Cinema: A Lion in Your Lap!

The idea of adding a third dimension to movies is almost as old as movies themselves. But to moviegoers, the illusion of depth is a perennial novelty. Off & on, through the years, it has always drawn interested crowds. Last week, at two Paramount theaters in Los Angeles, record audiences were queueing up to see an Ansco color movie called Bwana Devil, the first feature picture ever made in “three dimensions.”

The process that fascinated audiences is called Natural Vision, a new twist on the old stereoscope and on MGM’s 1937 two-reel “depthies.” Two projectors throw separate images on the screen. The light of each image is polarized, i.e., filtered so that it “vibrates” in only one plane, at a right angle to the other image. Wearing glasses fitted with polarizing lenses (furnished by the theater management), the viewer sees a different picture with each eye; his brain combines the images into a three-dimensional picture.

No kin to Cinerama (TIME, Oct. 13), which achieves the depth illusion by nearly surrounding the viewer with the picture, Natural Vision was developed by Milton Gunzburg, an ex-screen writer, and his brother Julian, an eye surgeon. The process was licensed by radio’s veteran Producer-Writer-Director Arch Oboler, who turned out Bwana Devil, a jungle yarn starring Robert Stack, Barbara Britton and some man-eating lions that almost halt the building of an African railroad.

Unimpressed by newspaper ads that promised the customers: “A lion in your lap! … A lover in your arms!” Los Angeles critics quarreled with the movie itself, the sensation of jungle leaves in the face, the eyestrain produced by the glasses.

But the public nonetheless flocked enthusiastically to get a look at Natural Vision. Last week’s gross at the two theaters: $95,000.