Last weekend a special VistaVision presentation of John Sturges and Hal Wallis‘s Gunfight at the OK Corral (’57) happened at the Chinese by way of the TCM Film Festival.
Kino Lorber’s reportedly excellent 4K Bluray version has been available since late February, but there was still an expectation that the TCM screening would deliver a visual “bump”.
Why? Because the venerable man in the booth, Boston Light and Sound’s Chapin Cutler, was showing an extremely rare horizontal 8-perf VistaVision print. The vast majority of 1957 audiences saw Sturges’ film in 35mm.
Did the VistaVision Gunfight deliver, in fact, a bump over the Kino 4K? Maybe…who knows? No one who attended has offered a comparison, but I would be surprised if the VistaVision presentation offered anything double- or triple-wowser or even significantly “better” (sharper, grander, more impactful) than what the Kino 4K delivers on my 65-inch Sony 4K. (So far I’ve only seen an HD streaming version.)
And yet it was projected on that big Chinese screen under optimum conditions (Cutler is the best projectionist on the planet earth right now), and the film-nerd gang was all there. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to attend. I’m sure everyone enjoyed this approvable-if-less-than-classic western.
I’ve been trying to find images from Mad magazine’s “OK Gunfight at the Corral.” I distinctly recall a Purple Rose of Cairo image of Kirk Douglas‘s boozy Doc Holliday, and a caption that read “Doc, drunk as a skunk, shoots an usher in the movie theatre balcony” or words to that effect.
I despise low-thread-count T-shirts as a rule, but I’ve got to buy one of those shamrock green VistaVision fuckers.
Posted a couple of days ago by losangelestheatres.blogsot.com:
