DVD narrow screen

Here's the answer, from widescreenmuseum.com -

"In early 1953, just a few months after Cinerama made its sensational debut, Paramount kicked off the wide screen format competition with its release of 'Shane'. The film was photographed in ... the standard Academy 1.37:1 aspect ratio, but Paramount demanded it be projected with the top and bottom cropped to yield an unremarkable 1.66:1 aspect ratio on the biggest new screens that theatres could install."

An advantage of shooting the movie this way is that theaters which hadn't upgraded could still show the movie on a standard screen. Also, it could be shown later on TV without adding black bars or or doing an optical pan & scan.

So, on the DVD, you're actually seeing a little *more* on the top & bottom than movie theater audiences would have seen. But the composition isn't quite right; it's looser.

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

HONDO's recommended aspect ratio was 1.85:1. It is not presented on the DVD that way out of ignorance of the studio.

Read more about the production of HONDO here:
http://3dfilmpf.org/info.html

-J. Theakston
http://centraltheater.blogspot.com

The IMDB Tech Specs for this movie are incorrect, just as they are for many other movies.

Hondo was filmed using the Academy Standard aspect ratio of 1.37:1 (actually 1.375:1 = 11:8) and that is the AR that both the 3D and 2D versions were shown at in its initial run. (The 3D version was only shown in a limited number of theatres and was pulled after less that a month). It may very well have been re-released in later years cropped (at top and bottom) to 1.85:1 but the original theatrical aspect ratio was 1.37:1. The DVD release shows the movie in the aspect ratio that it was originally intended to be viewed at.

As for Shane, it was also filmed at 1.37:1. However, after it was ìn the can the execs at Paramount decided to crop it (at top and bottom) to 1.66:1 for its theatrical release. They chose this AR because cropping it any further would have resulted in too grainy an image on the screen. This AR was also backward-compatible with their existing library of movies. Paramount continued to use this AR for a few years for movies that weren`t filmed in their large format negative VistaVision process. The DVD release also reflects how the movie was actually filmed.

In any event, neither DVD release is cropped at the left and right edges, so you do see the entire width of the images that 1953 movie goers saw.