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2024 has been an extraordinary year for film preservation, with theatrical premieres of new restorations of “The Searchers” and “North by Northwest” unspooling at festivals and repertory houses while pristine new editions of essential films like Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” and Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” become available for home viewing via 4K and Blu-ray releases. The 1952 adventure film “Bwana Devil” is not held in as high regard as those classics by most cinephiles, but its restoration and Blu-ray release from Kino Lorber are just as significant. The first color 3D feature film, “Bwana Devil” was a game changer in Hollywood history, and Kino’s Blu-ray provides the first chance in decades to see it as it was originally presented — an experience that reveals “Bwana Devil” is a far more exciting film than its tepid reputation would indicate.

“Bwana Devil” was the brainchild of writer, producer, and director Arch Oboler,...

Clockwise from left: Creature From The Black Lagoon (Universal), Elemental (Pixar), Friday The 13th Part 3 (Paramount), Jaws 3D (Universal), PhotoAlto/Odilon Dimier (Getty Images) Graphic: AVClub Few moviegoing experiences are as discouraging as finding the perfect showtime for one of the year’s most-anticipated movies, only to discover it’s playing in 3D.

3-D in CinemaScope? That seems like a strange combination, but this obscure treasure hunt adventure with Joanne Dru and Mark Stevens is indeed billed as being filmed in the ‘Miracle of Stereo-Vision,’ five years after the demise of Hollywood’s first fling with ‘depthies.’ Kino and the 3-D Film Archives extras include two vintage 3-D shorts, one of them never screened in 3-D.

September Storm

3-D Blu-ray

Kino Classics

1960 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 92 min. / Street Date March 28, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 34.95

Starring: Joanne Dru, Mark Stevens, Robert Strauss Asher Dann, Jean-Pierre Kérien, Véra Valmont..

Cinematography: Lamar Boren, Jorge Stahl Jr.

Film Editor: Alberto Valenzuela

Art Direction: Boris Leven

Underwater director: Paul Stader

Original Music: Edward L. Alperson Jr., Raoul Kraushaar

Written by W.R. Burnett from a story by Steve Fisher

Produced by Edward L. Alperson

Directed by Byron Haskin

The 3-D Film Archive has been an amazing resource for the fascinating depth format,...

The film industry has been around for well over 100 years. Today, Cinelinx looks at some of the famous firsts that set the foundation for the movie industry and made cinema what it is today.

As a bit of trivia to begin with, the first known piece of moving film footage was the The Horse in Motion (1878), a 3-second experiment consisting of 24 photographs shot in rapid succession. It’s just a scene of a jockey riding a horse, but it ultimately led to the development of modern film.

Most early films were short, silent bits of daily life, showing such exciting events as boarding a train, which was captured in The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895). This film footage supposedly scared the bejesus out of the viewing audience, who thought a real train was coming at them and ran for cover. Early films began to include documentary footage and newsreels,...

Last week, screenwriter and “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof signed a seven-figure deal with Disney to write “an original large-scale science fiction feature film.” Deadline reported the movie is planned “to play to a family audience,” but was unable to glean any other information from their inside sources, other than a curious working title of 1952.

This is the first film produced from the beginning by Lindelof, who is familiar with secrecy after working under paranoid producer J.J. Abrams. He recently rewrote Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel into an original sci-fi film titled Prometheus and contributed to this summer’s genre mash-up Cowboys & Aliens. Lindelof is currently holed up with Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci to complete Star Trek 2 for Abrams, in hopes of meeting its previously-announced summer 2012 release, then he will begin work on Disney’s large-scale science fiction flick (between jags of defending the “Lost” finale on Twitter, of...

Robert Stack on TCM: The Tarnished Angels, The Mortal Storm Schedule (Pt) and synopses from the TCM website: 3:00 Am Date With Judy, A (1948) A teenager thinks her grandfather is involved with a fiery Latin singer. Cast: Wallace Beery, Jane Powell, Elizabeth Taylor. Dir: Richard Thorpe. C-113 mins. 5:00 Am Fighter Squadron (1948) A dedicated flyer pushes himself and those around him during a perilous World War II campaign. Cast: Edmond O’Brien, Robert Stack, Rock Hudson. Dir: Raoul Walsh. C-95 mins. 6:45 Am My Outlaw Brother (1951) A ranger tries to pry his brother from the Mexican bandit gang he’s joined. Cast: Mickey Rooney, Wanda Hendrix, Robert Stack. Dir: Elliott Nugent. Bw-82 mins. 8:15 Am Bwana Devil (1952) A British railway engineer in Kenya tries to capture the lions attacking his workers. Cast: Robert Stack, Barbara Britton, Nigel Bruce. Dir: Arch Oboler. C-79 mins. 9:45 Am Iron Glove, The (1954) [...]...

Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, Airplane! Robert Stack is one of those actors I know but at the same time I don’t. I’ve watched many of his movies, but despite his good looks my focus while watching them was almost invariably on somebody or something else: Carole Lombard, Jennifer Jones, Joan Crawford, Dorothy Malone, Farrah Fawcett, Peter Graves, an inflatable doll. (Gotta add I’ve never seen Stack’s Elliot Ness.) Hopefully that can be rectified — minus The Untouchables omission, of course — on Monday, Aug. 16, as Turner Classic Movies will be showing no less than fourteen Stack films as part of its "Summer Under the Stars" series. [Full Robert Stack schedule.] Among those are six TCM premieres. They are: William Castle‘s period adventure The Iron Glove (1954); Bwana Devil (1952), notable as the first 3D feature distributed by a major Hollywood studio; My Outlaw Brother (1951), co-starring Mickey Rooney and Wanda Hendrix; [...]...

James Cameron’s Avatar Movies in 3D were a sensation back in the early 1950s: Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954); Bwana Devil (1952) with Robert Stack; and House of Wax (1953) with Vincent Price under the direction of Andre De Toth, who had only one eye and thus could not get the 3D effect. Movies in 3D are back in vogue, thanks in large part to the success of James Cameron’s Avatar and Tim Burton’s 2D-to-3D Alice in Wonderland. Clash of the Titans, How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek Forever After, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I are [...]...

"Avatar." "Alice in Wonderland." "How To Train Your Dragon." The success of these latest big budget 3-D epics wouldn't have been possible if not for the groundwork laid by previous filmmakers decades earlier, during a time when 3-D filmmaking was considerably less sophisticated than the material currently seen in movie theaters. Many of these movies, some ranging all the way back to the 1950s, aren't quite as involved as the trip from your theater chair to the lush jungles of Pandora, but the efforts are nonetheless quite impressive — or, at the very least, highly nostalgic.

After the jump, we've listed some of the classic 3-D movies that might pale in comparison to today's technological standards, but still thrilled and invigorated audiences in their prime.

Bwana Devil

Produced, written and directed by Arch Oboler, this 1952 drama is widely considered the first full-color American 3-D motion picture. Robert Stack starred as Jack Hayward,...

With the success of 'Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,' the forecast is good for the genre's comeback.

By Larry Carroll

Robin Wright Penn and Ray Winstone in "Beowulf"

Photo: Paramount Pictures

In 1952, television was increasingly keeping people on the couch and out of movie theaters, so Hollywood desperately turned to a process called "Naturalvision," and 3-D movies were born. Convinced that their best hope to win audiences back was by making things leap off the screen, dozens of 3-D movies were greenlit immediately. But just a few years later, bad scripts and gimmickry had effectively killed the fad.

These days, "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" is riding high at the box office for the second straight frame, the "Toy Story" films are being re-released this weekend in three dimensions, and such high-profile blockbusters as "Avatar," "A Christmas Carol" and "Alice in Wonderland" will all be coming at you soon,...

As it happens, I missed the press preview for "Fly Me to the Moon." It was a stupid misunderstanding, too boring to describe. My fault. I admit I was not inconsolable. After "Space Chimps," I had launched enough animated creatures to the Moon without starting on the insect kingdom. But even more to the point, "Fly Me to the Moon" was in 3-D, and I could all too easily imagine being "startled" by flies buzzing, ohmigod! straight at me!

Faithful readers will know about my disenchantment with 3-D. My dad took me to see the first 3-D movie, Arch Oboler's "Bwana Devil," in 1952. Lots of spears thrown at the audience. Since then I have been attacked by arrows, fists, eels, human livers, and naked legs. I have seen one 3-D process that works, the IMAX process that uses $200 wrap-around glasses with built-in stereo. Apparently that process has been shelved,...

Robert Stack, the stentorian voice behind TV's Unsolved Mysteries and the original Eliot Ness in the `50s TV series The Untouchables, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles of heart failure; he was 84. Starting his film career in 1939 with First Love opposite Deanna Durbin, Stack made more than 40 films, including The Tarnished Angels, The Iron Glove, To Be or Not to Be, Bwana Devil, The High and the Mighty and Written on the Wind, for which he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1956. Despite his prolific film career (punctuated in the `80s by a scene-stealing turn in the comedy Airplane!), Stack gained most of his fame through television, starting in 1959 with The Untouchables, where he won an won an Emmy award for his role as Chicago crimefighter Eliot Ness; other TV series included The Name of the Game, Most Wanted and Strike Force. In 1988, he began a longstanding run as the host of the syndicated series Unsolved Mysteries, which ran through the late `90s. Stack is survived by his wife Rosemarie, whom he married in 1956, and his two children, Elizabeth and Charles. --Prepared by IMDb staff...