MAN IN THE DARK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 721, 8 May 1953, Page 18

MAN IN THE DARK

(Columbia) JET me not lay perjury upon | my soul: it was not a very loud bang. The preliminary shock-wave of publicity might have led one to expect from the first impact of three-dimensional film something in the way of an atomic explosion in the entertainment world. As it was, the detonation seemed scarcely audible above the drum-beat-ing, and at the epicentre even the echoes were slightly overlaid by the whimper of cash-customers passing the box-office on their way out. Man in the Dark, however, requires a place on the record because it is the first three-dimensional feature film to be shown here-even if it does not deserve much attention for its %ntrinsic merits as entertainment. It is noteworthy as a portent rather than as a performance. For some filmgoers-those who were in circulation in the middle *thirties and can recall one or two stunt shorts which we watched through coloured spectacles — stereoscopic film will not be quite the novelty it is for a younger generation. They will not find the use which is made of these special effects very novel either, if they can remember what’ they saw in 1935. Man in the Dark depends almost entirely upon shock effects-and while shock effects may be acceptable enough in a short film they have a numbing effect ‘when the treatment is unduly prolonged. The producer of Man in the Dark prodded me in the eye with surgical forceps, dropped a flowerpot on my head, shot at me, slammed doors in my face, punched me on the nose, ran me down with a roller-coaster-in fact, generally galumphed around and trod heavily on my corns. And I’m getting too old for that. If he had only squeezed in a few three-dimensional shots of Jane Russell (and goodness only knows why that sort of angle was forgotten) I might not have felt so old and decrepit, so ripe for a disability pension, by the time the lights went up for the last time. The story of Man in the Dark exists | only as a setting for the optical skul-

duggery I have mentioned-indeed, the characters are so flat they almost cancel out the 3-D effect-and I wouldn’t call it, by any stretch of the imagination, a moral tale. Judgment on this form of 3-D must, in fact, be reserved until something worth judging comes along. There is no doubt that the true stereoscopic film has immense dramatic possibilities to counterpoise the awkwardness of spectacles and eyestrain. These possibilities Will in time be explored with sense and sensibility-and with a little more care than has been shown here.