November 9, 2014, 1:00 p.m. — The Bubble (1966)
The Bubble
1966. USA. Written and directed by Arch Oboler. With Michael Cole, Deborah Walley, Johnny Desmond. Fourteen years after Arch Oboler touched off the 3-D boom of the 1950s with Bwana Devil, the first feature-length film in the modern, polarized process, he returned with The Bubble, a science-fiction film intended as a showcase for a refined system called 4-D Space-Vision, which made it possible to project a widescreen 3-D image from a single strip of film. Based on an original story by Oboler that in many ways anticipates Stephen King’s Under the Dome, the film was both ahead of its time and behind it, and even a title change—to Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth—didn’t draw large audiences to Oboler’s offbeat blend of politics and suspense. Out of circulation for many years, The Bubble has now been restored from the original camera negative by the 3-D Film Archive (see 3dfilmarchive.com for a full account) and now looks sharper, brighter, and more dimensional than it ever has before. Courtesy Kino Lorber Films. 91 min.
