National Film Board of Canada | World Cinema Paradise

I currently have about 7,200 titles in my DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray library, but less than an hour into the two-and-a-half-hours-long 3-D Rarities, I knew I was looking at one of my Top Ten favorite titles. Of immense historical, technological, and cultural interest, and supremely entertaining besides, 3-D Rarities is one of the year’s top releases – heck, it’s one of the format’s best releases! – and a bona fide must-see.

A grab bag of material stretching from 1922 into the early 1960s, 3-D Rarities gathers together an enormous amount of all sorts of things even hard-core 3-D enthusiasts have never seen presented so perfectly, when at all. The digital 3-D conversions are uniformly excellent and, truly, there’s something for everyone: historical footage of New York City and Washington D.C. in the 1920s; an amazing promotional film for the Pennsylvania Railroad line; trailers for ‘50s 3-D films (in 3-D); dazzlingly 3-D shorts directed by the National Film Board of Canada’s resident genius Norman McLaren; a completely unexpected anti-nuclear documentary made during the height of the Cold War (and quickly suppressed, unsurprisingly); an eye-popping Casper cartoon, and lots, lots more.

This isn’t just for 3-D enthusiasts. Watching Thrills for You, the Pennsylvania Railroad documentary, I couldn’t help thinking how train buffs would go absolutely nuts over all the footage showing the construction of a big steam locomotive engine, and footage taken inside real, en route passenger trains that allow the viewer to vicariously experience that long-lost form of travel, remembered primarily in the distorted form of ‘30s and ‘40s movies set aboard trains but always filmed on soundstage sets.

3-D Rarities also includes gobs of extra features, including excerpts from 3-D comic books, View-Master reels, and even 3-D stills from the Lon Chaney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)!

A marvelous 24-page, full-color booklet guides the viewer through this unique collection. Following brief introductory essays by comedian Trustin Howard (who, as “Slick Slavin,” headlines Stardust in Your Eyes) and Leonard Maltin, the two-part program (Act 1: The Dawn of Stereoscopic Cinematography; Act 2: Hollywood Enters the Third-Dimension) is explained in short but illuminating essays by experts Jack Theakston, Hillary Hess, Donald McWilliams, Ted Okuda, Julian Antos, Thad Komorowski, Mary Ann Sell, and disc co-producer Bob Furmanek.

The essays provide valuable information about the 3-D processes used, how and when they were originally exhibited, quotes from contemporary reviews, and information about how they were rescued and restored. In many cases, the lone surviving negative or print was literally on its way to the junk yard and very nearly lost forever.

Many of the earliest shorts were originally exhibited in anaglyphic format (using red-green glasses) but for 3-D Rarities impressively have been reformat to “polarized” format, with the image in crystal-clear black-and-white with minimal ghosting effects.

This reviewer found everything totally fascinating, with only New Dimension, essentially a long if 3-D commercial for Chrysler’s 1940 Plymouths, wearing out its welcome before it was over. But old car enthusiasts, like train buffs watching Thrills for You, will delight in this stop-motion film showing a single car being put together, part-by-part. I had assumed this was done with a detailed scale-model, but Theakston reports that, incredibly, all of the stop-motion was done full-scale, presumably with (for the most part) real car parts.

Scottish expatriate McLaren’s ingenious shorts for the National Film Board of Canada got the deluxe treatment some years back via a superb DVD set, but the quartet of dimensional films presented here, Now Is the Time, Around and Around, O Canada, and Twirlgig are truly magical, bearing McLaren’s (and the NFB’s) unmistakable stamp while literally adding a new dimension to the NFB’s filmmaking innovations.

Finally, there’s a wealth of home movie-type scenes filmed to promote Bolex’s Stereo film gear, which awkwardly halved the 16mm gauge’s frame size, making it taller than wide, but the 3-D is nonetheless impressive.

Part 2 begins with an amusing short film that originally preceded Bwana Devil (1952), the picture that mainstreamed the ‘50s 3-D craze. Starring Lloyd Nolan, “Miss Third Dimension” and, in puppet form, Beany & Cecil, it’s a charming artifact of the period. 3-D Trailers for Oh-how-I wish-they-were-out-already ‘50s titles It Came from Outer Space, Hannah Lee, The Maze, and Miss Sadie Thompson provide, at least, tantalizing previews.

The first and only 3-D newsreels documents the unexpectedly brief Rocky Marciano vs. Jersey Joe Walcott fight, a controversial rematch that never went beyond the first round. This proved a bonus for 3-D fans, as the two-reeler is padded with loads of other good stuff, including Marciano reaching out and “punching” the movie audience.

The aforementioned Stardust in Your Eyes is a real oddity, clearly slapped together in haste by director Phil Tucker as a prologue short to his magnum opus, the infamous Robot Monster. Tucker’s notorious turkey actually has an infectious, child-fueled dream-like logic and apparently pretty impressive in good 3-D, but the short never takes advantage of the format, with comedian-impressionist Slavin doing his entire act in front of what looks like the kind of padding movers wrap furniture in.

Doom Town, on the other hand, is a revelation. Made independently by producer Lee Savin and written and directed by Gerald Schnitzer, it provides a rare, sharp contrast to the gung-ho propagandizing of most Hollywood films as well as the Cinerama travelogues. After a few bookings it was abruptly pulled and disappeared for decades, until the 3-D Film Archive discovered the original negatives, about to be junked, in 1985. There’s was a historic find and Doom Town all by itself is, as they say, worth the price of admission.

Another major restoration is the little-seen The Adventures of Sam Space, done in the stop-motion/replacement animation style of George Pal’s Puppetoons. Bursting with imaginative production design and effects, it was completed just as the fad for 3-D died and, until now, has never been seen in its correct widescreen aspect ratio.

I’ll Sell My Shirt is a cheap, typical burlesque/mild striptease-type short with the added benefit of 3-D. Far superior is the Paramount-distributed Casper cartoon, Boo Moon, one of the best-looking 3-D cartoons ever. After seeing the disappointing Bugs Bunny short Lumberjack Rabbit several times in 3-D, Boo Moon is a real surprise. It really uses the format spectacularly well.

The shorts all look great, especially considering the considerable restoration effort that went into many of them. All films are presented in their correct original aspect ratios and the 3-D is perfect nearly all the time. The disc is region-free, too.

Extras include a few minutes of 3-D footage aspiring director Francis Ford Coppola shot for The Bellboys and the Playgirls, an otherwise 2-D nudie-cutie made in West Germany. Also included are amazing 3-D still galleries from the Lon Chaney Hunchback of Notre Dame and the 1939 World’s Fair; Adventures of Sam Sawyer, a View-Master release, along with excerpts from several 3-D comic books, all transferred to polarized format from their original anaglyphic.

This is an outstanding collection, with delightful surprises around every corner, gorgeously realized on all levels. Kudos to the 3-D Film Archive and Flicker Alley for one of the best releases of this or any year.

A new feature here at World Cinema Paradise, “Life-Changing Movies” pays tribute to those films, festivals, and other special screenings that changed the way we look at the movies. Check back here as our contributors write about their life-changing viewing experiences.

To begin with the obvious, inevitable, but wholly justified inaugural title.

Back in the summer of 1979, I was shipped off by my parents, needing a break from their troubled teenager, for the second time to a filmmaking seminar sponsored by the appropriately named DAFT: Detroit Area Film Teachers. Held at the exclusive, historic Cranbrook boarding school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, teachers and students were provided all the necessary tools – camera, film, overnight processing, lighting equipment, etc. – to produce a short Super-8 film over the course of one week which would then be screened as part of a mini-festival on the final day.

The year before I had made a very modest Claymation short but somebody there, probably John Prusak, aware of my rapidly ballooning interest in movies of all kinds greeted me this year with an enormous gift: my own private Nirvana, a private classroom equipped with a Bell & Howell 16mm projector, screen, and in one corner of the room, something like 200 reels of film stacked in a pile in the corner rising five feet off the floor.

Instead of concentrating my energies on the challenge of writing, shooting, and editing a short film in just seven days, I spent all my mornings, afternoons, and nights plowing through those film cans, this effectively being the era just preceding the home video revolution. (Interestingly, however, the year before someone had gotten their hands on a VHS or three-quarter-inch copy of the still relatively new The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which we all watched one evening.)

I spent hours upon hours in that little classroom, seeing for the first time or rewatching such films as Duck Soup (1933), Lord of the Flies (1963), Night of the Living Dead (1968), untold treasures from the National Film Board of Canada and short films distributed by the late, lamented distributor Pyramid Films.

And then one evening I came across a film I’d always heard, in my teenaged naiveté, was one of the very best of its kind: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). But by this time it was already one o’clock in the morning, far too late to watch the whole thing. But, I figured, I’ll watch the first reel, then pick up where I left off the following morning.

Needless to say that didn’t happen. I was transfixed from the opening scenes, of Charles Foster Kane (Welles) on his deathbed in the castle-like Xanadu, by the abrupt cut to a dizzying virtuosity of filmmaking as a fake newsreel summarized his fabled life, of the next abrupt cut to the newsreel company’s screening room, where reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) is assigned to find meaning in Kane’s last words. With short breaks to change reels I finished watching this momentous triumph of movie-making around 3:30 am. And then proceeded to watch it a second time, then and there. And I watched it twice more before the week was over.

(Built in 1922 by the famed Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, Cranbrook, cavernous and bereft of students due to the summer holiday, was especially at night an eerie place to stay, and in its own way quite reminiscent of Kane’s Xanadu.)

Alfred Hitckcock’s Vertigo (1958) last year famously bumped it from Sight & Sound’s 50-year-old poll of the Greatest Films of All-Time but, for my money, there’s still no movie finer than Citizen Kane. I won’t attempt to explain its greatness – people have been doing that for decades – but on a personal level it’s perhaps the most startlingly entertaining of Great Movies. It’s crammed to the gills with so much creativity and ingenuity that, even when one has seen it close to 50 times as I have, there are still always new things to discover. And it still dazzles. It’s as fresh in 2013 as it was 70-plus years ago.

Seeing it that first time was an overwhelming experience, one that demonstrated how far filmmaking conventions could be stretched and even shattered to good effect, and – an especially important lesson in this day and age – how it’s possible to infuse a film with a deeply personal, original vision yet also so involve the audience that they lose themselves completely in the picture they’re watching, and not consciously aware of all they are seeing.

I can’t say watching Citizen Kane that week had any positive impact at all on my own filmmaking ambitions, try as I might, but it reshaped forever the way I look at movies, and made me recognize the limitless possibilities of the medium.

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Blu-ray Review: “3-D Rarities”

“Citizen Kane” (1941)

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