The Vikings
Jun 05 7:30pm PT
This is Widescreen The Vikings
Fri, 06/05/2015 - 19:30

Samuel Goldwyn Theater
8949 Wilshire Blvd
Beverly Hills, CA 90212

Cinema has endured for decades in the face of competing visual storytelling mediums. In connection with our event The New Audience: Moviegoing in the Connected World, discover how studios and filmmakers – long before tablets, smartphones and the Internet – responded as audiences began trading regular visits to the movies for the ease and affordability of the first small screen: television. In response, numerous widescreen cinematic formats were rolled out around the world and capitalized on the breathtaking width of the projected image, not to mention the heightened fidelity of stereophonic sound, to achieve effects far beyond the reach of TV sets. This Is Widescreen offers a colorful assortment of films that demonstrate how filmmakers found new means of engaging the flexibility of the cinema and the key larger-than-life film formats employed over a 15-year period in Hollywood – from the launch of Cinerama in 1952 and the subsequent widescreen boom that included CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO and others – plus highlights from the first wave of 'Scope filmmaking from around the globe.

Friday, JUNE 5 | 7:30 P.M.

The Technirama cinematography of the legendary Jack Cardiff and authentic Norwegian locations are among the highlights of this muscular adventure epic, which helped inaugurate a subgenre of big-screen Viking sagas. Kirk Douglas, in a larger-than-life performance, plays Einar, who feuds with his half-brother Eric (Tony Curtis) over the love of the beautiful Morgana (Janet Leigh, the real-life Mrs. Tony Curtis). Ernest Borgnine, who plays Douglas and Curtis’s robust father, was actually two months younger than Douglas. Veteran director Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues under the Sea) steered this action-packed voyage with a firm hand, helped by the stirring score of Italian composer Mario Nascimbene (One Million Years B.C.).

1958, 116 minutes, color, 35mm | Directed by Richard Fleischer; written by Calder Willingham, adaptation by Dale Wasserman, based on the novel The Viking by Edison Marshall; with Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine, Janet Leigh, James Donald, Alexander Knox, Maxine Audley.


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