Cinema: Strictly for the Marbles

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More buttered popcorn was sold at retail last month than in any,other month in world history, and most of it disappeared from circulation in the darkened caves of U.S. movie theaters. Surveying the technological development that set the corn rolling, the Russians formally announced that they had invented the thing first. A Chicago beanery produced the 3-D Special, and a Midwestern minister gave a sermon on "Prayer—the Third Dimension." Exuberant Cinemogul George Skouras kissed Pageanteer Mike Todd in public. Somebody else brought out a Polaroid lorgnette. "Whaddya mean, vulgar?" cried one movieman. "Isn't the public entitled to be hit in the face?"

Three-Dimension, "the four-eyed revolution," had hit the land hard. Quite by accident, as it walked around in a daze of depression, Hollywood had tripped over a firing cord and shot off a telling reply to television. "Third-dementia," the newest entertainment craze, was luring crowds back to the movies in such numbers as Hollywood had not seen since the end of World War II. By the millions they came, to peer through an eye-straining haze of alcohol and iodine (the basic ingredients of the H Polarizer) at a simple optical illusion whose principle was known to Euclid and whose practice put grandfather to sleep on Sunday afternoons.

One day the movies had been just a mental transom the public was half-tired of peeking through. The next day the movies were a gap in the mind's defenses through which a roaring lion leaped and landed in the delighted moviegoer's lap. Spears and guns threatened his head, spiders walked on his face, beautiful girls reached alluringly from the screen. Then, just when a man's guard was up, came a roar of sound from the balcony, and, caught from behind and before, he was yanked into the screen and taken for a thrilling ride on a roller coaster.

Slap in the Face. Had Hollywood really done any more than recapture the public's attention by slapping it in the face? Had a real technical and artistic revolution been started in the movie world?

Said one moviemaker confidently: "Hollywood is at the beginning of a new age of prosperity." There were signs that he was right, portents that he was wrong. The Sick Man of Southern California has a long case history of an intermittent fever, in which booms and busts succeed each other with violent frequency. The great successes of the teens and '20s brought on the "fall-of-Babylon" parties that led to the Morals Crisis of the mid-'20s. In the late '20s the introduction of sound set Hollywood on its ears, but it was followed by an era so fantastically prosperous that one frosty night Myrna Loy, it is said, left her mink coat wrapped around the roots of a chilly little peach tree.

Depression followed, and an ambitious male secretary at a major studio who asked for a raise was awarded a key to the executive washroom instead. The day was saved again by Technicolor, and in the sunlight of wartime prosperity, Hollywood made hay. But after the war the foreign market collapsed, and the domestic box office took a dive. The U.S. Supreme Court divorced the movie producers from their theater chains, and the studios no longer had a guaranteed outlet for their pictures.