[jayembee]

Originally Posted by Hintermann

I agree that with the present widescreen TVs there is a tendency to be "widescreen obsessed" but I am not one of them.

The funny thing is that no doubt a lot of them were "fullscreen obsessed" back when they had 4x3 CRTs.

I have a very large number of pre-1953 films on disc which were 1.37:1 (or 1.33:1) anyway. But what I don't want is (as used to happen with some early DVD releases) a 1.85:1 film cropped to 1.37:1, which is what I thought had happened to Odds Against Tomorrow, considering that it was made in 1959.

That wasn't actually very common. "Flat" widescreen films were generally shot full aperture, and printed full frame. The mattes were applied during projection in the theater. On rare occasions, a film was "hard-matted", in which the mattes were applied during printing.

The home video presentations were generally "open matte", meaning the full frame was telecined as-is to video. The problem with this is that either you had a lot of extra headroom or footroom, or you ended up seeing boom mikes and other extraneous material that wasn't meant to be seen.

Off-hand, the only instance I can recall of seeing a flat widescreen film actually cropped to 4x3 was my old laserdisc of The Company of Wolves. It wasn't an egregious cropping, as it was only cropped from 1.66 rather than 1.85. But still, it was noticeable.

There re many borderline films from the early and mid-fifties which have both versions (some on older DVDs only). I prefer the widescreen versions in Shane, Touch Of Evil, This Island Earth, The Night of the Hunter etc. One notable exception is Dial M For Murder in which the 1.85:1 looks overcropped to me with all its indoor scenes; I prefer to watch that film on the older 1.37:1 DVD.

If you ever feel inclined to give yourself a headache, look up the thread on Kino Lorber's blu-ray of Marty. Lots of storm and stress about how it was supposed to be 1.85, and presenting it in 1.37 was several kinds of wrong. I noticed scenes that obviously had excess headroom, but there were others that looked well framed. I tried going back and forth from 1.37 to zoomed 1.78, and determined that, at least for me, the 1.37 presentation actually looked better overall.