The Top 10 CinemaScope Movies on Flickchart
This month, Quentin Tarantino devotees will go out of their way, sometimes several tanks of gas out of their way, to see his new film The Hateful Eight in a theater equipped for its super-widescreen 70-millimeter film format. It was over sixty years ago that CinemaScope (which used 35-mm film but stretched the image) became the first successful widescreen format, and it too got people to tear themselves away from their tiny screens at home and make the trek out to the old movie house. Of course, widescreen alone is not enough to make people commit time and money to a theater sojourn. If Hateful Eight weren’t a Tarantino picture, full of characters and dialogue likely to become instant memes, only cinema nerds like Tarantino would care that the lenses he used were the same ones — the same exact ones — used to shoot Brando’s Mutiny on the Bounty.
The history of CinemaScope proves the point. Hundreds of titles carried the CinemaScope label, but the ones that rank highest on Flickchart are there not so much for their format as their content. CinemaScope was a beautiful way to capture some of the greatest stars and stories of the 1950s, but people who have seen those films in recent years may not have given the widescreen presentation more than a moments’ thought. So as we scramble to find our nearest 70-mm Hateful showing, let us revisit Flickchart’s top 10 CinemaScope films and consider what makes them great.
1. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
It is a visual that makes Rebel Without a Cause iconic, but the dorm room poster of James Dean with his blue jeans, red jacket, and cigarette are portrait-style rather than letterbox. The colors of his clothes and his coif of yellow hair are so ingrained in the zeitgeist that it’s difficult to believe the film was originally going to be shot in black and white. Watching the film today, there are aspects of the narrative that no longer live up to the hype. For example, one of the chief sources of Dean’s character’s angst is the fact that his father (Jim Backus of Gilligan’s Island fame) does not adhere to traditional gender roles in the home. Though the passage of time has made it more difficult to sympathize with the protagonist, Dean’s greaser style still looks right for our collective ideal of the all-American teenage bad boy.
- Global ranking: 245
- Wins 48% of matchups
- 5663 users have ranked it
- 8 users have it at #1
- 144 users have it in their top 20
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2. The Innocents (1961)
The first of two black and white titles on this list, The Innocents remains a vital work of psychological horror. Unusually, the film contains more subtlety and leaves more to the imagination than the Henry James short story it was adapted from. That is doubtless due in large part to the work of sardonic Southern scribe Truman Capote, who punched up the dialogue from an earlier stage production. The character of the governess (a sympathetic and increasingly unhinged Deborah Kerr) is convinced that the two children under her care are reliving the drama of a pair of lovers who passed away at a gothic estate. It is this literary premise, with its period piece trappings and salacious implications, that keeps The Innocents high on Flickcharters’ radar, but there are some good shots of the gardens that make use of CinemaScope’s width.
- Global ranking: 462
- Wins 60% of matchups
- 517 users have ranked it
- 3 users have it at #1
- 15 users have it in their top 20
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3. Forbidden Planet (1956)
Forbidden Planet has been described as the ur-Star Trek, the source material for Gene Roddenberry’s pilot script about the Enterprise crew. It has also been read as a space fantasy retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. An icon of midcentury science fiction, it even receives a reference in the genre-bending, gender-bending musical Rocky Horror Picture Show, with the big lips singing the line “Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet.” The movie’s high production value, evocative matte paintings, and sense of history and mystery easily compensate for its hokey performances. This was before Leslie Nielsen realized he was a better comedic than dramatic actor, but his Captain Kirk-like persona is pretty funny all the same. The character Robby the Robot, a sort of a beep-booping Michelin Man, originated here before going on to appear in several other sci-fi adventures. CinemaScope’s ability to showcase dramatic vistas certainly plays a role in Forbidden Planet’s success, increasing the awe factor of its naïve beauty.
- Global ranking: 471
- Wins 46% of matchups
- 2357 users have ranked it
- 4 users have it at #1
- 50 users have it in their top 20
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4. East of Eden (1955)
East of Eden makes John Steinbeck’s California look pretty good — maybe too good for what it’s supposed to represent. That’s the CinemaScope effect, showing off Elia Kazan’s huge, immaculately-constructed brothel sets and wide Cannery Row streets. This is another film that gets a boost from James Dean’s presence, though the script is more historically weighty than Rebel’s. A shot of Dean on a swing in a tree is framed in such a way as to take up maximum space.
- Global ranking: 476
- Wins 59% of matchups
- 849 users have ranked it
- 1 user has it at #1
- 23 users have it in their top 20
5. Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
The breadth of the desert landscape helps Bad Day at Black Rock feel like an epic Western, though it takes place over just a couple of days in a sleepy 1950s town. Like many Spencer Tracy films, this is a social issue drama, addressing racism and violence and the culture of silence that abets them. Its relatively high placement on Flickchart may have more to do with its cast than its presentation format: Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin costar. Anne Francis also appears, grabbing her second spot on this list — she and James Dean may be the King and Queen of CinemaScope on Flickchart.
- Global ranking: 638
- Wins 60% of matchups
- 517 users have ranked it
- 0 users have it at #1
- 5 users have it in their top 20
6. The Seven Year Itch (1955)
Just like Rebel, where Dean props up a wall with his suave, The Seven Year Itch’s fame boils down to one visual destined for mass reproduction: Marilyn Monroe, standing on a grate, holding down her skirt as it billows around her. That shot is reproduced on calendars and purses and postcards without regard to the original aspect ratio, and director Billy Wilder may not have cared much about that in any case — he shot just two films in CinemaScope, this one, and its immediate successor The Spirit of St. Louis. Though in the 1960s he would frequently use CinemaScope’s improved successor Panavision (more a lens- and camera-maker than a format, but in late 50s/early 60s usage it referred to an aspect ratio hovering around 2.35:1, comparable to most CinemaScope movies), he closed out the decade of the 1950s with modest 1.66:1 pictures like Witness for the Prosecution and Some Like it Hot. Wilder’s stories needed only witty dialogue and chemistry to resonate.
- Global ranking: 878
- Wins 44% of matchups
- 1553 users have ranked it
- 1 user has it at #1
- 19 users have it in their top 20
7. Mister Roberts (1955)
Two things that always look better through a wide lens: the ocean and the ships on them. Like Bad Day at Black Rock, this war-related movie features an incredible ensemble cast, from Henry Fonda to Jack Lemmon to James Cagney. They’re idling away the war on an American naval ship that’s seeing no action except what they can rustle up among the South Pacific island girls and the nurses. I’ve characterized Mister Roberts elsewhere as a forerunner of M*A*S*H, and director John Ford is no less an auteur than Robert Altman. Yet the CinemaScope, while well-suited to the setting, probably has less to do with the film’s high placement than the names attached to it.
- Global ranking: 886
- Wins 46% of matchups
- 633 users have ranked it
- 0 users have it at #1
- 12 users have it in their top 20
8. An Affair to Remember (1957)
This beloved, often-referenced romance feels more claustrophobic than most CinemaScope titles, focusing as it does on two lovers tormented by self-imposed loneliness. There are fine vistas to glimpse at a Mediterranean villa and in Manhattan, but the strength of this film has little to do with picture width. Its two charismatic stars, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr (Kerr joins Dean and Francis in this list’s two-for-ten club), have brought tears to the eyes of several generations of Affair junkies.
- Global ranking: 957
- Wins 45% of matchups
- 1018 users have ranked it
- 2 users have it at #1
- 22 users have it in their top 20
9. Guys and Dolls (1955)
Widescreen is kind to musicals because it replicates something of the stage show experience. A chorus can line up behind the principles and still spare some elbow room, a dancer can roam while the camera remains fixed, a great backdrop can steal a scene without dwarfing the action. And yet the movie adaptation of Guys and Dolls is fun for pretty much the same reasons all great musical adaptations are fun: great songs and committed performances from talented mugs like Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando. Plenty of shots in this Joseph L. Mankiewicz flick just wouldn’t fit into a narrower frame, though, so thank Lady Luck for CinemaScope.
- Global ranking: 1082
- Wins 43% of matchups
- 1228 users have ranked it
- 3 users have it at #1
- 24 users have it in their top 20
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10. The Longest Day (1962)
Though it closes out this top 10, The Longest Day may be the single movie that made the most use of the widescreen format. A sweeping aerial shot over the beaches of Normandy, for example, is a masterpiece of framing and staging — thousands of extras swarm below, puffs of black smoke to the right and landing craft bobbing away on the left. A backward tracking shot through a barracks reveals a sea of cots and countless extras in all states of repose and recreation. We are repeatedly staggered by the scale of the largest amphibious invasion in human history. Like most CinemaScopes this was an A-list picture, and seemingly every male actor who was anybody had a part. Henry Fonda (Mister Roberts), Sal Mineo (Rebel Without a Cause), and Robert Ryan (Bad Day at Black Rock) join our two-film list, but within the top ten there are no “threepeats”. The size of The Longest Day, both visually and otherwise, is absolutely a contributor to its acclaim. Director Ken Annakin went even bigger for his next war epic, Battle of the Bulge; he upped the ante to 70-mm Panavision.
- Global ranking: 1113
- Wins 54% of matchups
- 679 users have ranked it
- 1 user has it at #1
- 18 users have it in their top 20
Speaking of Battle of the Bulge, Tarantino used an actual lens from that production to shoot Hateful Eight. It may be too early to say that widescreen is “back,” and it may not be fair to say that it ever truly disappeared (prestige theaters that replay the classics have kept it alive, and home disc buyers learned to scan packaging for the “widescreen” band). Yet seeing the Hateful Eight in 70-mm is an event many movie lovers have planned out weeks in advance. Like a lot of the best CinemaScope titles, Hateful Eight boasts a top-shelf cast and a storyteller’s director, and it will perform well with or without a fancy aspect ratio. But, like CinemaScope did 60 years ago, its presentation format gives viewers a reason to turn off the small screens and get to a theater.