VistaVision Visits Mexico

Vistavision was a wide-screen movie format that Paramount used for about seven years. Typically, they premiered this with short subjects to get the audience used to it, and poached James A. Fitzpatrick away from MGM, where his Technicolor travelogues and shouted random facts had been a popular series of releases for almost twenty years.

There's a lot to admire in this movie from a visual viewpoint; certainly the copy I looked at was a lot sharper than the usually fuzzy and occasionally blotchy prints of the MGM series that run on Turner Classic Movies. Fitzpatrick spends a lot more time allowing the audience to enjoy the picture, rather than telling us something about Mexico in 1955 that we wouldn't have cared about then.

Contrariwise, cameraman Luis Osorno Barona occasionally seems to let his image slip, as if he is still learning how to compose for the novel 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Also the color values seem to have shifted towards brown and yellow, as if someone has been smoking excessively.