
Cinerama film … or was it? A lot of the scenes
were filmed using three 35 mm cameras as per
Cinerama, but a lot were also filmed using
70 mm Ultra Panavision cameras. The image
was then cut into three for screening in
Cinerama theatres, a fact that was never
publicized. However, in listings of movies shot
in Ultra Panavision How The West Was Won is
included!

In 1969 Columbia studios, which had only ever
released two 70 mm films (Lawrence of Arabia
and Lord Jim) released MacKenna’s Gold with
the claim that it was filmed in Super Panavision
(the 2.20:1 aspect ratio 70 mm format). It was
and it wasn’t. Segments were filmed in 70 mm
(watching the movie you can see the 70 mm

ver the years there have been a number of
Omovies filmed in 70 mm but not shown in
that format, movies which were claimed to have
been filmed in 70 mm, but that was not entirely
true, and then there were the “odd” ones …

Not taking into account the 70 mm Fox
Grandeur films of the early 1930s, the first
movie to be shot in 70 mm was Oklahoma in
1956, filmed in Todd-AO as Producer Mike
Todd’s single camera answer to the three
camera Cinerama process. In the U.S.
Oklahoma was shown on deeply curved screens
to give a Cinerama effect. Unfortunately, there
were no theatres in Australia equipped with
70 mm projectors at the time, so we never saw
the Todd-AO version here. Instead, Australian
picture theatres screened the separately filmed
Cinemascope version, which had an aspect ratio
of 2.55:1, making it wider than the 70 mm
version’s ratio of 2.20:1, but lacking the higher
resolution image and six channel sound.

The first movie made in the wider 70 mm Ultra
Panavision/MGM Camera 65 (2.76:1 aspect
ratio) format was the 1957 made Raintree
County, a civil war romance starring Elizabeth
Taylor. Unfortunately, there were no 70 mm
equipped theatres available anywhere to show

26 CINEMARECORD # 100