[ ( B ) Buy Oklahoma! [VHS] ]
[ ( O ) Order Oklahoma! [VHS] ]
{ Rating: 3.5 out of 5 }
Fox shouldn't blame the fledging Todd-AO itself, even though retrofitted onto existing cameras, for any of their problems with the Todd-AO transfer. I saw the original 70 mm Todd-AO version of Oklahoma! in the '50s, in San Francisco. I was a dedicated amateur photographer, working in both 35 mm and larger formats, and my photography friends and I marveled at the detail that got on the screen in Todd-AO. "Everyone" was talking about it! One day I was getting my hair cut and the stranger in the next chair started telling the barber how great Todd-AO was. It turned out he was a photographer too.
There was only one brief series of shots that was not clear -- during the "Many a new day" song, the young women toward the extreme right and left sides of the screen were not sharp in certain shots.
Words like "sharp" and "clear" may not be the most descriptive. At that time Kodak divided sharpness into two correlated properties "acutance" and "resolution." "Resolution" had the same definition as it does today, and, in use, was practically a synonym for detail or definition. "Acutance" was the capacity of a medium to make sharp edges -- like a knife edge -- look sharp .., and it was associated with a number of other factors, like contrast, and appropriateness of the brightness. The first two Todd-AO films, Oklahoma! (1955) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956) films had very high resolution, but very slightly softer acutance than some of the later 70 mm films (some of these later films had what reviewers commonly called "an etched look"). They both had very natural appearing color, more natural than usual in the movies, and more natural than we were used to seeing with the color print and slide films we were used to using.
Oklahoma! & 80 Days could both remain clear and detailed even when we moved down very close to the screen (row 9). Even people sitting farther back were treated to a very large image, because there was no stage, organ, or orchestra pit between the viewers and the screen ... the seats went right down almost to the chord of the curved screen's arc (at least in San Francisco). We measured the apparent size of the image with a calibrated detachable viewfinder, and found that the Todd-AO image (AR of 2.2:1) from the 20th row at the Coronet was about the same size in the viewfinder as was a 35 mm widescreen image (2.35, approximately) in the 5th row at the Grand Lake in Oakland, a movie palace with organ, stage, and pit taking up space. It should be noted that after a dispute between formats as childish as the VHS/Betamax or Blu-ray HD-DVD wars, the size of the image at the Coronet was reduced, when they took out the deeply curving Todd-AO screen, and put in a very shallowly curved screen that would be compatible with competing 70 mm formats. We simply moved closer after that change. They left the deeply curved curtains in place .. did they think nobody would notice?
One last note: The 6 channel magnetic sound was magnificent, and had really high dynamic range. The trombones and tuba between stanzas of the "The Farmer and the Cowman" song seemed to nearly rip the roof off. It was responsible for making me an audiophile.
