As I haven’t reviewed one of these in many months, I need to explain the whole Cinerama presentation from the 50’s and 60’s. It is a presentation where three screens wrap around a viewer as films shot especially for that format are shown w/ 7 channel stereo; for those unfamiliar w/ film history, such a widescreen multichannel stereo presentation was astounding for the time. A few narrative films were shot that way along with various documentaries which presented nature & culture from around the world.
The way people can view those now is via Blu-ray releases from niche label Flicker Alley. It’s a simulation of the tri-screen presentation done via Smilebox, which has a curved aspect ratio and they stitch the three prints together into one. The discs aren’t the cheapest purchases; on the other side of the coin, the picture & sound are both great, along with all the special features included. To me, they’re worth the money.
In fact, as this is niche even in a community like Letterboxd, that is why a list was just created of all the ones I’ve seen; this includes a review of How the West was Won on Turner Classic Movies. That is because they started showing it via Smilebox, which is IMO preferable to the one screen version with the outrageous aspect ratio.
The topic for this was more focused than usual for Cinerama productions: it was visiting several regions in Central Asia which have stunning mountain views and some people say are Shangri-La. That of course is the fictional land which was part of the Lost Horizon book that was turned into a renowned Frank Capra movie and a musical version in the 70’s more infamous than anything else. The novel said it was somewhere in Tibet, so that’s the theme this production went with and did not explicitly state perhaps because at the time they featured everyone knew the novel.
Regardless, the Himalayas are shown along with the Hunza region of Pakistan, Kasmir in India and finally we see a royal coronation in Katmandu in Nepal. Personally, all the rural mountain scenery was stunning and all the footage from that part of the world was a delight as it was all from a world I know little about. Thus, when shots lingered, I marveled instead of feeling tedium. I won’t discuss my opinions on monarchies in general but I just saw on Wiki that the king coronated in Nepal (Mahendra) ended up abolishing democracy in 1960, so after the fact, that segment is now awkward!
Speaking of awkward, there are some amazingly bad songs sung which unfortunately have the name Dimitri Tiomkin attached to them. He did the score and it was fine; those tunes with those lame lyrics weren’t sung or written by him. Also, the United States government must have been involved… time is spent on military aircraft and they sent an official delegation to Nepal. Why else would there be frequent references to “China Reds” and the film belaboring the point that Communism is the government of the Chinese? Someone was peeved that the country also sent representatives.
Even with those carps, I still had a good time with this program hosted by the square radio host known as Lowell Thomas. Actually, I shouldn’t laugh at him or his lack of charisma; among other accolades, he covered T.E. Lawrence in World War I before he became Lawrence of Arabia so who am I to criticize? The final segment seems to confirm the theory that the federal government was involved—it at least was impressive in its own ways.
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