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...