The Big Illusion

As the 3-D craze swept Hollywood, Variety reported last week that one producer claimed he was going to shoot his next picture in a process "much better even than 3-D." i.e., 4-D. "It means," the moviemaker explained, "that I'm using 3-D and I've got a story, too." The week's two new 3-D movies seemed to concentrate on stereoscopic effects rather than dramatic effectiveness.

House of Wax (Warner), a remake of the 1933 2-D thriller, The Mystery of the Wax Museum, pictures Vincent Price as an insane sculptor who murders his victims and then immerses them in molten tallow for his waxworks display. At the end, meeting a fate he has richly earned, he falls into a puddle of his own wax.

An intermittently gripping shocker, House of Wax. utilizes the process known as Warner Phonic sound (multiple sound tracks and speakers) mostly for recording eerie musical effects and the screams of ingenues. The picture was photographed in Natural Vision 3-D (TIME, Dec. 15, 1952), and calls for Polaroid spectacles. Although the Natural Vision is an improvement on that in Bwana Devil, it still becomes blurry at times, and there is often little illusion of depth, particularly in closeups. The picture's writing and direction are also blurry, and the extra dimension is used primarily as a trick. All sorts of objects pop out at the audience from the screen: fists, a skeleton's hand, cancan dancers' legs, guns, pickaxes, spears, falling bodies. As Waxworks Proprietor Price says at one point: "I'm going to give the people what they want--sensation, horror, shock." If, as Hollywood fondly hopes, this is what moviegoers want, House of Wax is a howling success.

Man in the Dark (Columbia) is photographed in Columbia's own 3-D process (also requiring Polaroid glasses). It is a black & white cops & robbers yarn about a criminal (Edmond O'Brien) who, as a result of a brain operation (prefrontal lobotomy), forgets where he has stashed away the $130,000 take from a payroll robbery. Like House of Wax, the movie seems tireless in depicting objects jumping out at the audience: surgical instruments, a car, a bird, a spider. In fact, just about everything seems to come out at the moviegoer except a good movie.

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