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Although it is most commonly associated with the television age, the zoom lens has been part of the movie scene for much longer than that. Zooms have been spotted as early as the Merian C. Cooper-Ernest Schoedsack version of The Four Feathers (1929), and at least two Frank Capra films of the early Thirties contain one zoom apiece, each for a shock-of-discovery effect: in Dirigible (1931), a zoom-in on the ice-encrusted face of their leader, left buried in the snow, reveals to the explorers - and the audience-that the party has been wandering in Antarctic circles; while in American Madness (1932), Capra employs a similar zoom-in to discover the face of a clock shattered by a bullet, and fixing the time of a nocturnal bank robbery. The American Madness zoom is technically smoother, having been executed with the recently introduced three-element Cooke Vara lens, as opposed to the more primitive two-element mechanism used for the Dirigible shot; but the shuddering progress of the Dirigible zoom, visibly jolting its way into closeup focus on the explorer's frozen face, actually contributes to the subjective impact of the moment.
Early zoom lenses were unwieldy affairs in which the various lens elements were moved in relation to one another mechanically, by a series of cams operated by a crank. Moreover, the focal range of the basic zoom was fixed at 150 feet to infinity. To obtain acceptable focus at shorter distances, it was necessary to attach auxiliary lenses.
Nevertheless, the occasional adventurous director and/or cinematographer experimented with the cumbersome device. Rouben Mamoulian enhanced the "Gay Paree" and stag hunt sequences of Love Me Tonight (1932) with zooms; the same year, Tay Garnett called for zoomins in One Way Passage and Prestige. Paramount even trumpeted the use of a perpendicular zoom, in Thunder Below (Richard Wallace, 1932), in trade journals: a zoom-in onto rocks below imitated the point of view of a woman plunging from a cliff.
Cameraman Leon Shamroy executed a series of zooms, in Gregory LaCava's Private Worlds (1935), for subjective coverage of a mental patient running amok. Lewis Milestone, always willing to experiment with new technical possibilities, worked the rhythmic use of zoomouts into the climactic battle sequence of Edge of Darkness ( 1 943 ) with...