Cinema: Strictly for the Marbles

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As a stereo expert in New York said later: "Any schoolboy with a ruler can tell you that a human's eyes are not four inches apart, but two and a half. The nearest thing to a human being with a four-inch interocular distance is a gorilla. All these 3-D movies so far have been shot for an audience of gorillas."

Even when Hollywood has mastered 3-D technique, there will still be discomforts. With it, at least for many years to come, the audience will have to wear glasses—and sit up straight. The problem of glasses is even more acute at drive-in theaters, where managers estimate that half their customers belong to "the horizontal audience," and where the new-fangled windshields stop what little light the Polaroid lets through.

The Last Chance? The public is obviously ready to give Hollywood a chance. But is it a last chance? Perhaps the television honeymoon is over, and the public has come back for another fling with its old flame, the movies. But even Hollywood admits that audiences in recent years have become more severely selective: it is an era of "the premeditated purchase." Can Hollywood reclaim, and retain, its prodigal audience? Or will the entertainment business settle down into a running fight between TV and the movies?

In that case, says British Moviemaker Sir Alexander Korda, "the fatal fascination of the little TV square, and the charm of keeping your slippers on instead of going out into the cold, will finish the cinema in no time." After all, TV has already learned to use color, and there is nothing to prevent the addition of 3-D.

Yet Hollywood's fate, many experienced onlookers feel, lies well within Hollywood's power to determine. "If this fuss over 3-D and wide screen has done nothing else," says United Artists' Chairman Bob Benjamin, "it has lifted the industry out of its appalling lethargy." But what will Hollywood do with its fresh release of energy? Says Columbia's Jerry Wald: "In a year it will be a tie score in the gimmick game. Then it will be the same old question—who has the story?"

Can the moviemakers match all the technical to-do with some creative excitement, add some psychic dimension to the physical sense of depth? Old Hollywoodian Dick Breen says with a grin: "This isn't being done for art's sake. It's strictly to save some of the marbles." "Revolution?" laughed a onetime Hollywood scriptwriter last week. "The only revolution I hear is the sound of Hollywood turning over in its grave."

But the movies have, from their beginning, been the luckiest of the arts, and Hollywood's have been the luckiest of movies. It may be that the villainous old eagle, stuffed as he is with ill-got gains and moth-eaten with artistic sins, can still regain his grip on the wide-eyed public, and flap away in screaming triumph, as of old, with the innocent and apparently contented victim dangling from his claws.