Cinema: A Sock in the Nose

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Behind the Great Wall (Continental), according to its promoters, is just about the most important cinematic event since the first talkie: the first smellie that really smells right. That is to say, it is a motion picture that permits the audience not only to see and hear but also to smell what is happening on the screen. The process is called AromaRama* ("You must breathe it to believe it"), and it could be guaranteed, on the basis of its first showing, to turn even a good movie into something of a stinker.

The picture itself is just a wide-screen ("Totalscope") travelogue filmed two years ago in Red China by Italy's globetrotting Count Leonardo Bonzi (Green Magic, Lost Continent). At times the DeLuxe color photography by Pierludovico Pavoni and Alesandro d'Eva is magnificent. (Best scene: a mistily magical sequence in which the fishermen of the Kwei valley, winged like big birds in their bright wet coats of bark, glide out upon the morning waters on their slender rafts and dance them on the current to attract the fish.) But the film as a whole has no shape, makes only a cursory attempt to describe the vast revolution that lies before its lens.

The AromaRama process itself, developed by a public relations executive named Charles Weiss, is fairly ingenious. The film carries a "scent track" that transmits cues to an electronic "trigger" that fires a salvo of scent into the theater through the air-conditioning ports. The AromaRama people claim they can reach every nose in the house within two seconds, and remove the odor almost as fast as they release it. The perfumes* are built up on a quick-evaporating base (Freon), and as the air is drawn off for filtering, it is passed over electrically charged baffles that precipitate the aromatic particles.

Unhappily, the system sounds better than it smells. To begin with, most of the production's 31 odors will probably seem phony, even to the average uneducated nose. A beautiful old pine grove in Peking, for instance, smells rather like a subway rest room on disinfectant day. Besides, the odors are strong enough to give a bloodhound a headache. What is more, the smells are not always removed as rapidly as the scene requires: at one point the audience distinctly smells grass in the middle of the Gobi Desert.

Are smellies here to stay? Or are they just another cinema gimmick that will soon be one with the paper goggles of yesteryear? No doubt the public will get tired before very long of having its nose tweaked. But if smelliemakers can provide more realistic smells and make more intelligent use of them, the scent track might offer rather more than meets the nose. Exhibitors can sniff secondary possibilities in "the olfactory dimension." One of them has suggested that if he could give his customers the smell of steam heat, he might be able to cut down his oil bill. Another plans to fill his theater, at tactful intervals, with the scent of buttered popcorn.