Cinema: Birthday of the Revolution

The revolution against “flatties” (two-dimensional movies) is one year old; 3-D, which temporarily saved Hollywood from bankruptcy and scared most cine-moguls out of their ulcers, began its second year last week. Cinerama celebrated its birthday playing to capacity crowds in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles. It had not only grossed a phenomenal $4,300,000 but had also become a social phenomenon. Travel bureaus this summer were flooded with requests from people who wanted to see the original of what they saw in Cinerama: the Grand Canyon, the canals of Venice, the bull rings of Spain. Even the roller coaster at New York’s Rockaway Playland—the opening attraction in Cinerama’s two-hour documentary—had enjoyed a record year.

Real stereoscopic 3-D had enjoyed cometlike popularity, but only as a novelty, mainly because Hollywood had merely thrown things at the customers and failed to provide anything much to look at through the polaroid glasses. Said one California sage: “Every studio in Hollywood agrees that the 3-D vogue is practically dead.” Even the news from Washington that an, inventor had patented polaroid sun glasses that can be changed with the flick of a finger into 3-D spectacles failed to cheer the true stereoscopists.

The first wide-screen CinemaScope epic, soth Century-Fox’s The Robe, was breaking box-office records all over the country. Manhattan’s Roxy Theater reported a first-week gross of $264,000. It was the same story in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Kansas City and San Francisco. Foxmen dreamily talked of total earnings topping Gone With the Wind’s record $35 million take. Hollywood Reporter Columnist Mike Connolly wrote: “The Robe just has to be the greatest grosser of all time. It might even outsell the Bible.”

The California pulse-feelers debated how much of The Robe’s success could be credited to CinemaScope and how much to the lavish production itself and its smasheroo promotion campaign. A few suspected its triumph might be due to the simple fact that with all its spectacular slickness, The Robe was based on a great theme (Christ’s passion) written by a popular storyteller (the late Lloyd C. Douglas). As Samuel Goldwyn remarked: “In any consideration of new dimensions for motion pictures, the fact still remains that the most important dimension is that of the story.”

The success of the first movie in Cinema-Scope did not cause a rush to the Cinema-Scope bandwagon. At MGM, Paramount, Columbia, Universal-International and Warner, 3-D production was lagging. As one studio executive said: “We’re playing it down the middle…Whichever way the wind turns the fastest buck, that’s the way we’ll turn.”