Canadian Pacific (1949) 720p BluRay x264 EAC3-SARTRE

Filmed on location in the Canadian Rockies, this historical adventure spins a fanciful account of the building of the Canadian Pacific railroad. Randolph Scott heads the cast as Tom Andrews, a rough-and-ready surveyor who meets and conquers all obstacles in the railroad's path. The biggest fly in the ointment is trapper Dirk Rourke (Victor Jory), who perceives the Canadian Pacific as a threat to his livelihood. Rourke foments an Indian uprising which very nearly destroys the railroad. But Andrews and his hardy band persevere. Jane Wyatt plays the heroine among more intelligent and self-reliant lines than is usual in films of this nature. Highly suspect on a historical level, Canadian Pacific is nonetheless an exciting piece of filmmaking, evocatively photographed in Cinecolor by Fred Jackman Jr.

Blu Ray Notes

Canadian Pacific was originally filmed in "CineColor"  This was essentially a "two component" color process in which the 35mm negatives captured a rather limited range of the color spectrum - one covering the part of orange/red, the other that of cyan/blue. It was unique in many ways.

The CineColor printing process used not one but two emulsion cells - one for each respective record - coated on opposite sides of the base element, thus combining the two "records" simultaneously during projection. In order for the manufacturing process to work, specific prism techniques and machines were required. Depending on how well the negatives were developed and copied the color values, density and detail in gradation varied. This was one of the process' weaknesses. But because of the much lower costs compared to the Technicolor process (both two and three strip) it attracted many independent film producers.

However; with the introduction of (single) Eastman Color film negatives and prints in the early 1950s the number of productions made in CineColor began to drop fast and sharply. With the duplication machines also being discarded shortly thereafter films made in that process had to be recombined in later years using the Eastman Color process and machines that were incapable of replicating the correct color range and rendition. In addition, because of instability issues both inherent in the original film materials and due to the very different photochemical techniques and machines used by Eastman Kodak the two original CineColor "records" were often very severely misaligned on the resulting (Eastman Color) prints. In some cases, due to material damage and availability these films were even (wrongly) presented from one record only - in black and white.

This is how CineColor films were seen and remembered for decades.