A Los Angeles Times article I read recently made me chuckle. It began by wearily tossing an exhausted barb at the 3-D phenomenon sweeping Hollywood: “With sighs of relief, critics last week took off their Polaroid glasses and looked at a couple of old-fashioned, two-dimensional films.” The big-screen photography of one of those pictures drew particular attention, with one critic noting that “It gives reality a true third dimension. . . the kind of 3-D you cannot get with mechanical tricks or by any other means except a rich comprehension and ingenious mastery of the visual storyteller’s art.”
Well, let me fess up. I read the article recently, yes — but in a fifty-year-old copy of the Los Angeles Times. The paper was dated May 6, 1953, and the two-dimensional film being praised for bucking Hollywood’s push towards 3-D was Shane.
It was a time when TV was cutting deeply into movie profits, and studios were scrambling to win back the wandering eyeballs of America. Cinerama, an ambitious, three-projector widescreen extravaganza, debuted in New York in the fall of 1952, with its test film This Is Cinerama garnering front-page fanfare and great acclaim. Bosley Crowther, the Roger Ebert of his time, gasped that it gave the audience “the same sensations. . . felt on that night, years ago, when motion pictures were first publicly flashed on a large screen. . . People sat back in spellbound wonder. . . as though most of them were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” In a single evening, the development of all-new expansive formats had become a fait accompli, and studios immediately began looking for ways to capitalize on the buzz.
At the same time, 3-D movies were another innovation being used to lure your grandparents and parents away from their televisions. Nineteen Fifty-Two, the year before Shane, saw the first flurry of attempts to do for depth what This Is Cinerama did for height and width. By 1955, audiences had seen Vincent Price (eventually christened “The King of 3-D!”) appear in House of Wax and several other horror titles. John Wayne used 3-D for Hondo. The now-famous cult classic Creature from the Black Lagoon crawled off the screen and toward audiences who didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. The great Alfred Hitchcock even toyed with the third dimension in Dial M for Murder.
While the two potential TV killers, widescreen and 3-D, warred with each other for supremacy (one contemporary ad for Cinerama proclaimed “NO GLASSES NEEDED,” reminding audiences of the eye fatigue and uncomfortable headgear necessitated by its rival), these fads spurred frenzied discussions among filmmakers and studio heads. The 1952 movie Singin’ in the Rain was then in theaters, mocking the shortsightedness of many 1920s Hollywoodites caught in the bedlam of the transition from silents to sound. Everyone in modern Hollywood, therefore, was wary of catastrophically missing out on what, for all they knew, could snowball into the 1950s equivalent of that epochal transition.
That is, almost everyone. George Stevens, for his part, looked on these developments with wry amusement. His Shane was in the can, having been filmed a year earlier in the summer and fall of 1951. And he seemed perfectly comfortable knowing that his plain ol’ 2-D picture would be debuting in the midst of all this hoopla. “I’m interested in all the new ideas, such as 3-D and widescreen,” he told one reporter at the time, “but I don’t believe the technical method of presentation is the real important thing. Only the picture matters. It’s what goes on the screen that counts.”
Perhaps that is why, when Stevens was choosing a cinematographer to shoot Shane, he zeroed in on a man named Loyal Griggs. Griggs was a Paramount fixture. Born in 1906, raised in Los Angeles, and graduated from Los Angeles High in 1924, he immediately scored a grunt job at Paramount in their effects department. Beginning at a paltry $80 a month and often logging hundred-hour work weeks with no overtime pay, he persevered for nearly three decades, slaving his way up the Paramount food chain towards the coveted rank of Director of Photography. Finally, in 1950, he became head lensman on a trio of mediocre flicks (a gangster pic and two westerns) for producers Bill Pine and Bill Thomas.
At the comparatively late age of 44, he was at long last a full-fledged Hollywood cinematographer.
Stevens had employed Griggs for some process photography on his last film, the popular and well-regarded A Place in the Sun (1951), and during pre-production on Shane it was becoming increasingly apparent that he needed a cameraman who not only could film pretty pictures, but who could use color, lenses, and composition to manipulate images for serious dramatic effect. The director, you see, had chosen Wyoming’s Teton Range over a slew of other locations (Utah, Idaho, Colorado) after sending a camera crew on an exhaustive 4,500-mile trek around the American West, filming test footage in glorious Technicolor (itself an expensive concession made by the studio only after pressure from Stevens).
But while the awe-inspiring, snow-capped peaks and grand desolation west of Jackson Hole looked perfect, there was also a problem — the scenery filmed too well. New York Times writer Jack Goodman, who visited the Wyoming location while Shane was being shot, laid out the essential challenge in a September 9, 1951 article for that newspaper: “The Teton Range west of the Hole has been widely photographed before this and has become associated with tourism and dude ranching through hundreds of travel-magazine articles. . . Further, as Stevens now explains it, Technicolor ‘tends to glamorize and romanticize,’ its basic weakness being ‘the rainbow quality’ it lends to scenic shots.”
So the question was how to get rid of what Stevens once derided in another interview as the, “Oh, what a beautiful morning!’ Technicolor musical look.” How could one make rich, saturated Technicolor images bend to the will of a director who foresaw his story’s need not only for beauty and majesty, but doom and gloom?
Enter Loyal Griggs. He had worked in the various process, front-projection, and special effects departments of Paramount for three decades. There wasn’t a trick in the book he hadn’t seen. And he brought his full array of talents to bear on making Shane one of the most variegated Technicolor films in Hollywood history.
The goal was to achieve the filmic version of what in art circles is called “Rembrandt Lighting,” a classic, shadowy style filled with dramatic possibilities. To that end, Stevens and Griggs studied the famous photographs and drawings of the Teton Range made by William Henry Jackson, as well as the paintings of famed western artist Charles Marion Russell. Most Technicolor cinematographers were afraid to lose exposure and saturation, but Griggs ruthlessly degraded both when necessary. Early each morning weather stations were consulted, and if rain or clouds were on the way the filmmakers would rush out to take advantage. Many times the sun appearing through the gray expanse would ruin the effect, and so Griggs had such shots backprinted (made artificially darker) in the lab to preserve the shadow-laden, brooding atmosphere.
Back in the Fifties, film stocks weren’t “fast” enough (i.e. sensitive enough to light) to pick up anything during a nighttime shoot. So Griggs used a trick called “day-for-night” — first filming in bright sunlight, then adjusting the exposure in the lab to make it look as if it had been filmed in the evening — to capture some of the most important scenes in the movie, complete with visible mountains and vast plains in the distance.
This particular technique was itself common enough, but Griggs took it to the next level, using optical printing to single out characters in the frame and boost their exposure while leaving the rest of the image alone, giving the actors an eldritch, almost supernatural glow of the kind moonlight makes on Halloween. For the very last shots of the picture, he filmed a graveyard bathed in a severe darkness, then used optical printing to insert Alan Ladd’s character as a ghostly silhouette.
Jack Goodman, viewing the rushes while visiting for his New York Times article, came away most impressed: “[By] not hesitating to shoot portions of Shane on days when clouds race across nearby lakes, Stevens has managed to make this most beautiful of western vistas positively forbidding.”
Careful use of lenses also played a role. Stevens and Griggs show here some of the earliest examples of filming vast outdoor spaces with telephoto lenses normally used for facial closeups. The result was a flattening of the depth in an image, which made the distant mountains in the background seem far closer and more imposing. This is nowhere more effective than in the justifiably famous funeral scene of Shane. “There was the funeral on the hilltop,” Stevens explained, describing the master shot for this key sequence, “and there was the dis tance where cattle grazed, and then there was the town at the crossing, a western town like western towns were. There were the great moun tains that rose behind it. This was all arranged in one camera view, one camera view that had to do with a man being put away in his grave with the synthesis of the whole story wrapped around it.”
Stevens wanted to connect 1950s families with a time when “death was a very large part of living.” His inspiration for the scene came while visiting a tiny pioneer hamlet in California:
Bridgeport, on the way to the Sierra Nevadas, is. . . a poor little town. . . About three miles away, in the foothills, there is a graveyard. . . A man comes in his front door from a funeral and perhaps goes out the back door to bring in the pail of milk before he goes to bed that night. If he has just buried his mother, he can look up to where she is on that hillside. While he was at the cemetery, he could look back to those beautiful mountains. This is what the pioneers came for, this vast country, and a little cemetery with a fence around it. It’s there waiting. Mother, all those who have gone before, are there. It will be throughout his time, and the man can look down to the town and see the house where mother came as a bride, and where he was born and where he was raised. There is a convenience in being able to visually associate all of these essential aspects of life in a frontier world; some of it isn’t around the corner or on the other side of town, it’s all right there and it’s all true. I see that, I know what it means.
As Shane was nearing its release, Paramount ran a test of the film on one of the big new screens being developed, to see how it would look blown up to that size. To make the square-ish image fit onto a rectangular screen, they unceremoniously chopped off a portion of the top and bottom of Griggs’ lovingly composed compositions. Some critics noticed this right off and grumbled. (Lord knows what expletives emerged from Griggs’ own mouth!) But most thought it was a decent enough compromise for the treat of getting magnified, IMAX-like versions of Shane‘s Wyoming vistas.
On April 15, 1953, the industry trade paper Variety ran an article stating that
Shane was previewed in a process stage on Paramount’s experimental widescreen, to an audience perched on makeshift seating. Despite these abnormal viewing conditions, the picture’s worth was not lessened, and the widescreen projection did contribute, in some measure, to a sense of bigness, although, again for the record, Shane would be a big picture on any size screen. Theaters equipped for widescreen showings should find the extra ballyhoo angle of this gimmick adding to the dollars taken at the box office.
The efforts of the cinematographer were especially singled out for distinction: “Pictorially, the picture has been beautifully photographed in color by Loyal Griggs. Wyoming’s scenic splendors against which the story is filmed are breathtaking. Sunlight, the shadow of rainstorms and the eerie lights of night, play a realistic part in making the film a visual treat.” The Hollywood Reporter chimed in as well, praising the use of “long shots and lovely Technicolor hues to establish mood, some of the scenes emerging like exquisite paintings.”
Soon after that test, Paramount debuted the film in New York at Radio City Music Hall, which had just installed one of the first widescreens in the country. On April 24, 1953, The Hollywood Reporter gushed to an industry town holding its collective breath: “New York Critics Enthusiastic About Shane, Wide Screen.” Frank Quinn of The New York Daily Mirror conveyed the almost futuristic, game-changing aspect of the event: “A thrilling new visual concept of motion pictures unfolds with the debut of Shane on the panoramic screen. The screen is wide, more oblong like a picture postcard.”
In Los Angeles, the movie’s star-studded premiere was equally rapturous. Celebrities like Cary Grant, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Irene Dunne, Charles Coburn, Mitzi Gaynor, Rory Calhoun, Anita Ekberg, Shelly Winters, and Claire Trevor poured into Grauman’s Chinese Theater as hundreds of fans cheered. “Shane Premiere Gala Fete: Hollywood Turns Out in Panoramic Pandemonium,” was the headline in the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express.
Philip K. Scheuer, longtime film critic for the Los Angeles Times (who had begun his career covering the silents), penned in his own newspaper a thoughtful review of both film and presentation:
When, in the good old days, we called a picture an epic we must have had some reason for it. Later, through misuse and repetition, the word fell into disrepute and we put quotation marks around it to indicate we didn’t really believe an “epic” was an epic any more. With Shane one is tempted to leave the quote marks off. . . .
At the Chinese, where it premiered last night, it is being projected onto what is, by a slight margin, the largest screen in town (about 50 x 25 feet). Shane was not made for magnification, but its detail “blows up” very well in Technicolor, with not too much of the picture cut off at top and bottom. Directional sound, from three speakers, is used sparingly but effectively. . . However, I am quite sure Shane would hold you even on a 17-inch screen.
It wasn’t long before the trades were reporting that — much like today’s twenty-first-century theaters rushing to install 3-D capability — dozens of 1953 theaters were hurriedly converting to widescreen in a frenzied attempt to take advantage of Shane‘s theatrical run. Reviewers and audiences alike were almost unanimously hailing it as an instant classic. The Saturday Review honed in on exactly the things that we’ve been discussing here, noting “Loyal Griggs’ handsome Technicolor photography. . . his cameras point insistently to the physical beauties of the place — the play of light on the distant mountains, the golden skies after a shower, the vast expanse of green and coppery fields. But none of this is merely travelogue prettiness. Nature enters dynamically into the development of the story, its moods matching and underlining the dramatic action.”
Conservative Henry Luce’s Time magazine made the distinction between gimmickry and artistry: “Without recourse to tricky 3-D photography and Polaroid glasses, Stevens, with ordinary Technicolor camera and sound track, has given his flat old story a real third dimension of believability.” A grandstanding Democratic politician from Wyoming, Lester C. Hunt, even went so far as to stand on the floor of the Senate and laud the picture’s stunning portrayal of the beauties of his home state.
So although Shane wasn’t a real widescreen Hollywood movie (the first real one was The Robe, a Christian tale shot in Twentieth-Century Fox’s Cinemascope format, which hit theaters later that fall and quickly became one of the all-time box-office champions), it was the first to be presented with much fanfare on a widescreen, and its marvelous cinematography did much to warm audiences to the new format. Meanwhile 3-D, hampered by a variety of technical limitations, would die out by the end of the decade, experiencing only intermittent spurts of life thereafter (time will tell how this latest 2010 revival pans out.)
Loyal Griggs won his first and only Oscar for Shane (the only Shane nominee to take home a gold statue that night), and went on to a distinguished career as a Director of Photography. A few years later, when Cecil B. DeMille was looking for a combined Technicolor/special effects/VistaVision expert, he turned to Griggs, and the result was another classic of gargantuan proportions, The Ten Commandments. That film netted Griggs another Oscar nomination, and in 1975 he received a special U.S. Bicentennial award for his photography on the picture. He died in 1978 at the age of 71, with two great Technicolor spectaculars forever linked to his name.
If I had to turn to one person to sum up the impact of Shane‘s visuals, I’d pick the words of Hollywood writer/critic Ruth Waterbury, who’s own review appeared on Friday, June 5, 1953 in the pages of The Los Angeles Examiner. “The glory that God gave to the American West has been captured by it,” she said of the photography. “The strength, the fidelity, the weakness, the insecurity, that God gave man is reflected in it. . . Shane is on wide screen with stereophonic sound, all very fine. But it would still be magnificent if it were the size of a postage stamp. You’ll remember it long, long after you see it. In fact, I think I will personally remember it always.”
Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane“
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
FURTHER READING and VIEWING
The development of VistaVision: Here’s an informative overview of Paramount Pictures’ own 1950s widescreen format, which debuted a bit too late to be used in Shane. In my humble opinion, it was perhaps the most impressive of all the various permutations of widescreen created during that era. Loyal Griggs used VistaVision for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), John Ford used it for The Searchers, and Alfred Hitchcock for To Catch a Thief among others.
And check out the rest of The American Widescreen Museum website for even more history on widescreen photography in general.
Order a nifty CD-ROM book on The Making of Shane. Wish I had known about this before starting in on these articles. Compiled by Walt Farmer, it reportedly has a full tour of all of the film’s Wyoming locations, including detailed directions and GPS coordinates in case you want to hunt them down yourself (I love reading about — or performing myself — that kind of historical detective work). He reveals that the only structure still standing from the movie is Ernie Wright’s homestead (the sodbuster played by Edgar Buchanan, whom the Ryker Gang intimidates by running their cattle through his farm and crops). Apparently, the Cemetery Hill still sports a faint depression where Torrey’s grave was dug. Alas, save for a few fence posts and ruins, everything else is gone.
The cost is $20 plus $5 S&H, but if you are a hardcore Shane fan, or simply someone who’d like to poke around the film’s locations the next time you are out Wyoming way, it sounds like an invaluable purchase.
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