That summer, Fox filmed its very last CinemaScope pictures, to be released the following spring, In Like Flint and Caprice, the latter photographed by LeonShamroy, ASC, who had started it all on The Robe and makes a cameo appearance in the film. Some sources at Panavision claim that Von Ryan's Express was shot with Panavisionlenses at the insistence of Frank Sinatra. Yet while this may have been true for some scenes, there are others in which the anamorphic mumps and other aberrations associated with CinemaScope lenses are quite obvious. In the late Sixties, Panavision modified the Mitchell BNC to make it a reflex camera which Gottschalk named the PSR (Panavision Silenced Reflex). By 1970, Panavision dominated 35mm anamorphic photography throughout the world. With the development of the lighter and more compact Panaflex camera, which was first used by Vilmos Zsigmond ASC, on Steven Spielberg's Sugar/and Express (1974), and a line of high quality spherical lenses, Panavision solidified its position as the industry leader.
Later Anamorphic Systems From the early Seventies on, several companies have joined the anamorphic fray by developing lenses for use with Arriflex cameras. In 1971, Todd-AO licensed a line of Japanese designed anamorphic lenses, primarily for use with Arriflex cameras, which it marketed under the name "Todd-AO 35." The Academy Award winning documentary The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1976) was filmed under difficult conditions with 35mm anamorphic lenses, raising a question as to the validity of complaints about the bulkiness and difficulty of working with these lenses. In 1976, an Italian company, Technovision, introduced a line of Cooke spherical lenses that had been modified for 35mm anamorphic photography. The Cooke anamorphics were particularly popular with Vittorio Storaro, ASC, who used them on Apocalypse Now (1989), The Last Emperor(1988), and the35mm portions of Little Buddha (1994).
In 1981, widescreen buff and equipment developer Joe Dunton also came out with a line of anamorphic lenses which were used by Dina De Laurentiis, who housed Dunton's American headquarters at his North Carolina studio, on films he produced such as Tai-Pan (1986) and Maximum Overdrive (1986 ). Other films using Dunton's lenses were The Black Hole (1979), Invaders from Mars (1986), The Sandlot (1992), Rob Roy (1995), Rumble in the Bronx (released in the U.S. in 1996), and the Malta sequences of Cutthroat Island (1995). In 1989, Germany's Isco Optic developed a line of anamorphic lenses especially for Arriflex, which were given the moniker" Arriscope." The Arriscope lenses were first used by Warner Bros. on Body Snatchers, the second remake of the Don Siegel sci-fi thriller. With today's tightly grained film stocks and high resolution anamorphic and spherical lenses, there are many ways to produce rich and beautiful widescreen 35mm motion pictures. Whether this might have been envisioned in 1953 at the birth of the widescreen revolution is not known. For at that time, each method involved great compromises in image quality: the CinemaScope lenses had mumps and masked spherical images wasted a significant part of the photographed image. As soon as these techniques were launched, industry technicians began to seek ways of improving image quality. Through their efforts, the movie-going public has greatly benefited. Yet, on a parallel plane with the optical improvements in 35mm photography just discussed, some studios chose instead to improve image quality for their premiere pictures by going to a larger negative.
Next in the series: The development of Vista Vision and Technirama. Rick Mitchell is afilm editor, director and historian who currently lives and works in Hollywood.