3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

Chapter 4: Deep Black and White

3-D Film Noir of the 1950s The screening of pristine black-and-white prints at the World 3-D Film Expo in September 2003 and 2006 in Hollywood provided an opportunity to reevaluate three film noirs of the 1950s and to consider their effectiveness as stereoscopic narratives within the genre. The shimmering blackand -white prints were given optimum presentation. It is quite possible that these 3-D films didn’t even look this good on their first presentation in the 1950s. The term film noir, literally “black film,” was first coined by French film critic Nino Frank when an exhibition of post–World War II American movies was held in Paris in August 1946, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and Double Indemnity (1944). Film noirs were visually and thematically dark, and they featured characters such as con men, crooked cops, bookies, and deadly femmes fatales. The overriding mood of film noir was one of paranoia, cynicism, and fatalism, with stories largely set in nighttime urban environments. Sex and violence were also inextricably linked in film noir, twin threads entangling the protagonist in his inevitable downfall. Columbia’s Man in the Dark Edmond O’Brien was a recurring Everyman in film noirs. In the 1950 (2D ) release D.O.A., directed by Rudolph Mate, O’Brien portrayed Frank Bigelow, a small-town certified accountant who, on a vacation to San Francisco , is accidentally poisoned and finds that he has less than forty-eight Deep Black and White 4 46 3-D Revolution hours to live. The story is told in flashback, and the film opens with narration by Bigelow, who is dead as the story begins. After the success of Bwana Devil, Columbia Studios hurriedly put together their first 3-D motion picture, Man in the Dark, which opened April 8, 1953, as the second 3-D feature film to be released, one day before House of Wax. Edmond O’Brien was the perfect choice to portray Steve Rawley, a gangster who undergoes brain surgery to eliminate his criminal tendencies. When the film opens, Rawley is an amnesiac in a hospital who can’t remember his former life. The effect of the stereoscopic imaging in the opening scenes gives the narrative an immediacy that permits the audience to readily identify with the baffled Rawley. This same spatial and temporal presence pulls the viewer into the story as Rawley’s former gangster associates kidnap him to find the $130,000 he had hidden away before the operation. When Rawley meets up with Peg Benedict (Audrey Totter), his former girlfriend, his memory starts to return. He escapes, and with Benedict’s assistance, he finds the hidden money. Periodically, an insurance investigator shows up, on the trail of the cash. Stereoscopic images of Rawley experiencing a dream on an amusement pier, in which his memory fully returns, are highly effective. Flat rear-screen projection is combined with stereoscopic foreground imagery for a climax on a roller coaster in which Rawley exchanges gunfire with the gangsters. Man in the Dark was shot in just eleven days using a twin camera rig assembled by Columbia Studios engineer Gerald Rackett and camera department head Emil Oster. The 3-D unit used two Mitchell cameras shooting straight on without any prisms or mirrors, and produced pairs of stereo negatives that did not require subsequent reversal or optical treatment. The two Mitchell cameras were mounted side by side, with one inverted to bring the lenses closer together. The film magazines for both cameras were mounted on top. “In designing this camera, the importance of good 3-D close-ups was considered of paramount importance,” stated Racket in a May 1953 article in American Cinematographer. “As a result we can make individual head closeups—chin to forehead—with ease and without any distortion.”1 Director Lew Landers, working with cameraman Floyd Crosby, shot exteriors for Man in the Dark right on the Columbia lot using gangplanks and stairways to good 3-D effect. In thematically working through a mood of paranoia and fatalism to one of moral self-control, Man in the Dark is Deep Black and White 47 the narrative inverse of D.O.A. Rawley is redeemed at the end, not doomed, and the stereoscopic imagery underscores both the darkness and the nature of this narrative progression. Universal’s 3-D Director Jack Arnold was the 3-D director...