[78-L] STEREO<<<<>>>>PHONIC SOUNDDDDDDD ^

[Jeff Sultanof]

Re. Silk Stockings

There was a soundtrack CD from Rhino some years ago (I don't have it in
front of me, but I believe it is still in print) and it is in full stereo,
derived from MGM's multitrack masters. There was a fake stereo version on
MGM as a two-fer back in the seventies. There may have been a CD issue in
stereo taken from the released film track itself, but I'm not sure.

The Hays code came into being in 1934. I am a big fan of pre-code films, as
some of them are pretty raunchy even today. Some years ago when I began
writing about them, many were not easy to see. Thank goodness for the Film
Forum, TCM and DVD; now many of these films can be seen in their full glory.
Some couldn't even be shown on television without cutting, or not at all.

Many of the Fox early Cinemascopes had directional sound, in that the voices
would move when the speaker moved. In a big theatre like the Roxy, this
could be tremendously effective. MGM did Fox one better. A film like Silk
Stockings was recorded in four track, and one of the tracks had the
dialogue. That track was encoded with Perspecta Sound, a pseudo-stereo
process developed by Robert Fine, whereby the sound moved from left to right
via encoding. Paramount used it with their VistaVision process (there was a
VHS version of The Ten Commmandments where the Perspecta track was decoded
and used for the stereo tracks), and MGM used it for re-issues of Tom and
Jerry cartoons.

Jeff Sultanof