SEATS RESERVED

...The four Cinerama productions issued so far have appealed to a great many people who rarely go to the movies—and even more infrequently to the live theater...

...In a sense, the original frenzies for three-dimensional images and sounds and wider and higher screens that followed Cinerama were attempts to standardize throughout the industry separate effects achieved or suggested by that system...

...Eva Gabor is briefly flamboyant as an unilluminating flame, and Jacques Bergerac handsome as an obstructive gigolo...

...The feast is for the eye and ear together...

...Gigi is well remembered—from the book, from a French film version starring Danielle Delorme, and the Broadway show that had Audrey Hepburn in the role of the young girl being trained as a courtesan by her grandmother and aunt, to carry on the family tradition...

...Show people had immediate and continuing doubts about something using cameras, film, and projectors for presentations so markedly unrelated to ordinary movie-going habits and industry logistics...

...It impresses at once a sense of elegance, an exquisitely heightened picture of Paris when the century was young—a time which Cecil Beaton, whose costumes and design make up so much of the film, has made so much his own...

...That it lends itself to musical transcription is to say the least...

...Several are organically parts of lyrical montages, in which times and places swirl past in swiftly economical, characteristically cinematic fashion...

...The State of the Cinema Seats Reserved by MARTIN S. DWORKIN The movies continue to come in all sizes—which is not so much a Eeat as a sign that there now may be really several movie industries, manufacturing and marketing several distinctly different products...

...The formula, especially since Lowell Thomas moved into active direction and omnipresent participation, expresses the breathless magniloquence of the hugest of picture postcards of faraway places—the kind guided travelers waste their time buying when they should be seeing for themselves, inevitably discovering that the views aren't real, and that the cards were lithographed in all their glorious colors somewhere else...

...The obligatory U.S...

...But it is even more disappointing to see something created to compete with Cinerama by carefully imitating it, offering only technical improvements and more polished hokum...

...The Cinerama policy of selling tickets and reserving seats for particular performances was not new to the movies, but it had never been more than an unusual exploitation device, often adopted in strategic emulation of the "legitimate" theater...

...Unlike the technically unusual Windjammer, it requires no radical alteration of theaters...

...These considerations may have somehow affected the judgment to present Gigi in play fashion...

...The visual effect is technically splendid, as is the aural effect of the multiple sound tracks heard via the speakers placed around the theaters...

...Several sequences, showing the old squarerigger soaring over the vast, open sea, are deeply moving in their beauty—more than merely spectacular, showing that the superb photography (by Joseph Brun and Gayne Rescher) can be used to see more than glossy surfaces, meticulously arranged for maximum superficiality...

...After the late Mike Todd showed everyone in Around the World in 80 Days what Cinerama might have done to begin with, there was hope that the formula would be discarded, to put the unquestionably spectacular process to some creative use...

...As Gigi's grandmother, Her-mione Gingold is the model of demimonde respectability, warm and vigilant of every element of quality, every privilege, emolument, and opportunity in the life of love without marriage...

...sounds and images seem to merge into an essence with the taste, aroma, and body of a wine of grand vintage...

...Off to one side would be the "art" or the "specialty" theaters, profferring the foreign or off-beat films for a limited clientele...

...Most outrageously, there is a bit of business about a romance between the ship's mascot and a seductive black poodle ashore in Curacao that is too cutely human for any words but obscenities...

...Cecil Beaton did the costumes and decor...

...The attraction policy is having a profound effect, creating forms and manners of offering movies that have relatively remote or accidental connection with the institutions of the industry, founded for so long upon ideas of movie-going as habitual or merely occasional...

...Alan Jay Lemer and Frederick Loewe did the book, lyrics, and music of My Fair Lady...

...But these have settled into an acceptance—for as long as the box office booms—of what is so deliberately a newfangled revival of the movies' first commercialization as carnival attractions...

...They burst into self-conscious dialogue and singing and dancing with the artificiality of countless shipboard musicals...

...The effect, however, is that of the working out of what is now apparently a travelogue ritual...

...any equipped for Cinema-Scope will be able to run it, eventually...

...As a narrative gimmick, it is at least as good as the ones typical of Cinerama, wherein so much is made to hang upon the holiday trip of a young married couple, or a junketing Air Force major and his sergeant, or the big-wheeling romantic Lowell Thomas himself, that the screen seems to sag even as it is curving and towering...

...If Cinerama had been put into as many theaters as, say, CinemaScope or VistaVision, and presented on a basis of continuous showings, we may be certain that it would have quickly palled, even with a supply of new presentations—perhaps shrouding the theaters entirely in the outcome...

...Search for Paradise only compounded the waste of splendid scenery and the idiocy of manufactured excitement, strung on spurious story lines...

...Its resemblance to a play—to a particular play—is as apparent as it was unsurprising...

...Now, "roadshowing" a film is increasingly an integral policy of the business— perhaps related to the converse policy of immediate "saturation" releases, whereby films are not shown first in the "showcases" or "flagship" theaters of the circuits, but are thrust out at once into many theaters in every area...

...Beaton is one of the world's leading commercial photographers, and his planning for Joseph Rutten-berg's rich Metrocolor photography creates nuances of elegance in the details of every scene...

...Their association again on Gigi not unpredictably produces something reminiscent of the other— aside from certain analogies of content...

...military sequence out of the Cinerama formula is more directly relevant here, as the training ship meets a heavy task force and participates in maneuvers...

...His magnificent posture, his knowing comedy, his superb singing of the key songs, Thank Heaven for Little Girls, I Remember It Well, and I'm Glad I'm Not Young Any More, are the Eiffel Tower around which to arrange, as Minelli has done so wonderfully, a dream Paris of another age—a city not inconceivably one for which to reserve a place, to plan to see, as the opportunity for seeing is presented at this time of changing opportunities and changing visions...

...As her wealthy playmate, then suitor, Louis Jourdan is determinedly bored, preposterously formal about matters of public intimacy, always too rich, too charming, too perfectly tuned to happiness to be intelligent...

...The showcases would follow the reserved-seat roadshow policy, as may be observed today in cases of such films as Around the World in 80 Days, The Bridge on the River Kwai, South Pacific, the various Cinerama editions, its new optical relative Windjammer, and Gigi...

...The cast is completely excellent— again inseparable from the other elements of the cinematic organism...

...That it is being sold this way now says much about the changes in the industry—as well as about its qualities as the sort of entertainment people might plan to see in the same manner as they do a hit play...

...A sequence made with a camera mounted on the deck of a submerging submarine is remarkably realistic...

...The regulars would adhere to the old policy of continuous shows in multiple circuits, including the burgeoning drive-ins, with the added attraction of simultaneous "first runs," as, today, of Attila, Fraulein, or those bread-and-butter horror absurdities for grownup kiddies—served alone, like Horror of Dracula, or in a two-layer sandwich like War of the Satellites and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman...

...Windjammer, produced by Louis de Rochement as the first "Cinemiracle" presentation, actually originated as a project for the Cinerama organization, and might easily follow its models around the Cinerama circuit...

...Gigi (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is another matter—although it, too, is being released according to roadshow tactics, with seats reserved and theatrically-timed performances...

...Maurice Chevalier, who opens and closes the film, and is the chorus and rock of worldliness upon which its delights are built, acts the roue par excellence: the legendary Frenchman who is the artist at living, the lover to whom romance is a strategy of pleasure, and unhappiness a luxury only the young can afford...

...Another, interpreting New York City in an impressionistic montage (by Arthur "Wee-gee" Fellig) of optically distorted images, rhythmically inter-playing on the three separate sections of the screen, provides something fresher than a literal, familiar tour of the city—and a welcome intermezzo in the unfolding of the film...

...There is nothing basically wrong, moreover, in tracing the film's travelogue purposes along the story line of a training cruise of the Norwegian schoolship Christian Radich...

...And as such they appear to have been shaken out, until 3-D is again only a potential stunt resting in dormancy, and the enlarged screens, in whatever shapes, are simply commonplace—as commonplace as television, and ultimately only more attractive as they carry images of better quality...

...As Gigi, Leslie Caron is triumphantly wholesome, impish, and so knowingly innocent that sin doesn't really stand a chance...

...If present tendencies continue, there may be evolving an informal structure separating the showcases from the regular theaters...

...But the life of the boys—all speaking English perfectly—on board and on tour, is made impossibly stagey...

...Add these to sequences meaninglessly mimicking famous Cinerama ingredients, as one of downhill sled-rides over cobblestones on Madeira, or the pointless interpolation of musical numbers by Pablo Casals, by Wilbur de Paris and his New Orleans Jazz Band, by a group of calypso artists on Trinidad, and the story line loses any real, credible life...

...One of them practices the piano on board, and finally plays a movement of Grieg's Piano Concerto with the Boston 'Tops" Orchestra under Arthur Fiedler, as if some Judy Garland is waiting in the wings to make the hero's story all come true...

...Like Cinerama, it is something people cannot see anywhere else—and like Cinerama, it rises too rarely above the level of its unifying fabrications...

...From the first, This Is Cinerama, through Cinerama Holiday, Seven Wonders of the World, and Search for Paradise, the emphasis has been upon travelogues for happily misinformative family tourism...

...Written by Lemer for the screen, from Colette's famous novel, and directed by Vincente Minelli, who did the model musical An American in Paris, Gigi is most properly a movie, avoiding those tendencies towards photographing stage numbers so characteristic of film versions of stage musicals...

...Since Cinerama was unveiled in 1952, the drive has been towards theater attractions television cannot hope to match—-with a growing tendency towards promotion and presentation modeled upon the living theater...

...The score and lyrics are delightful, and they are integrated too well into the film to stand apart too far...