Easter Parade

by Tony Dayoub

In the spirit of Passover and Easter, here's an excerpt from my latest feature for Nomad Editions Wide Screen:

...Done right, the restored versions of classic films often look better, sharper, and truer to their original film elements than they may have ever looked before, particularly on something with the deep and wide visual range of a Blu-ray disc. More specifically, the movies that look best are the larger formatted blockbusters of the 1950s and ’60s — shot on CinemaScope, VistaVision and other rival formats to compete with the growing popularity of television.

Of these, the most popular and critically acclaimed were often the biblical epics. They had proven to be quite successful during the silent era, making the name of directors like the one most closely associated with the genre, Cecil B. DeMille. It was he who famously responded when asked why he liked to make such films, “Why should I let 2,000 years of publicity go to waste?” So when studios began developing large-scale films to compete with TV, the biblical epics were among the first to be mounted for production...

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