3-D Movies

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3-D Movies

For an all-too-brief period in the early 1950s, three-dimensional (3-D) movies enjoyed a huge popularity among American moviegoers. Motion picture images are by their nature flat and one-dimensional. In a 3-D film, an illusion of depth and perspective is created with the help of special glasses. Use of these special glasses results in an image's foreground appearing to stand apart from its background. In a 3-D film, an animal could be made to appear to leap off the screen and into the audience. A knife-tossing villain or spear-throwing warrior could appear to be actually hurling the weapon at the viewer.

In the early 1950s, movie ticket sales were falling fast as Americans in great numbers were moving from the cities to the suburbs (see entry under 1950s—The Way We Lived in volume 3), where there were fewer movie houses. Television (see entry under 1940s—TV and Radio in volume 3) sales were skyrocketing. Why spend money on a babysitter, a restaurant meal, and movie tickets when free entertainment at home, in the form of one's TV set, could be had. In order to lure patrons back to movie houses, the motion picture industry endeavored to employ gimmicks to bring viewers sights and sounds they neither could see nor hear at home. One such tool was 3-D, which resulted in more realistic—and potentially more entertaining—movie images.

Three-dimensional movies evolved from stereoscopy (see entry on stereoscopes under 1900s—Commerce in volume 1), a technique developed in the nineteenth century for the viewing of still images. In stereoscopy, a three-dimensional illusion is produced via the use of a stereoscope, an optical device that offers up slightly different images to both eyes, resulting in what appears to be a 3-D picture. Over the years, the stereoscopy technique evolved. During the first decades of the twentieth century, scores of stereoscopic moving image systems had been developed, but none were commercially marketable. Then in the 1950s, the technique was adapted to feature-length Hollywood productions. The first 3-D feature of the period was Bwana Devil (1952), an action tale set in Africa and spotlighting murderous, man-eating lions. The most popular 3-D film was House of Wax (1953), a horror film starring Vincent Price (1911–1993) as a sculptor who commits murders and transforms his victims into wax museum figures.

Not all 3-D films were horror chillers and adventure yarns. Kiss Me Kate (1953), a hit Broadway (see entry under 1900s— Film and Theater in volume 1) musical composed by Cole Porter (1893–1964) and based on The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), was shot in 3-D. Even Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), the movies' celebrated master of suspense, directed a 3-D film: Dial M For Murder (1954), the tale of a man who plots his wife's killing. In order to view a 3-D movie, filmgoers had to wear throwaway glasses outfitted with one red and one blue lens, which allowed each eye to distinguish only specific parts of the on-screen image.

Ultimately, 3-D was just a fad. The initial thrill of watching three-dimensional images soon waned. The technique's costs and limitations, coupled with the discomfort of wearing the glasses, resulted in the industry's abandoning 3-D film production. The technique was reintroduced for a short time in 1980s horror films and was reemployed a decade later in limited-release IMAX 3-D movies.

—Rob Edelman