70 mm Grandeur film

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“Grandeur” redirects here. For the automobile, see Hyundai Grandeur.

70 mm Grandeur film was a widescreen film format developed by the Fox Film Corporation and used commercially on a small scale in 1929-1931. It is technically very similar to the Todd-AO 70mm system, marketed from 1955 and still in limited use (albeit with significant modifications) today. The main differences were that Grandeur had a four perforation pulldown (i.e. each frame occupied the height equivalent to four perforations on the film) rather than the five of Todd-AO, and that it used the Fox Movietone variable-density optical sound-on-film system.

A small number of shorts and features were produced in Grandeur. These included several issues of Fox Movietone News called Fox Grandeur News first shown 26 May 1929 with the Grandeur feature Fox Movietone Follies of 1929; the musical Happy Days (1929), directed by Benjamin Stoloff; and the Western The Big Trail (1930), directed by Raoul Walsh, in which John Wayne played his first starring role.

Filming of The Big Trail began in April 1930. The film was shot simultaneously in Grandeur and conventional 35mm: both versions survive, and differ significantly in composition, staging and editing. When the film was released, the only theaters equipped with the Grandeur projectors and screen were Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles and the Roxy Theater in New York City.

Grandeur was one of a number of widescreen processes which were developed by the major Hollywood studios alongside sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A combination of the Great Depression and the costs of converting thousands of cinemas to sound prevented the successful introduction of any of these systems on a commercial scale. When widescreen did eventually become a commercially successful technology in the mid-1950s, however, the three major systems which emerged (CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO and their derivatives) all drew heavily on the results of this initial phase of research and development, of which Grandeur was arguably the most successful example.