CinemaScope proved to be a major hit with north film fans

In the second and final part of the history of cinema in Thurso, Darren Manson reviews the watershed moments in its development from the end of the Second World War, from the advent of CinemaScope movies through to the present day and the plans to introduce digital technology

FOLLOWING the Second World War, cinema didn’t change much for the next 25 years but there were things happening. Colour had crept in slowly but successfully, with Technicolor being the king of colour cinema. Their colour systems are still among the most highly regarded in the industry today.

Declining audiences after the war saw Hollywood look to three-dimensional films and, while it was a come and go market, 3D has lingered in the background, only occasionally showing its head above the parapet.

The industry was also struggling to compete with the rise in television and the coronation of 1953 was to prove the main driving force to the biggest revolution in motion pictures in Britain.

Since the 1920s, studios had experimented with large or wide format films. 70mm had been used in some 1920s movies with a massive 10 perforation high frame yielding an unparalleled picture quality and, in 1927, an anamorphic system came and went with no fanfare.

20th Century Fox, like most studios in the late ’40s, was looking for the next thing that would keep it in business as television spread its cathode glare over America and Europe. Others had gone with large format films such as Vista-Vision, which used 35mm film horizontally, and Cinerama, which used three cameras to shoot the picture and three projectors to show the finished film, which in turn used a 6 perf high frame on three times vertical 35mm.

These systems were very expensive and most cinemas were resistant due to the costs and complications of installation. Fox was looking for something that was cheap and easy to install yet would give the audience an experience beyond anything they had seen before.

They found it in that anamorphic system that came and went in 1926. Anamorphoscope had been invented, developed and patented by French inventor Henri Chretien and was to return with the extended 20th Century Fox logo and fanfare. The first major release in what Fox called CinemaScope was the 1952 film, The Robe, starring Victor Mature.

In June 1955, The Picture House in Thurso, now part of the Caledonian Associated Cinemas circuit, announced its old 12ft screen was to go as the cinema was to be refurbished and extended for the new CinemaScope system. It would also be able to show the not-so-wide Superscope and less wide again, Widescreen films.

Again Wick was first to experience this new wonder with the Pavilion opening to a new 34ft by 17ft screen which proportionately was bigger than many screens in the super cinemas of the cities. Previously Wick’s screen had been 13ft wide by 10ft high.

On March 10th 1956, after months of building work, Thurso Picture House was to close for connecting work and the last film to be shown on its old 12ft screen was the Norman Wisdom comedy, Man Of The Moment.

On Monday March 26, the Picture House reopened with the James Stewart western The Man From Laramie. The house capacity had increased by 200 seats to provide a total of 670. The old procenium had gone to make way for a huge set of gold French festooned satin curtains. Provost John Sinclair performed the opening ceremony cutting the white tape in front of the curtains to which they then swept open to reveal the 30ft wide by 10ft high screen.

There was loud applause followed almost immediately by an audible gasp of astonishment from the patrons as the black masking moved open to reveal the full width of the CinemaScope screen. Overall, Thurso and Wick were extremely well provisioned in screen size, better than many other cinemas including those in Inverness and Aberdeen.

In reference to the growth of cinema in Thurso, Provost Sinclair said: “I have no doubt there will be many present tonight who can recall the magic lantern, the early motion pictures and later, the addition of sound. So much progress has been made that we accept colour films as part of our daily life.”

This event was captured on audio tape recorded by Eric Chadwick, a radio engineer, of High Street, Thurso, and it was played back to the second house audience. Efforts are being made to trace the recording but with no luck so far. There was one other big change in cinema that had not happened in Caithness – stereo sound. The local cinemas and the mobile cinemas which visited Caithness in the ’80s and ’90s only used mono playback even though the films had stereo soundtracks.

With the arrival of the All Star Factory in October 2000, Dolby Surround finally arrived in the far north. Dolby had been around in mainstream cinema for 20 years by this time. Although the cinema was equipped with Dolby Digital and DTS, the bulk of the films were shown with analogue surround. The average viewer wouldn’t notice the difference as analogue is a very good system.

Almost prophetically, the Picture House in Thurso opened under the name, “The ELECTRIC Picture House” and in the last 116 years, electricity has come into cinema operation in every way possible. The sciences of separate industries were moving closer together. Sound on film in synchronisation, colour pictures in CinemaScope and stereo surround sound all evolving alongside the television and broadcasting industries.

Both cinema and television have been on a collision course since their earliest days. For as long as I’ve been filming on super 8, I’ve also been recording on video and longed to be able to project video as well as film. As technology has moved on, video projection has become a reality. Worth a watch for its insight to the future is the film, Quatermass And The Pit where moving images from a special television camera are seen to be projected as part of the story.

The Picture House community cinema which ran a season of films in 2011 gave Caithness its first shows of fully digital movie presentation, albeit on a lesser 720p DLP system yet presenting clean, sharp picture and sound on a large screen without using film.

In the last 18 years, the cinema industry has advanced its research into digital projection and the new technology has been arriving all over the world faster than anyone imagined and with it comes a new era for cinema. This year Thurso is hoping to see full digital cinema with 7:1 surround as a reality in the north.

It is interesting that at every step where Thurso cinema has been upgraded, it has been one of the best equipped cinemas in the country and soon it will be again as digital brings us everything that has been developed in over 100 years, colour, surround sound, 3D, and CinemaScope. Sony 4K digital is by far a superior way to view projected digital images at four times that of domestic HD systems.

The reasons behind this change are about economics but the drive to sustain cinema as the highest quality audio visual entertainment has remained at the forefront of all developments. At the production end of movies, film is actually gaining popular momentum with more and more directors turning to highly advanced film stocks which yield greater depth of field than digital.

At the viewing end of the industry, cinemas are changing to digital completely and by 2020 only selected cinemas will still have film projectors, although it is likely that the mainstream cinema market will have completed the move by 2015.

While that is sad for those who understand the qualities that film has over digital, it does have its advantages for the audience. Never again will you see a dusty scratched film out of focus!

The content will also be more extensive and, in a way, programming will become something like the value for money it used to be way back in the early days. This new dynamic will also allow old films to be available more easily in real cinemas once more.

So now, 57 years after the biggest change to cinema, Thurso will experience the step into the next era of motion picture entertainment.

We’ve seen the arrival of the talkies and the epic sweeping CinemaScope motion pictures, now cinema moves into an even wider spectrum bringing all its greatest achievements into modern cinema and melding with other audio visual mediums to enhance its universal appeal.

This is the legacy of motion pictures heading into the future without leaving the place where it started. No matter what you’ve experienced in cinema so far, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”