Cinema: Also Showing

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North to Alaska (20th Century-Fox), a sort of northwestern for intellectuals, resets the Tristram legend as a Klondike comedy. Steady now. The Tristram is John Wayne. Bound home to Nome with a load of mine machinery, Sourdough Wayne picks up a package (Capucine) for his prospector pal (Stewart Granger). Though sorely tempted, the big dope delivers the package still wrapped. Can't he see that the girl is madly in love with him? Probably not: Actress Capucine has only one expression at her command, a look of tender gastritis. When Wayne and friend get back to the mine. Granger fails to hit paydirt and so does his little brother (Fabian). In the end, after a belly-busting burlesque of the standard barroom brawl, Wayne gets the girl, and the villain (Ernie Kovacs) gets covered all over with sweet violets—or studio facsimile. But it does seem that Fabian should get Capucine. That way, between the two of them, they would at least have one full name.

September Storm (20th Century-Fox) will soon blow over, but while it lasts the public is invited to contemplate—along with Mark Stevens, Joanne Dru, a wicked-looking foam-rubber shark and a fishily familiar search for sunken treasure —a cinematic curiosity: the first 3-D picture Hollywood has released in five years.

The film was shot in Stereovision, a new and allegedly improved process of stereoptical cinematography designed to adapt 3-D to the CinemaScope wide screen. Although the moviegoer still has to wear flimsy and uncomfortable Polaroid goggles that allow the two separate images on the screen to merge in his mind, some improvement is apparent, particularly in the definition of images. The actors still look strangely diminished, far away, unreal, like little plaster figures in a photographed tableau.

When the camera tries a closeup, some customers experience a disturbing sensation, as if their eyes, in order to focus, were being forced to cross. As the cutter fades one image from the screen and fades another in, the eyes instinctively attempt to focus on the departing and the arriving images, and the strain sometimes approaches the threshold of pain. On the whole, the experience is entertaining, and probably will not hurt anybody who has not had to go through it since 1955. In any case, it is always possible, if the eyes protest too much, to slip off the goggles and see two pictures for the price of one.