1/3/23
Newsletter #238
The Crack of Dawn
In the winter of 1964 my whole family got dressed up and we went to downtown Detroit for dinner and a movie, which was a big deal. Before the Detroit riots of 1967 when a great deal of the city got burned down, Detroit was a huge, cosmopolitan city – the fourth-biggest in America – and every bit as vibrant as Chicago. At the center of downtown was Grand Circus Park, a several block circle of businesses and about 12 movie theaters. Different theaters showed different kinds of movies. There were a couple of big, somewhat opulent theaters showing the big new films – the two huge movie palaces, the Fox and the Palms-State were nearby, but not located there – several decent-sized theaters, second-run houses showing double-features, one place showing foreign films, a couple of tawdry joints showing what passed for pornography in 1964, meaning there was some nudity. There were also bars and pool halls and pinball parlors, and probably a tattoo parlor. This was Detroit’s Broadway and 42nd St. Smaller and more contained, but still with that feeling of anything goes.
I just loved walking around Grand Circus Park. It was jammed with people, and as I recall, the women were all in dresses with hairdos, and the men were in suits and ties and wore hats. And everybody smoked. But somehow movies were central to all of it.
On this cold night my family saw the newest, biggest movie, How the West Was Won (1963), in a completely strange, short-lived process called Three-Screen Cinerama. Using three wide-screen cameras locked together to cover 160-degrees of view, they then showed them with three projectors locked together on an absolutely enormous curved screen. There were also gigantic speakers.
With three projectionists constantly running torque controls throughout the entire movie, there was still no way to keep the three images exactly together. The edges floated slightly on top of each other, and close to sync, but never achieved it.
The movie itself isn’t very good, although the early scenes with James Stewart as a fur trapper are wonderful. In dazzling color Jimmie Stewart in a buckskin outfit comes canoeing up with a pile of animal pelts. There’s a strange saloon in a cave run by Walter Brennan. Stewart has a couple of drinks, then a pretty young girl says that there’s some strange critter they’ve never seen before. Stewart follows her to a pit, then some guys smash him over the head with clubs, he falls into the pit, then they steal his pelts. I thought, “But it took him all winter to get those pelts. This just isn’t fair.” Then we see Jimmie Stewart covered with blood come out of the water, and he’s pissed. He goes back in there and gets his pelts back, and it’s great.
The movie is three hours long, and somehow George Hamilton and Debbie Reynolds become the leads. But I was impressed as hell. I got a hardcover program (that I still have) and a bolo tie with a silver cowboy boot.
I was out on the driveway swinging the bolo tie around and it shot out of my hand. It flew up onto the garage roof, got caught in the gutter and I never got it back.
Since I’m actually in Hollywood, I’m going to have a cool day.
The Crack of Dawn
It's a shitty movie, but important to me.
The blu-ray release of "How The West Was Won" is a thing of beauty. Digitally they were able to hide the seams of the three pieces of film and it looks pretty great. The Walter Brennan sequence is insane. Someone throws a molotov cocktail and Brennan gets an arrow through the chest. The John Ford-directed Civil War sequence sticks in the mind too.