The (really) big picture

The Music Box kicks hi-def old school with a week of 70mm films.

If you’re like us, you’re sick of hearing Blu-ray hailed as the be-all-end-all of high definition. Blu-ray, we’ve got news for you: 70mm film has you beat coming and going. The 35mm film format, whose global hegemony in cinema has lasted for more than a century, was originally nothing more than a budget version of 70mm; in the late 1880s, a technician working on Thomas Edison’s groundbreaking Kinetoscope viewing system sliced a 70mm strip of Kodak still film lengthwise as an economy measure.

As an industry standard, 35mm entailed significant trade-offs. Had Edison’s helper left the scissors in his desk drawer, he would have doubled future filmmakers’ outlay for film stock but bequeathed to the movies a standard of image quality about four times as stable, clear, sharp and tonally nuanced as that to which we are accustomed.

Attempts to break the 35mm stranglehold with manifestly superior 70mm date back to the silent era but went nowhere until the 1950s, when Hollywood was frantically seeking ways of differentiating the movie-going experience from that of watching TV. The industry’s brief and partial transition to 70mm was the most successful facet of a pattern of innovation that included use of wider screen formats, curved screens, 3-D and stereo sound.

As Hollywood poured fortunes into large-format spectacles, high-end 70mm-capable movie palaces—clustered in larger metropolitan centers—offered filmgoers a revolutionary upgrade not just in image quality but in sound as well. The 70mm vogue, while popular, was short-lived: By the 1980s, 70mm had been economically undermined by the rise of suburban cineplexes, whose shoe-box screening rooms were strictly 35mm turf. (The sonic advantages of 70mm were also essentially nullified by the arrival of Dolby sound systems in those same cineplexes.)

If you’ve never had the privilege of experiencing 70mm in the flesh, you owe it to yourself to pay at least one visit to the Music Box Theatre between Saturday 19 and July 24, when the venerable repertory house will screen four films shot in the high-definition format: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), and some random dude’s Tron (1982).

For our money, the pick of the litter here is the epic Lawrence of Arabia, the incomparable opulence of whose desert vistas more than compensates for its queasy post-colonial politics and the grotesque shoe-polish make-up coating the conspicuously non-Arab faces of Sir Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, et al. If you’re simply not in the mood for shock-and-awe in the desert (as so few Americans are these days), we would steer you instead to Hitchcock’s dreamlike poisoned love story Vertigo, starring Jimmy Stewart in his finest—if least-sympathetic—performance, as an acrophobic ex-cop unhealthily obsessed with a friend’s mentally troubled wife (Kim Novak). Less a thriller than an eerie visual poem, the film flopped in original release but has since been awarded its rightful place near the top of the Hitchcock canon.

At the risk of dying in bloody slow-motion at the hands of irate Peckinpah fans, we confess to finding The Wild Bunch a bit of a snooze (something we’d never say about Sam’s Straw Dogs or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid), though we concede that a 70mm encounter with the long, sweaty, ultra-violent Western could cause us to reconsider. (As for Tron, we’ll take a pass, thanks. Those black-light Frisbee death matches struck us as visually adequate in plain old 35mm.)

Endowed with only an average-sized screen, a pocket-sized movie palace like the Music Box can’t fully capitalize on 70mm’s potential as a widescreen format, but since it’s the only theater in Chicago with a projector capable of converting from 35mm to 70mm, this may well represent your one chance to see any of these films as they were meant to be seen. Music Box projectionist Scott Freestone vows that those who regard Blu-ray as the cutting edge of high-definition imagery are in for a revelatory viewing experience. “The larger frame of 70mm means that that much more information is reaching the screen and then your eye,” says Freestone. “With the right print, 70mm delivers an extreme clarity that’s unlike anything else you’ll see at the movies.”

Films in 70mm play at the Music Box Saturday 19–July 24.

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