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The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:But wasn't this one of his films made in SuperScope? This DVD is 1:33. The odd amount of headspace over the characters leads me to believe this wasn't exactly made for Academy ratio, no?

Der Spieler wrote:I don't know what your friend used to take the shots but I sure know it didn't look THAT shitty on my screen.

Der Spieler wrote:

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote:But wasn't this one of his films made in SuperScope? This DVD is 1:33. The odd amount of headspace over the characters leads me to believe this wasn't exactly made for Academy ratio, no?

I don't believe it was, even though Exposure are very firm about it.

"For both this film [While the City Sleeps] and Lang’s next film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the format poses a thorny problem that can be resolved only by considering aesthetic matters. The film, not shot in CinemaScope, was exhibited in Superscope (a wide format used at RKO and created through laboratory processes), and then in a normal format. Which is better? In my opinion, the wider one. Only there, for instance, do the camera movements and the newspaper-office set have their true impact. Even if the Superscope version was 'manufactured' in the lab, Lang knew that the film would be seen on the wide screen and his direction was conceived as a function of that. The same goes for Beyond a Reasonable Doubt; to cite just one instance, the first sequence showing the condemned man walking toward the electric chair is obviously conceived for the wider format."

This does lead to some intriguing speculation on how “misreadings” of films can have positive consequences. The French celebration of Lang’s 1950s films led American and British critics to reevaluate them.

The case of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is quite parallel to that of While the City Sleeps. Released in September 1956, it too was reviewed in Variety as a non-anamorphic picture. Its U. S. publicity makes no reference to a widescreen format. But its overseas posters claim that it is in “RKO-Scope.” Huh?

By the end of 1956, the Tushinskys had split from RKO and were selling SuperScope generally. So in November 1956 RKO simply announced that it had developed “a new widescreen, anamorphic process” that would carry a ratio of 2.0:1. Historians of widescreen have assumed that this is SuperScope by another name. The same publicity announced that soon all the studio’s films would be in RKO-Scope. But RKO ceased making movies on 1 January 1957. Universal took over distributing the remaining pictures.

Again, on the basis of the posters and Lourcelles’ comments we can be confident that Beyond a Reasonable Doubt was shown in a 2.0:1 aspect ratio in some overseas markets.

knepo wrote:I am very happy to see so many new DVD releases of Lang films.
I have ordered all three Exposure titles and today I got the Scandinavian edition of You Only Live Once. I am very curious about the quality of the Scandinavian version.

RobertAltman wrote:It's excellent. Identical to the Studio Canal version I believe, with a very solid transfer, and a terrific featurette with Claude Chabrol as a special feature.