INTERVIEW: Mexico’s first 3D movie to be screened at Film Forum in NYC
Photo: El Corazon y La Espada, starring Katy Jurado, will be screened at Film Forum. Photo courtesy of Film Forum / Provided with permission.
When New York City’s Film Forum screens the Mexican film El Corazon y La Espada Sunday, Feb. 23, in many ways history will be made. The newly restored feature will be shown in its original format — that is as a beautifully rendered 3D film. It will be the first time in more than 50 years that this foundational work, directed by Edward Dein and Carlos Véjar Hijo, will be screened for an audience as it was intended to be shown.
Doubling the history factor is the fact that El Corazon is Mexico’s first-ever 3D film. When it played theaters in 1953, it was a novelty and a marvel to behold. Audiences had the chance to see Cesar Romero, Katy Jurado and Rebeca Iturbide jump off the screen and into their hearts.
One of the main reasons Film Forum is able to showcase this movie in its original format is because of Robert Furmanek, founder of the 3D Film Archive, which restored El Corazon to its beautiful original format.
“It has a number of different angles that are quite interesting,” Furmanek said in a recent phone interview. “When the 3D movie boom hit in late 1952 / early ’53, this was the first feature to be filmed in Mexico in 3D. They ultimately did three features and a short, but this was the first. They brought in a camera rig from the Howard Anderson Optical Company in Burbank, [California], and Anderson was one of the top camera builders at the time. And they did a lot of work, which is rather legendary now, including the visual effects for Star Trek on television in the mid-’60s. So they were really a brilliant company, and they had designed this camera rig that was used for production of the film.”
What Furmanek is most excited about when he introduces the movie at the Film Forum is the historic nature of the screening. He cannot wait to see the audience experience the classic movie, all dusted off after sitting in a vault for decades.
“When it was shown in 3D in the ’50s, it was one of the very few features that was converted to a red and cyan anaglyphic 3D system that used the red and blue glasses,” he said. “All of the other features at that time were shown polarized, which used neutral density gray filters very similar to the modern 3D of today, but this film had been converted for release in anaglyphic. And our presentation at the Film Forum and our restoration is the first time that viewers are going to have a chance to see it in full high-quality HD discreet 3D, which is far superior to the original anaglyphic version, so there’s a lot of different elements to it that make it really cool. For me personally, when I began my 3D work back in 1979 or 1980, my interest and efforts were always to get these films out of the vaults and seen again, and it’s taken a long time and many years. But we’re finally able to achieve that with this film, so there are a lot of elements that make it very special.”
Furmanek said that when 3D films were lensed in the Golden Age of 3D Hollywood, they were designed optimally for depth. The cinematographers, directors and production team intended for the picture to be seen in 3D, not 2D.
“So I always say seeing the film composed and shot for 3D in its flat version is kind of like watching a classic Technicolor movie with the chromo level turned off and seeing it in black and white,” Furmanek said. “You’re not seeing what the filmmakers intended, so I think that’s a very important aspect to honor their intent and their work on the films, to present it in the way it was meant to be seen.”
The team members with the 3D Film Archive have had a lot of fun restoring these classics. El Corazon serves as the 18th film for the company, and that’s 18 films over only four years, so they’ve stayed quite busy.
“When you do all the work in the trenches and you live with the film for the three or four months that it takes to restore one feature, it’s really gratifying to get it done and get it out there and then sit back and watch the audiences respond to it,” he said. “You can’t top that. If I have one disappointment it’s that our restoration team is scattered in different parts of the country. I am very conveniently based in New Jersey, so anything in New York is easy for me to get to. … For me personally it’s such a thrill to see the films with an audience. I wish everyone on the team had that opportunity, but it’s just not possible.”
Other titles that have been restored by the 3D Film Archive include such genre flicks as Gog, It Came From Outer Space, The Mask and September Storm.
For Furmanek, his restoration efforts were never planned; they simply fell into place because of his connection to Jerry Lewis, the world-famous entertainer.
“I had an opportunity in the early ’80s to move to California to work for Jerry Lewis, and that in and of itself was kind of a dream job because as a kid I grew up loving Jerry and his films and had an opportunity to meet him and convinced him that he needed to hire me to be his archivist,” he remembers. “It took a couple of years of coaxing, but I got the job. And I moved to L.A. in 1984, and I had done a lot with 3D already up until that time. But I really began to see that there was a lack of interest among the various studios and copyright holders in saving these films in 3D. They were not being handled well. In some cases when preservation had been done on a 3D film they had only preserved a single side, either the left or right side, meaning that, yes, the film was preserved as a flat movie but not in 3D. So I was in the right place at the right time to really start trying to make a difference.”
Furmanek said that Lewis agreed with the need to restore these important films, and by using the comedian’s name around Hollywood, the archivist was able to get a foot in the door and examine some vaults.
“At that time, the only way that you could present 3D at home was in a very severely degraded image,” Furmanek said. “You had to convert it to the red and cyan anaglyphic 3D, which really compromised the visual quality, and they also had a field sequential system for laserdisc, which was a little bit better than anaglyphic but still far from optimum. It was really only about a decade ago that the technology got to the point where we could deliver high-quality 3D restorations for people to see at home, and even with that, it took a few years. … And it was really Warner Brothers that was the first ones to take the plunge. They did Dial M for Murder, the Hitchcock film, and that kind of started to open the floodgates. Our first release was in 2015, and we’ve been going full steam ahead since then. We average three to four releases a year, and we’re still going strong. We’ve got about eight or 10 features in the pipeline at the moment.”
And now audiences will have the chance to experience the intricate work of the archivists with this historic screening of El Corazon y La Espada at the Film Forum.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
El Corazon y La Espada will be screened at 12:50 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 23 at the Film Forum in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
