Lowell Thomas

A selection of excerpts from the first Cinerama films.

Mussolini Speaks is a 1933 documentary film highlighting the first 10 years of Benito Mussolini’s rule as Prime Minister of Italy. The film, narrated by U.S. radio broadcaster Lowell Thomas, includes footage of the Fascists’ March on Rome, the Lateran Treaty between Italy and The Holy See, engineering projects in Italy and North Africa, and excerpts of speeches by Mussolini.

An educational one-reeler for elementary aged children demonstrating the concept of American free-enterprise. The film utilizes wooden toys designed and animated by Goldman, all set to a music box-ish xylophone score by Jam Handy musical director Samuel Benavie and narration by notable commentator Lowell Thomas.

Biography follows the life of famed woman pilot Amelia Earhart, including her marriage to a famous publisher and her disappearance during a flight in 1937.

Designed to introduce the then-new widescreen process Cinerama, audiences experience the roller coaster at Rockaways' Playland, the temple dance from Aida, Niagara Falls, a Viennese choir, the canals of Venice, a military tattoo in Edinburgh, a bullfight, and more. The film concludes with a view from the nose of a low-flying B-25 while America the Beautiful plays.

Made in 1937, HIGHWAY MANIA is an early driver safety film narrated by Lowell Thomas. It features stunning images of auto accidents, including some that are doubtless stunts from Hollywood films.

An animator is in the process of creating a series of three drawings of prominent historical figures. As the animator goes about his drawings, a narrator tells some stories about the historical figure in question. The drawings come to life as the narrator tells some anecdotes about the historical figure. As each drawing nears its completion and as the story about that figure nears its end, it becomes more and more apparent who the historical figure in question is.

Charlie, working on a junkjard, always trying to help people in the most impossible ways with junk from his work place, hears from a German professor, that there is a bird, a Belgish Kongo, that eats metal. Charlie sets out on a ridiculous hunting expedition to catch one. With some music - the birds love music - and a strange worm he is able to catch one, but even then the bird offers some even more over-the-top surprises.

This 40-minute short, produced for MacFadden Publications, is basically a plug for the selling power of ads placed in the pages of "Liberty Magazine," a MacFadden publication.

Using newsreel footage, this film reviews world events from the end of World War I to the American entry into World War II and, according to the narration, shows "how, through their disunity, democracies were led, some to destruction and others to the verge of destruction."]

An expedition is sent into the rugged Australian outback to search for a lost white woman.

This 1946 entry in the "Movietone Adventures" series of shorts was in Technicolor when originally released. Narrated by Lowell Thomas, it is a trip from Medicine Hat in southern Utah down the rapids of the San Juan River ending with a view of the Rainbow Bridge, hence the title and the use of Tehnicolor. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Subject, One-Reel.

Watson crafted a dazzling visual ballet that stands on its own as an aesthetically rewarding and educationally inspiring tour of the massive Kodak factories. Utilizing the multiple exposure imagery he had used to such great effect in The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933), Watson makes tool and die drill presses, assembly lines of camera parts, and the film coating process every bit as expressive and interesting as an MGM historic drama.

Filmed in 1949 when Lowell Thomas and Lowell Thomas Jr. took a journey to Tibet before the Chinese had moved in. It shows Tibet as it was then and, for that matter, as it had been for centuries.

Prominent scientists Dr. William Beebe and Otis Barton, using the Bathyspere invented by Barton, descend several thousand feet to the ocean floor off of the shores of Bermuda to study and film sea creatures seen and filmed at that depth for the first time. A sometimes staged semi-documentary that was often sold and advertised as an exploitation/horror picture.

A documentary outlining railroad work and the effects on the lives impacted by the iron horse

Advances in chicken and egg farming.

Captain Wallace Casewell Jr., chief of police of Panama City, Florida, is the star of Killers of the Sea. Appointing himself protector of all Gulf of Mexico gamefish, Capt. Casewell makes it his mission to round up illegal fishing boats and to stave off such natural predators as sharks, whales and octopi. This may well be the only American film in which a school of dolphins are depicted as "the enemy." Beyond its rather ludicrous continuity, the film offers several spectacular underwater scenes, as Casewell battles invading sea life with knife and harpoon. This 49-minute documentary was narrated by Lowell Thomas.

Schlitz is a tourist in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Ignoring posted warnings which say that you shouldn't climb Mount Washington (the tallest mountain in New England) in bad weather, Schlitz pushes onward up the mountain, briefcase in hand. He gets lost in the snow, becomes entangled in mischief spun by a quirky hermit, and finally ends up skiing down Tuckerman's Ravine at perilous speeds, losing his briefcase several times.

Introduces Polaroids marketing campaign for the year 1964, including TV commercials. Produced for dealers.

A documentary on railroads doing their daily tasks created by trhe The Milwaukee Railroad

An educational film sponsored and distributed by the Los Angeles-based Narcotic Educational Foundation of America and directed by Gilbert Lasky with financial assistance of the Woman’s Relief Corps targets teachers as well as junior and senior high school students in the war on drugs. Narcotics are classified and effects of opiates, stimulants, and barbiturates are summarized and dramatized

Tour of an auto parts and accessories factory climaxing with a stop-motion product parade.

Lowell Thomas travels across Europe and the Middle East on his way to attend the coronation of King Mahendra in Nepal.

Ike, also known as Ike: The War Years, is a 1979 television miniseries about the life of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The screenplay by Melville Shavelson is based on Kay Summersby's 1948 memoir Eisenhower Was My Boss and her 1975 autobiography, Past Forgetting: My Love Affair. The series aired from May 3–6, 1979 on ABC. During World War II, General Dwight D. 'Ike' Eisenhower serves as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Western Europe. On a personal level, he has an extramarital affair with his driver Kay Summersby.