Search - Max Steiner, Louis Forbes, Cinerama Philharmonic Orchestra :: This is Cinerama: At the Movies

Not quite complete

Joseph P. Durham, Jr. | West Monroe, Louisiana | 10/12/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I had the opportunity to once again relive this movie when the theater in Dayton, Ohio had a revival in the late 1990's. This is Cinerama has been called the movie that saved Hollywood from a horrible fate and brought about a whole slough-ful of wide screens in the 1950's.

Cinerama, developed by the late Fred Waller after his gunnery trainer device was used in World War II, uses three cameras and three projectors to throw an image onto a huge curved screen.

It was not quite the first of its kind. A similar system had been used back in the 1920's, but Cinerama proved to be very popular.

Needless to say, a system this huge, had to have an awesome sound system to go with it. Cinerama was the first successful stereophonic sound system. the system proved to be so popular, the first stereo records were released about five years later.

Enter this, the only recording we have to date of this soundtrack. I am especially disappointed in it not being a complete one.

For instance, none of the bagpipe music is heard from the gathering of the Clans sequence in part one. only part of the music of the climactic flight across America is heard here and none of the music used in the Cypress Gardens sequence is here.

Still, it does give the listener some of the more breathtaking parts of the sound which was used and still beats anything heard on the market today.

There are at the present time only two theaters in the United States equipped to show Cinerama and both of them are on the West coast. One is in Seattle, and the other is in Los Angeles.

It would be worth any movie buff's while to check out when they show these old Cinerama movies and at the same time get a glimpse of what the sound was like, even though this soundtrack is incomplete. One hopes a complete one will be issued before too long."