Truly, madly, deepie: Britain’s first fling with 3D

Fancy a night out at ‘the deepies’? The early 1950s saw the first significant wave of popular 3D cinema. Its novelty meant that when breakout Hollywood successes like Bwana Devil (1952) and House of Wax (1953) arrived in Britain there was little agreement on how to describe them – hence newspapers billing forthcoming ‘deepies’ as opposed to films screened ‘flat’. In fact, British audiences had already been offered more opportunity than most to experience 3D film, and the BFI had played a key part in putting on the show.

The 1951 Festival of Britain was planned as a mid-century stocktake of British achievements in arts and science, with an eye towards the future. The physical heart of the festival was the redevelopment of the South Bank area of the Thames in London, and film was represented through a purpose-built cinema building – the Telekinema. The BFI was responsible for the film offer, and it chose Raymond Spottiswoode to produce a suite of new productions for the festival. 

Spottiswoode began his career in 1930s British documentary but had become technical supervisor at the National Film Board of Canada (NFBC). Roping in his brother Nigel, an engineer who had dabbled in stereoscopic still photography, he set out an ambitious plan to shoot a selection of short films in 3D, with stereo sound, to be screened at the Telekinema in 1951. Ambitious, because, in his own words: “In the early part of 1950 no equipment of any kind was available in England for producing stereoscopic and stereophonic films.” 

Earlier 3D film releases had mostly employed the anaglyph technique using the familiar red-cyan glasses that were often used with cheaply printed images such as comics. The system worked on any projector, but the results were monochrome and imprecise. Spottiswoode noted developments in the use of polarised filters that enabled 3D films to be made with clearer images and in colour. Images captured from a carefully measured right and left eye perspective were simultaneously projected from two separate film reels run on twin synchronised projectors. The projector lenses and the audience glasses were equipped with corresponding polarised lens filters so that the overlapping images were conformed into a single image with a perception of depth.

Four stereoscopic films were made for the festival, with two live-action shorts produced in the UK and two animated films outsourced to the NFBC to be directed by Norman McLaren. Creating depth from flat artwork involves a lot of complex maths and visionary thinking, but it doesn’t require a special 3D camera, so McLaren was free to crack on with his extraordinary creative process. Now Is the Time to Put On Your Glasses (1951) acts as a curtain opener, as a delightful medley of clouds and suns manifest before your eyes while a variety of hand-drawn letters and figures welcome you to the proceedings. His second film, Around Is Around (1951), is more abstract and quite extraordinary, transporting you into distant space accompanied only by giant morphing patterns generated on an oscilloscope – “My god, it’s full of stars!” a couple of decades early. Both films made the most of the Technicolor palette, and McLaren also showed his typical invention in the soundtrack, synthesising sound by photographing hand-drawn and printed waveforms on to the soundtrack area of the film. It was a technique he had used before, but he now had four sound channels to play with to add stereophonic effects.

The British productions were a little more down to earth. A Solid Explanation (1951) is a ‘comic’ lecture on the principles of 3D in which presenter Desmond Walter-Ellis gets in the way of some more enjoyable footage of animals filmed at London Zoo. Understandably the giraffes rather steal the show. The film was co-produced with Pathé Documentary Unit on an experimental rig referred to by Spottiswoode and co as “the BFI camera” and was filmed in black and white. 

Royal River (1951) was more ambitious, a journey down the Thames from source to the South Bank itself, and filmed in colour. Plans to use recent developments in single-strip colour negative film fell apart, so they had to use two bulky three-strip Technicolor cameras mounted side by side. The subject matter suited the set-up as close-ups were a problem and a floating barge suited the heft of the camera. Horrendous weather in March 1951 proved a further obstacle, with the Thames visibly having flooded its banks in the resulting film. When the festival opened in May the film was unfinished and presented in curtailed form as Distant Thames (1951), but still proved a favourite with audiences. 

The 3D films were only part of the Telekinema experience but contributed greatly to its success. Despite being one of the few paid attractions, an audience of nearly half a million queued, sometimes for up to three hours, to fill the 400-seat capacity for every showing across the five months of the festival. 

Royal River debuted in its completed form in August at the Edinburgh Festival, a sign that the ambitions for 3D went beyond the Telekinema. Spottiswoode and his team had established Stereo Techniques Ltd, offering themselves as not just consultants and partners on the production of 3D films but also as a service to equip cinemas to be able to project them. Technicians were sent across the UK and into Europe to help train projectionists, install screens and adapt projectors. So as a new wave of British 3D films began to appear in 1952 they were seen not just in the Telekinema, now operating as the BFI’s National Film Theatre, but in Blackpool, Battersea, Bristol, Glasgow and beyond. 

More by accident than design, these new films offered something for almost everyone. The Black Swan (1952) featured a section of the Swan Lake ballet, while Eye on the Ball (1952) cast an eye (or two) on sports, including snooker star Joe Davis and cricket legend Denis Compton. In 1953 every viable camera rig was brought together to film the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II from as many angles as possible. To fill the gaps the film was padded with events filmed elsewhere in the coronation year. Delays completing the film meant that it was released under the title Royal Review to obscure the fact that they were late to the coronation party and audience attention had moved on.

There were films sponsored by the National Coal Board and the Shell Film Unit, and 3D cinema commercials for cornflakes and cigarettes. But notably these films were all shorts, and British film studios were happy to stand back and observe from a distance. Though Stereo Techniques did go into co-production on a British 3D feature film, The Diamond, it was with a small scale, independent producer and lacked both means and ambition (it was eventually released ‘flat’ to middling reviews in 1954). It wasn’t until the British press caught wind of the success of Bwana Devil that the idea was taken seriously. Too seriously, in some cases, as in the build-up to simultaneous UK premieres of the film in Birmingham, Leeds, London and Glasgow in March 1953 a Daily Mirror columnist announced “the funeral of the flat film”. 

Because of the Telekinema experiment and the work of Spottiswoode and his Stereo Techniques company, Britain was in a better place than many other countries to ride the 3D wave and profit from hits like House of Wax. The MGM musical Kiss Me Kate and John Wayne western Hondo (both 1953) were evidence that the form could attract investment from big names and, most importantly, result in good films. Even Alfred Hitchcock was drawn in when it was announced that his adaptation of the hit play Dial M for Murder would be made in 3D, starring Grace Kelly. But by the time the film was released in 1954 the wave had truly crashed. Warner Brothers dropped their requirement to lead with the 3D release and offered exhibitors the choice of which version to screen. I can find no record of the film being screened in 3D in the UK until a re-release in the 1980s. 

Hollywood studios had clutched at 3D as a means of fending off the growing competition of television, but parallel developments in widescreen CinemaScope proved a more viable option. It was easier for cinemas as only a single film copy was required, and audiences had never quite got comfortable with wearing those pesky glasses.

Stereo Techniques continued to collaborate and push for 3D into 1955, but Spottiswoode and his colleagues largely faded into the sponsored film sector from which they had emerged. With the foundations of the endeavour built around the largely unprofitable short film sector, it was always going to be difficult to make any advances stick. But the sheer variety of films produced represented the first extensive exploration of the potential of 3D cinema, crossing genres and techniques to reach a variety of audiences.

Explore the programme of 3D films at the BFI Film on Film Festival.