Salem Press

	The Fifties in America follows the publisher’s successful The Sixties in America. The Fifties, however, has expanded coverage with 640 entries that... prove important enough to make this a priority purchase.
Booklist (starred review)

	Overall this is a terrific set.
ARBA

	Your U.S. history teachers will be happy with this purchase. Highly recommended.
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Fifties in America
3-D Movies

Definition: Films made to be viewed in three dimensions

Three-dimensional film projection was one of several experiments that the film industry undertook in order to win back audiences who were deserting movie theaters for television. Three-dimensional films enjoyed a brief popularity when they were introduced, but their extra costs and technical difficulties combined with mediocre productions to ensure their speedy demise.

Three-dimensional still and moving picture photography uses techniques that mimic the stereoscopic vision of human eyes. Just as human beings can perceive depth by viewing objects simultaneously through pairs of eyes that see objects slightly differently because they are separated by several inches, 3-D cameras shoot stereoscopic pictures through side-by-side lenses, each of which views the same objects from a slightly different angle. When projecting the resulting images on screens, an illusion of depth is achieved when viewers's eyes can separate images so that their left eyes see only the pictures taken by the camera lenses positioned on the left, and their right eyes see only the images taken by the lenses on the right. When this phenomenon is achieved, audiences see motion pictures in full stereoscopic vision, that is, in 3-D.

Creating 3-D movies requires special camera equipment but is comparatively simple. The greater difficulty is projecting the captured 3-D movies on screens in ways that audiences can see three dimensions. This is a two-step problem. The first step is projecting the separate, left and right, images on screens. The second step is enabling audiences to view those projected images stereoscopically. Each problem can be solved in more than one way, and solutions to the problems had been found as early as the 1930's. However, the process used during the early 1950's was a now one called Natural Vision, developed by the Polaroid Corporation.

In the Natural Vision system, pictures were projected onto screens by completely separate projectors, each of which used a polarizing filter turned at a different angle. To the unfiltered eye, the result of the combined images was merely a blur. However, to viewers wearing glasses with appropriately oriented polarizing filters, the result was natural 3-D images. The polarization of the left lens cancelled out pictures intended for the right eye, and the right lens did the opposite. Viewers thus saw the pictures as the original camera lenses saw them. However, the 3-D effect was lost to viewers not wearing polarizing glasses, so audiences attending 3-D movies had to be outfitted with the glasses when they entered the theaters.

The 3-D Fad
When the first feature-length 3-D film, an action film set in Africa titled Bwana Devil, reached motion picture theaters in November, 1952, it attracted sizeable audiences. The 3-D technique was startlingly new and exciting and was definitely a form of entertainment that television could not match. As one might expect, early 3-D films emphasized physical action that accentuated the feeling of depth. In Bwana Devil, for example, lions appeared to leap from the screen into the audience. In the 3-D Western Fort Ti, audience were barraged with spears, tomahawks, and flying bodies.

Despite their initial popularity, 3-D movies faced several challenges that they ultimately could not overcome. The first was the burdens they placed on theaters, which not only needed to double their equipment in order to project two films at once but also had to ensure that the projected films were perfectly aligned and synchronized at all times. Even subtle misalignments could give viewers headaches. A second challenge was getting audiences to accept having to wear paper glasses. Once the novelty of seeing objects flying from the screen wore off, most people objected to wearing the glasses, especially when imperfectly projected films made viewing difficult.

Another challenge to 3-D came not from television but from within the film industry: wide-screen movies. Reaching audiences around the same time that 3-D was being introduced, wide-screen formats such as CinemaScope and Cinerama offered a different novelty: vastly bigger pictures. Moreover, they also offered--at least in the case of Cinerama--some illusion of depth, but without the need for special glasses. These challenges, coupled with the generally mediocre quality of the films being released in 3-D, quickly doomed the format. By the end of 1954, the fad was dead.

More than one hundred feature films were made in 3-D during the 1950's, but many of them were released only in normal two-dimensional versions, leaving audiences unaware that they had even been made in 3-D. Among the better-known 3-D films released in normal formats were the John Wayne Western Hondo (1953); the musical adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Kiss Me Kate (1953); and the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Dial M for Murder (1954). Perhaps the best-known film of the era released in 3-D was Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). However, even that classic monster film saw much of its release in a two-dimensional format, so that many of its audiences never saw it in 3-D.

Impact
Of all the entertainment innovations of the 1950's, the experiment in 3-D movies is probably the one most closely identified with the decade. Indeed, images of rows of people in theaters wearing paper 3-D glasses instantly invoke the 1950's. Although 3-D films were essentially a novelty that could not sustain audience interest, attempts to revive 3-D movies were tried in later decades--but failed even more quickly than the 1950's experiment. Ironically, the place in which 3-D has proved most enduring is television, on which 3-D movies are occasionally broadcast using a two-color technique, instead of polarizing, requiring audiences to wear red-and-blue lenses.

Further Reading
Drake, Albert. Fifties Flashback: A Nostalgia Trip. St. Paul, Minn.: Motorbooks International, 2003. Examines a variety of the fads of the 1950's, including 3-D movies.

Hayes, R. M. 3-D Movies: A History and Filmography of Stereoscopic Cinema. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1989. Thoroughly researched history of 3-D films, from their early origins through their post-1950's development, including their use in modern theme parks, with an emphasis on the technical side of the subject. Filmography has extensive details on more than two hundred films.

Morgan, Hal, and Dan Symes. Amazing 3-D. Boston: Little, Brown, 1982. General history of 3-D processes that includes extensive discussions of 3-D movies.

R. Kent Rasmussen

See Also
Fads; Film in the United States; Television in the United States; Wide-screen movies.