Cinema: The Gold Standard

"Art is long," somebody once remarked to the late Fred Allen. "Yeah," he rasped. "As long as the line at the box office." Last week Manhattan's so-called art theaters refused to give a line a chance to form for a major work of art, a film from India called Father Panchali. The theater operators decreed that the picture did not measure up to their standard—the gold standard. Explained one manager baldly: "The picture's got no sex in it."

Father Panchali won a Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. Last December it took first prize at the San Francisco International Festival, has been running for nearly two months at the city's Vogue Theater, the only public screen it has found in the U.S. In London, where it did excellent business, the Observer called it "tremendously affecting," and the New Statesman rated it "a masterpiece." Written, directed and produced by a 36-year-old Indian named Satyajit Ray. the film describes the slow decline and quiet fall of a family in an Indian village. Homely, poetic, stunningly beautiful to see, it is one of the finest pictures of recent years.

The men who own Manhattan's 36 art houses were not impressed. "Look," said one of them, "I saw this picture at Cannes and I like it, but it wouldn't make money. It lacks entertainment, and besides, a little girl dies in the picture." Said another: "These peasants live in huts. My customers live on Park Avenue."

Since a foreign picture cannot be booked in most U.S. cities without Manhattan reviews, Father Panchali will almost certainly not be booked elsewhere in the U.S. Meantime, Manhattan's art houses looked more than ever like tart houses, as their marquees showed: The Adulteress ("absorbing drama of sin"), And God Created Woman (starring Brigitte Bardot), Sins of Casanova ("wicked"), The Bride Was Much Too Beautiful (Brigitte Bardot), Smiles of a Summer Night ("bawdy, nawdy"), The Light Across the Street (Brigitte Bardot).