Bwana devil color8/28/2023 It’s at this point Meade decides to open his own clinic in this town that makes Dogpatch look like Martha’s Vineyard. Rather than removing the bullet and using high falutin techniques like sterilization, hillbilly Hazard insists on using a mixture of hickory ashes and black pepper on the wound. When Meade takes the wounded kid into town, he discovers a dirt-poor clinic with no electricity run by a quack, Dr. The titular city doctor (Jack Holt) takes a hunting vacation and accidentally shoots a kid in the backwoods of Kentucky. For the thousands of drive-in operators across the country who were told to “proceed with caution,” this was a long shot. The hardtops were taking a flyer on this movie from the Lights Out guy and whatever else might be in the studio pipelines. Other than the 3D novelty, Bwana Devil was a standard issue B-movie-an action film with Robert Stack and Barbara Britton. As the Motion Picture Herald pointed out, just as Barnett was giving his speech warning drive-in owners of the perils of stereoscopic exhibition, a forward-thinking ozoner in Chicago was spooling up Bwana Devil, the first feature length color 3D film. The livelihood of the middle-class exhibitor and the studio execs were on the line television was keeping an increasing number of eyeballs at home. Faced with the question of how much time and expense to invest into adapting their theater to play these 3D spectacles, theater owners had to make a hard decision. As soon as word got out that United Artists had a hit on their hands, all the studios rushed into 3D productions. That crowd is at the Hollywood premiere of Bwana Devil in November of ’52. Everybody is familiar with the photograph of the massive audience, all dressed to the nines, donning those alien-looking polarized viewers. Film history books are clear on one thing: 1953 was the year of the 3D gold rush. In other words, if you’re outdoors, you’ve got no business stepping into the third dimension.Īudiences were hungry for this new experience and the industry was even hungrier to boost lagging sales. “I shall have failed in my mission here if you leave with anything but a desire to proceed with caution,” Barnett said ominously. Drive-ins have an even more difficult fight, having to compete against the natural ambient light of an outdoor space. Regular indoor theaters-“hardtops” as esteemed critic Joe Bob Briggs calls them-struggle mightily compensating for the reduced illumination caused by the polarization filters used in stereoscopic projection. Herbert Barnett, president of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, laced his talk with some humor but the serious intent was summed up in the title of the speech: “Proceed With Caution.” Barnett outlined the inherent difficulties of any stereoscopic projection and at each step emphasized the added difficulty of this technology at a drive-in. In fact, the whole point of the headline speech at the March 1953 National Drive-In Theatre Convention in Milwaukee was to frame outdoor 3D films as a quixotic venture. Nobody said showing 3D films at a drive-in was going to be easy.
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