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The 3D Western film “Arena,” starring Gig Young, Jean Hagen, and Polly Bergen, filmed in Ansco colour & directed by Richard Fleischer, was released nationally on June 24, 1953 & claimed by MGM as the first 3D western.

Spec-wearing audiences were no doubt diving behind their seats every few minutes back in the 1950s. Feet, balls, stools, bottles, fists – you name it, they all fly at the screen at one time or another in Arena.

M-G-M’s first 3-D production shot at a rodeo in Tucson, Arizona is a story surrounded by objects flying into the camera. The story takes place in one day between the rodeo events where bronc buster Gig Young has left his wife, Polly Bergen, for rodeo-follower (i.e., “groupie” for those born since the sixties) Barbara Lawrence. The reconciliation of Young and Bergen is brought about by Harry Morgan (still being billed as Henry Morgan), an over-the-hill bronc buster now reduced to being the show’s clown. (Rodeo clowns are usually the most disciplined, most valuable to the welfare of the rodeo cowboys and best-trained of all rodeo performers but Hollywood always showed them as down-and-outers.) Morgan of course has a pretty wife, Jean Hagen, and a little boy, Lee Aker, and anybody watching this film and not guessing who is going to get killed just hasn’t been exposed to enough scripts from Hollywood set around a rodeo arena.

Technical changes - In 1953 there were major technical changes to the Adams theatre - the installation of CinemaScope, a revolutionary optical process that compressed the image on the film with a special lens. This widened the image out, almost doubling the width of the picture on the screen, a fore-runner of the widescreen technology used today. This was a huge deal at the time, and theaters took out large newspaper ads boasting that they had made the switch.

The theater also was hip to the wide-screen 3D fad, showing movies like “Kiss Me, Kate, The Bubble, Arena”

Contributed by Greg Lynch - dimensional1@bigpond.com