Cinema: Son of Cinerama

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. “The answer to television!” So they said when Cinerama was first shown to the public in 1952, and for a couple of years praise was supported by performance: This Is Cinerama, the first full-length picture produced in the medium, has grossed more than $26 million. But the novelty soon wore off. For one thing, the customers were obviously irritated by the imperfections of the Cinerama process: the fuzzy vertical lines between the three panels of the picture; the jiggling of the panels and their variations of color and brightness; a degree of distortion that often makes the picture look like something seen in a laff mirror. For another thing, the Stanley Warner Cinerama Corp.

produced nothing but travelogues for the next six years—each one a bigger snore than the one before.

Three years ago Stanley Warner sold out to more progressive managers, who made a deal with M-G-M for four Cinerama pictures—all of them presumably shot with a plot instead of an itinerary.

Encouraged by the continuing prospect of real movies made for the wall-to-wall screen and shown at ear-to-ear prices, dozens of key theaters are currently converting to the system—at a cost that ranges from $175,000 to $500,000 a theater. By year’s end, 60 of them will be open in the U.S. and some 40 more in other countries.

To judge from past performance, the exhibitors will probably get their money back. To judge from Wonderful World, the first picture released under the new agreement and the first Cinerama production that tells a story, most moviegoers will get their money’s worth—though Cinerama’s stockholders apparently have their doubts: in the period just before and just after the show opened, the stock lost more than a fifth of its value. To begin with, the blurbs for Wonderful World are black with big names: Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Buddy Hackett, Terry-Thomas, Yvette Mimieux, Russ Tamblyn, half a dozen others. The show offers also an album of snapshots, each one approximately the size of Liechtenstein, that dramatically itemize South Germany. And it offers, inserted at intervals in the story, three full-length fairy tales (The Dancing Princess, The Cobbler and the Elves, The Singing Bone], of which the last is wacky enough to make up for not being Grimm—it stars Terry-Thomas as a sort of dilapidated Lancelot, Hackett as his squirrely squire, and a 53-foot, kelly-green dragon that looks like a giant bejeweled pickle.

All the same the film has faults that somehow seem three times as regrettable on three screens as they would have on one. The story, now that Cinerama has at last got around to telling one, seems hardly worth telling—the lives and loves of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the gentle German philologists who collected the famous folk tales, are scarcely the stuff of which movies are made. Furthermore, the film’s interpretations of the tales, though amusing, incline to be cute and design to be sentimental. And the Cinerama process, still full of half-squashed bugs, presents at least one insoluble problem: a moviegoer watching a screen the size of a tennis court can quite readily get a stiff neck from trying to follow the conversational ball.

Yet, surprisingly, the film has a big, dumb, dopey, galumphing likability that turns groans to grins. Confronting it, the spectator feels like Samuel Johnson confronting the dog that walked on its hind legs. He is not surprised that the thing is not done well. He is surprised that it is done at all.