Seventy years ago, cinemas showed White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. It was the first film in the new high- and wide-screen VistaVision process.
In 1954, theatre managers advertised White Christmas as an entirely new motion picture. They didn’t want audiences to be confused with an earlier Bing Crosby film, Holiday Inn (1942), where he had previously sung the Irving Berlin standard White Christmas. The song got another outing in the film of the same name. White Christmas became the UK’s second most popular film in 1955, after The Dam Busters, and America’s most popular in 1954.
In 1954, VistaVision was the latest screen development from Hollywood to try to lure people away from the TVs in their comfortable living rooms and back to the cinemas.
VistaVision was a deep-focus process that eliminated distortion and included action taking place in all areas of the screen. Exhibitors had the flexibility, with compatible lens and aperture plates, to choose their own screen ratio (from 4 x 3 to2x1)on a large screen. In the 2x1 proportion on a big screen, VistaVision looked rather like CinemaScope.
For VistaVision, the film was photographed by an oversize negative running horizontally through the camera. When optically printed on a standard 35mm positive, it brought a new clarity to the picture.
The VistaVision screen – higher and narrower than CinemaScope – had speakers behind it. It made VistaVision less expensive than CinemaScope’s stereophonic sound.
At the 1955 Academy Awards, Paramount Pictures and all the engineers and technical staff received an honorary Oscar for the development of VistaVision.
The film got varying reviews. None of the new Irving Berlin songs achieved the popularity of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas in 1942. The best-known new song from the film was Count Your
Blessings (Instead of Sheep), which received an Oscar nomination for best song of 1954, losing to Three Coins in the Fountain.
As for VistaVision, it continues to be used occasionally for special-process effects in films.
