Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: SEPTEMBER STORM 3D Review

This is topic SEPTEMBER STORM 3D Review in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 04-01-2017, 02:45 PM:

I know there is another thread about this movie but it was about restoring it and now that the Blu Ray has been released, I thought there should be one to review it. Here is my review.

3D ARCHIVE has hit the ball right out of the park again with SEPTEMBER STORM in 3D.

The movie had a simple story about the search for a fortune in gold coins starring Mark Stevens and Joanne Drew with Robert Strauss and newcomer at the time, Asher Dann . The film was made in 1960 and the very first 3D feature to be shot in CinemaScope by Edward R. Alperson and directed by Byron Haskin and released by 20th Century Fox. Although the 3D was advertised as Stereovision, it was photographed in Natural Vision, the same camera used for HOUSE OF WAX and HONDO. Despite the fact that it was photographed in 3D, it was stated in the interview with Asher Dann that the movie was never commercially shown in 3D. I can see why because of the need to install the required silver screen to show it.

The 3D effects in this movie was awesome especially the underwater scenes but the color was pretty drab looking but it was ok. The stereo sound was fine and I was very impressed how clean the movie looked with no scratches. Kudos once again to Robert Furmanek and Greg Kintz for doing a marvelous job restoring another film from the 3D Golden Age that was never commercially shown in 3D.

-Claude

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 04-01-2017, 04:21 PM:

Posted by Terry Monohan (Member # 8285) on 04-16-2017, 01:18 AM:

Thanks Claude for your review. My 3-D Blue Ray copy arrived but we have not watched It yet. It did play in many theatres in 3-D CinemaScope® like the Fox Theatre in San Francisco CA in the early 60's. The movie was done in old mono sound, but who knows maybe they did a fake stereo thing on the disk, I'll have to listen when I watch It on my curved 3-D screen next week. A big thanks to the 3-D people for doing this restoration. You must of liked all the water and ocean 3-D scenes living in Hawaii.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 04-16-2017, 10:46 AM:

quote: Terry Monohan
...but who knows maybe they did a fake stereo thing on the disk...

When we played this title at one of our theaters last year, the first version of the DCP we received had what appeared (on the AP20's display) to be the same mono track triplicated on the left, center and right channels. I played a clip that had mixed dialogue, music and effects, three times, monitoring each of the channels individually, and this confirmed my suspicion: it was the same mono mix copied onto all three stage channels.

A tech check was requested by the distributor in advance of the show, and at it I suggested that it would be a good idea to remake the DCP with the audio on the center channel only, to prevent it from sounding echoey and customers sitting toward the sides of the house struggling to make out the dialogue. He said that he would do this, but I didn't work the night of the actual show, and so don't know if he did or not.

Posted by Robert Furmanek (Member # 7026) on 04-24-2017, 10:00 PM:

The film is mono but the music under the restoration credits is three channel stereo.

Posted by Terry Monohan (Member # 8285) on 05-30-2017, 09:34 AM:

To bad they didn't bring the master track to the Chase people in LA they could have got a semi stereo fake sound out of It. They do a wonderful job taking old mono prints and bringing out a stereo mix even with surround sound. Must have been budget problems on getting It out at least we have great old time 3-D and CinemaScope® to for the first time.

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 05-30-2017, 09:40 AM:

I'm very glad they did not have Chase create a "fake" stereo track. I want to hear the original mono mix, not a modern remix.

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 06-03-2017, 02:08 AM:

For the most part I agree, Mitchell, but today sound designers with the digital tools available to them, they are capable of doing some pretty remarkable things with sound conversion, and given that I love stereo so much more than mono (mono = sound with no space), I am willing to give any stereo converted soundtrack a try.

Chase does some amazing stuff. The trick with any manipulation, and getting something to sound like it's stereo when it started as only a mono mix, is about as difficult as making gold out of pig iron. The biggest pitfall is always that the stereo sound mixer tries to make it SOUND like stereo and thereby calling attention to it. When ANY element of a film distracts from the natural flow of the story and calls attention to itself, it is obtrusive and that is the mortal sin of film making.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 06-04-2017, 05:38 PM:

quote: Frank Angel
...and given that I love stereo so much more than mono (mono = sound with no space), I am willing to give any stereo converted soundtrack a try.

Do you love color movies, and if so, would you be willing to give Ted Turner's infamous colorized versions of King Kong and Citizen Kane a try?

A mono soundtrack achieves a sense of space by the relative levels at which its various component sources are mixed. That is more difficult to do well, because you don't have the option of using the distracting gimmick of hitting your viewers with sound from behind them or to the side of them. Their ears are focused on one sound source in the room, and what goes into the mix that comes through that one channel is all you have to play with.

I can't even begin to imagine, say, the pursuing dog pack in I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, the silence followed by crickets chirping after Charles Vanel blows up the rock in The Wages of Fear or Peter Lorre whistling in M after they'd been artificially stereo-ized, even if it had been done by someone knowledgeable and careful enough to make a very good guess at how these would have been mixed for multi-channel playback if that technology had been around at the time.

There's a reason why some top name directors, Hitchcock and Woody Allen being the two best known examples, wouldn't or won't use stereo at all.

Posted by Allan Young (Member # 6332) on 06-05-2017, 08:31 AM:

By coincidence, just yesterday I was reading an interview with Leon Vitali in which he explained why Kubrick tended to favour mono sound.

"what he understood was if they were going into cinemas, they may or may not have decent stereo sound. And you know even right up to Full Metal Jacket, I'll tell you because we checked about 300 cinemas in the U.K. He had people checking cinemas over here in the U.S. when we released Full Metal Jacket. And even by 1987, some cinemas hadn't even looked at their sound systems for like ten years. What Stanley understood was that if you made a stereo track and the sound system was no good, you've lost half your sound. It sounds terrible. His notion was better good mono than bad stereo.

That was the whole thing about why he did his films with mono mixes right up until Eyes Wide Shut. Because by Eyes Wide Shut, you had your multiplexes. The majority of cinemas, sound wasn't an important thing because the public understands. They like sound now. Ten years ago or twelve years ago, fifteen years ago or twenty years ago, sound, even for filmmakers, it was the last consideration. You know? It just needed a soundtrack.

The most important thing, and I cannot stress this too much. The most important thing for Stanley, when it came to his theatrical releases was this: That everywhere, whether you watched the film in Hong Kong or Singapore or Buenos Aires or New York or London, everyone should have the opportunity of seeing the best quality that you could possibly see on film."

Link.

Posted by Jeffry L. Johnson (Member # 453) on 06-05-2017, 09:25 AM:

To clarify, all the above references to Chase should actually be Chace Audio, now Chace Audio by Deluxe.