The History of Stereoscopy in Cinema - Text 3
During this period, most 3D films were exhibited in colour, and thus with a polarized system but anaglyph exhibition was still used for black-and-white films. One of the greatest successes, technically, aesthetically and commercially, was André de Toth’s horror film House of Wax (Warner, 1953). Films in 3D were released in every genre, or almost: westerns (John Farrow’s Hondo with John Wayne and Richard Fleischer’s Arena, MGM, 1953), musical comedies (Curtis Bernhardt’s Miss Sadie Thomson with Rita Hayworth and George Sidney’s Kiss Me Kate, 1953), the fantastic (Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954[4]), science fiction (Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space, Universal, 1953), adventure films (Edward Ludwig’s Sangaree, Paramount, 1953), etc. When Alfred Hitchcock, in 1954, shot a thriller in three dimensions, Dial M for Murder, the 3D wave was in the process of crashing. This film was practically not distributed in 3D. And yet Hitchcock had planned the mise en scène quite specifically using the stereoscopic screen plane: in many sequences the elements in the foreground stand out clearly. For the sequence in which the murder must be set in motion by a telephone call, an enormous telephone was built, along with fake fingers. In 1954, it was not possible to shoot a close-up with the two-camera system.
