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The introductory Prologue defines four separate eras for the evolution of stereoscopic cinema. A prior volume examined the Novelty Period for 3D films. The present volume considers the three subsequent epochs of stereo cinema with 1) the Era of Convergence, 2) the Age of Immersion and 3) Digital 3D cinema.

Samuel Taylor's play Sabrina Fair: A Woman of the World had been submitted to Paramount in typescript months before the New York premiere in November 1953. A reader in the story department turned in an enthusiastic report on the play, and this prompted Billy Wilder to get Paramount to purchase the film rights immediately. Wilder's decision turned out to be a wise one. An overview of the story of this play is presented. Sabrina was hailed by the critics as a charming and hugely entertaining love story; Frederick Hollander's dreamy score and Charles Lang's slick visuals were the icing on the cake. It was also Wilder's last picture with Paramount. Thus, his first project outside Paramount was The Seven Year Itch. There was little risk in choosing this film because it seemed almost guaranteed to be a blockbuster movie. The story is set in New York City during a boiling hot summer. This picture also helped to pave the way for more artistic freedom in the making of Hollywood movies. In addition, it was enthusiastically received by reviewers as a sizzling sex farce beautifully mounted in CinemaScope.

With his emphasis on a factual background in his stories, Verne offered the first analysis, in fictional form, of the challenges of the scientific age, but his stories also were set in his own time, limiting them primarily to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making them increasingly remote to modern audiences. By the late 1930s, however, adaptations of Verne novels began to be heard over the radio, becoming widespread by the end of the 1940s, reversing the decline in Verne readership and publication. The initial cinematic reflection was a movie serial in 1951, and the next year television broadcasts of Verne stories began. The spark that had been lit might easily have dimmed had not Walt Disney realized how Verne could be the source for a modern movie spectacular. His 1954 film 20,000 Leagues under the Sea is undoubtedly the most influential Verne movie ever made, achieving a level of critical, commercial, and artistic success that launched a seventeen-year cycle of live-action filmmaking of Verne’s work. Moreover, Disney also situated the work to echo for residual benefit, exploited through books, records, associated television shows, and theme park attractions.

Difficulties of 3D exhibition in the 1950s are examined and business factors for theaters described. The impact of TV upon movie theaters is gauged and the choice by the movie studios to use CinemaScope instead of 3D is evaluated. The end of the 1950s 3D movie boom is attributed to CinemaScope.

This chapter argues that widescreen cinema enabled the close contact between the viewers and the film spectacle, including the spectacle of technologically enhanced screen bodies. Publicity and advertising for Cinerama and CinemaScope utilized the idea of audience participation to communicate the appeal of the new systems, linking them with the contemporary theater. Both marked an attempt to legitimize film, and evoked movements in avant-garde theater aimed at “bringing audiences away from their inactive state as compliant observers.” The investment in and knowledge about the onscreen illusion rendered thrilling and frightening widescreen spectatorship, providing viewers with firsthand experience of the powerful new technology that was transforming life outside the theater.

This chapter explores the politics of color in Oscar Hammerstein's Carmen Jones by focusing on the various layers of representation in its stage and film versions. Carmen Jones uses lyrics that adopt common clichés of Negro speech and equates Georges Bizet's sexually liberated gypsy in Carmen with a lower-class African American woman. After providing a background on the circumstances, precedents, and models that inspired Hammerstein's conception of Carmen Jones, the chapter considers Hammerstein's transformation of the plot and his text-translation practice, along with the opera's exoticism, stereotypes, and problematic representations of blackness and black Other. It then discusses the critical reception of Carmen Jones in light of the socioeconomic status and race of its 1943 audience. It also analyzes Otto Preminger's 1954 film version of Carmen Jones and how he was able to capture the spectacle of its Technicolor bodies on the big screen with the aid of CinemaScope.

Alongside the celebrated essays on wrestling and steak-frites, the Tour de France, and laundry detergent—“l’euphorie d’Omo”—that make up Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, we find a surprising number of essays devoted to movies, television advertisement, actors, and film technology. Barthes writes about Joseph Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, Chaplin’s Modern Times, Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity, the Italian anthropological documentary Continente perduto, Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, Sacha Guitry’s costume farce Si Versailles m’était conté, Visconti’s La Terra Trema, the Biblical epic The Robe, a French espionage film set during World War I (Deuxième Bureau contre Kommandantur), a biopic of l’abbé Pierre, Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi, Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge, the advent of CinemaScope, the airy gestures of film noir gangsters, studio portraits of actors, Audrey Hepburn’s modernism, Marlon Brando’s wedding, and Michèle Morgan’s divorce.