Investigating the glory of Cinemascope - Marshall Deutelbaum uncovers a Design Pair in THE RAINS OF RANCHIPUR (Jean Negulesco, Twentieth Century-Fox, USA, 1955)

Jean Negulesco

While much has been written about the technology of CinemaScope, apart from Charles Barr’s preliminary discussion of the format and David Bordwell’s exemplary writings regarding the staging of actors in ‘Scope films, CinemaScope aesthetics remain largely unexamined. Set design, for example, has elicited little comment, as has the relationship fo camera placement to it. Yet the films themselves offer remarkable insights. All it takes to see them are asking the right questions.

By accident or by design? 

The interior of  Lady Edwina Esketh’s train compartment in The Rains of Ranchipur (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1955) lines up perfectly with the exterior of the train as she alights with her husband at the station in Ranchipur. 

The oddness of the compartment’s design is explained by the train’s exterior: door lines up with door, unusually shaped section of the wall next to the compartment door lines up with the vertical shape to the right of the train’s doorway, and the verticals between them are equally thick. The rectangular panel behind Lady Esketh’s head is repeated by the bands on either side of the train’s windows. 

A further clue indicating that the compartment’s was meant to mimic the train’s exterior is the way that the walls of the compartment read as flat even though they must be at right angle to one another.

It is only a step from this pair of images to recognize that their basic outline, their graphic configuration, exists elsewhere in the sets of The Rains of Ranchipur. The background of the Maharini’s palace echoes their basic form, once one recognizes the paired doors at its center. Furthermore, the symmetry of the background’s design makes it easy to see that the set—thanks to the position of the camera-- divides the frame into thirds. The same division of the frame into thirds, defined by the sets, continues throughout the film. In this way, the sets add continuing order and stability to the wide frame.