This was released in southern California at Grauman's Chinese Theater where its three-projector and massive screen requirements were provided at an expense that would probably never be reproduced today. I doubt that the IMAX system is anywhere near as complicated and the specially built theaters for its presentation are possibly less expensive to construct, adjusting for inflation, than what was done at the Chinese.
The opening scenes on an ordinary size screen were a suspenseful buildup to what was eventually revealed: a seemingly infinite opening of the drapes to a dizzying crow's nest view of the storm-tossed Christian Radich Windjammer as it left Oslo's harbor for its voyage. The Cinemiracle three-camera system (which involved a complex setup with mirrors and other technical details too numerous for an amateur to recount here) and the three-projector theater presentation, with full stereophonic sound, was an amazement in its time and I have not been as impressed with my recent visits to IMAX theaters to see the usually less interesting subjects designed to wow us today. The kinetic feeling imparted to the late-Fifties audiences who saw this film was easily more realistic than anything that IMAX has attempted.
Some years later, after the initial release, at the Cinerama Dome Theater on Sunset Blvd. (which was never set up to show three-projector films, since "Cinerama" was by then a single camera process, generally shot with 70mm Panavision cameras) a return engagement of "Windjammer" was advertised. I told a film-loving friend of mine, who had not seen its original release, that we ought to attend a showing. Imagine my disappointment when all that was shown was the middle panel, leading to some really strange sequences when seascapes were blank for an extended period of time as the Christian Radich proceeded from the unseen left panel, across the middle one, and off onto the unseen third panel on the right! I really didn't understand why they didn't edit this version so that only the action in the middle panel was shown, but that would probably have required some tinkering with the soundtrack, something that the people who had gotten their hands on this curiosity were seemingly much too cheap to do. Anyway, I convinced my friend that we were wasting our time and, after complaining in the lobby to a representative of the Cinerama Dome's management about what was undeniably a rip-off, we went up to Hollywood Blvd. and saw a first-run film, probably shot in CinemaScope or one of its equivalents. Less than a week later the ads for "Windjammer" in the LOS ANGELES TIMES movie listings carried a tiny disclaimer that the film was not being presented in its original format. IMDb.com information on this film seems to indicate that the 1962 re-release, under the Cinerama Corporation's aegis, was an anamorphic presentation, but what we saw at the Cinerama Dome was nothing more than a reproduction of the original negative's center panel and there wasn't anything wide about it.
Obviously the original negatives were not preserved, since a major studio was not involved in the production, and so its eventual transfer to video (which was, for example, accomplished with M-G-M's three-camera/projector Cinerama extravaganza, "How The West Was Won" with clearly visible demarcations to the left and right of the center panel, which were much less obvious in the Cinemiracle process, by the way) is now something that is lost in the mists of movie-going memory.
