For many years I’ve been lamenting the “CinemaScope mumps” distortion syndrome, or that face-broadening, weight-adding effect that resulted from the use of anamorphic CinemaScope lenses from ’53 through ’60. It would be heaven if someone could figure a way to horizontally compress these films so that the unnaturally widened effect would look right. Every mumped-up movie gives you a fundamental feeling of being cheated out of God’s natural proportions. I’m therefore interested in Criterion’s recently-announced Bluray of Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (9.23.14), which has always been mumps-afflicted since its initial release in 1961 and has definitely looked this way on home video presentations.
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And yet, as the Disney guys reportedly showed three years ago in their restoration of Richard Fleischer‘s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, fixing the “mumps” distortion is technologically achievable. A Criterion summary of the contents of the Innocents Bluray mentions a “new interview with cinematographer John Bailey on director of photography Freddie Francis and the look of the film,” but there’s no mention of any “mumps” correction. I’m presuming that a decision was made to keep the mumps, but maybe not.