Fox Grandeur was the most prominent of a group of wide-gauge widescreen film formats with which the Hollywood studios experimented in the late 1920s. The brainchild of William Fox and developed at his Fox Film Corporation under the technical direction of Earl I. Sponable (who was also a pioneer in sound-on-film technology), Grandeur employed 70mm film and a 2:1 aspect ratio to produce sharp imagery on large, wide screens. The system was employed for the production and exhibition of a handful of feature films and short subjects. Although its use was suspended in 1930, Fox’s work with Grandeur informed its development of CinemaScope and CinemaScope 55 in the 1950s. More generally, the Hollywood studios’ experimentation with widescreen in this period contributed not only to the widescreen revolution of the 1950s but also to a broader rethinking of film exhibition and film experience throughout the mid-twentieth century.

The Grandeur system emerged against the background of widespread experimentation with mediated sounds and images in the United States in the 1920s. The mid-1920s marked the heyday of large picture palaces seating thousands of people. These theatres had large stages that hosted the live performances that shared billing with filmed entertainment. There were some experiments with expanding the 35mm film image to fit screens of a scale that was commensurate with the proscenia and auditoria at these theatres – for instance, with the Magnascope system. But the 35mm image became grainy when projected on screens larger than 22–24 ft (6.7–7.3m) in width. (Screens averaged about 18 ft wide in this period, though large picture palaces could have 22- to 24-ft-wide screens.) This situation was exacerbated with the arrival of synchronized sound, since sound-on-film systems reduced the area apportioned to the photographic image on the filmstrip and, therefore, forced increased magnification to fill even standard-sized screens. At the same time, synchronized sound was believed to favor the kind of spectacular films demanding a large scope. An additional factor contributing to the interest in wide-gauge widescreen cinema was the popular discourse on television, which was successfully demonstrated at high-profile events in the mid-1920s. The apparently imminent introduction of a new form of screen entertainment, which like radio threatened to draw movie patrons away from the theatre, encouraged movie moguls like William Fox to develop a form of spectacular cinema unachievable in the home (Belton, 1992; Belton, 2010; Paul, 2016; Rogers, 2019).

The Fox Film Corporation’s foray into wide-gauge widescreen cinema was part of its broader efforts at expansion in the mid-1920s, which included acquiring theaters, broadening its newsreels program, and pursuing patents for sound, as well as widescreen technologies. William Fox bought an option for John D. Elms’ Widescope camera in August 1927 and asked Sponable, who headed the studio’s Research Department, to develop it into a more viable widescreen system (while keeping Elms and his assistant William Waddell on the payroll to help with this work). The 70mm Grandeur system debuted at the Gaiety Theatre in New York on September 17, 1929, with a 34-ft-wide screen and a film program that included Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 (directed by David Butler) as well as the short Niagara Falls and several Fox Grandeur Movietone News items. When the second Grandeur feature Happy Days (directed by Benjamin Stoloff) opened at the Roxy Theatre in New York and the Fox Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles in early 1930, the system included 42-ft-wide screens. Although those screens only slightly surpassed the size of the 40-ft screens used for Magnascope, publicity heralded Grandeur as offering a screen twice as wide as older screens. The final feature to be made and shown in Grandeur was Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, which opened in October 1930. Whereas Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 and Happy Days had harnessed the new screen scope to depict theatrical stage shows, The Big Trail employed it to display spectacular landscapes (Edeson, 1930; Sponable, 1932; Belton, 1992; Belton, 2010; Paul, 2016; Rogers, 2019).

In May 1930, after Fox himself had been ousted from the company, the Fox Film Corporation joined the other studios in agreeing to limit work on their wide-gauge formats until the industry could agree on a technical standard. But by the time a wide-film standard of 50mm was proposed in late 1931, enthusiasm for the format had waned. The studios (still feeling the economic effects of the transition to sound, not to mention the deepening Depression) were financially strained, only a small number of theatres had been equipped for the systems, and the spate of widescreen releases in 1930, including The Big Trail, had failed at the box office (Belton, 1992: pp. 48–64).