MovieChat Forums > The General (1927) Discussion > There's no widescreen edition of this, i...

There's no widescreen edition of this, is there?

posted 14 years ago by Amthermandes
6 replies | jump to latest

I'm trying to buy this online (pretty cheap on ebay), but I'm noticing they're all in full frame (1:33). I'm assuming there's no widescreen, since maybe they didn't film the movie with the widescreen ratio. But I was hoping that through modern technology they made it into widescreen.

Does anybody know if there IS a widescreen version of "The General"? Or should I just buy the regular full frame version?

"Negative, I am a meat popsicle"

[–] 14 years ago

[deleted]

[–] SinemaGirl 14 years ago

KAGE is correct. If you ever see "The General" in widescreen, it means that "modern technology" has chopped off the top and bottom of the picture.

That's what was done to "Gone With The Wind" for a late 1960s release. It was a disaster:

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/special/gwtw.htm

Personally, I want to see the whole picture (of both movies).

[–] msaiu78 14 years ago

TCM showed it tonight -- it was widescreen (!?) -- about 1.66:1.

By the way, how long has 1.37:1 full frame been around? Was there a time when other ratios were used prior to 1953-54 ?

[–] SinemaGirl 14 years ago

Sorry I missed that. Strange that TCM would do that kind of cropping; that channel is rather reverential toward preserving the original aspect ratio

Regarding the Academy ratio, the silent aperture of 1.33:1 pretty much began with Thomas Edison (or maybe more accurately, his kinetoscope developer, W.L.K. Dickson). When the optical soundtrack was added to the film in the late 1920s, the picture temporarily lost some of its width and became almost square. It spurred the first attempt at wide-film processes like Fox's "Grandeur" and Fearless "Superpicture." Here are some articles on that short-lived period of widescreen cinema:

http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/mullen.htm

Hope this helps.

[–] chuck-526 11 years ago

I'm assuming there's no widescreen, since maybe they didn't film the movie with the widescreen ratio.

Widescreen? In 1926? No cameras nor lenses nor projectors existed to do such a thing. The technology simply wasn't available at all at that time no matter what.

But I was hoping that through modern technology they made it into widescreen.

As far as I know this is not possible. (Modern technology is magical, but not that magical:-) If the original negative wasn't widescreen, recreating the missing pieces later is somewhere between prohibitively expensive and impossible.

(It is "possible" to forcibly display an academy aspect ratio picture in widescreen anyway by pressing all the wrong buttons. Such a thing doesn't look quite right though. Everybody's a little too fat, faces look doughy, wheels aren't quite round, doors seem a little short, and so forth.)

(It's also possible to make a movie appear widescreen by chopping off the top and bottom. However, as noted above, the few experiments with this technique were disastrous, and nobody does it any more.)

[–] mnbush 9 years ago

No widescreen and no Technicolor.