What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [77]
Reade’s actions were not those of a man expecting great success; according to Variety, he made only enough prints to show the film in six theaters simultaneously. He produced no ancillary merchandise, and his openings had none of the celebrity buzz that Todd’s did. He didn’t bother to incorporate AromaRama Industries, Inc., until one week before the picture opened. Reade promoted his smell system harder than his movie, printing AROMARAMA in gigantic letters atop the ads, with the movie name below it in letters a quarter the size. (The Smell-O-Vision tagline appeared in smaller letters below the title.)
The largely negative reaction to Great Wall threatened to spoil the upcoming release of Scent of Mystery. Variety noted that AromaRama’s New York ticket sales were good but not great, and that Reade’s people “apparently aren’t expecting any overwhelming jubilation on the part of the trade.” Variety was prepared to dismiss the idea of “smellies” before Smell-O-Vision had even opened. When I asked him about Reade and Weiss’s impact on Smell-O-Vision, Hal Williamson said, “in retrospect they probably did more to harm our cause than the occasional failure of [our] scents to work exactly as they were supposed to. It left a very bad taste with the press after the Reade opening in New York.” Even Reade’s people admit to the problems. Paul Baise says it “was doomed before it even got off the ground, but we went ahead with it anyway and presented it as a piece of new innovation.” AromaRama, he says, “belonged in the laboratories, and not presented to a paying public.”
Todd Junior Fights Back
Scent of Mystery premiered in Chicago on January 12, 1960, with all the hype the formidable Todd PR machine could provide. A chartered plane flew Elizabeth Taylor in from New York, accompanied by members of the press. The producers threw a preshow cocktail party at Fritzl’s, a showbiz watering hole. The film was preceded by The Tale of Old Whiff, a cartoon with fifteen Smell-O-Vision scents and Bert Lahr (of Cowardly Lion fame) as a character voice. At a late dinner following the movie attended by nearly 250 people, the entertainment included Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and Mort Sahl. Cohosting the event with Todd junior was Elizabeth Taylor, recently married to Todd senior’s showbiz buddy Eddie Fisher. At the New York opening on February 18, Taylor’s presence drew a huge crowd of fans and reporters.
The film itself was received warmly, if not enthusiastically. Most critics liked the exotic scenery and action sequences. Variety’s take was typical: “Diverting tale told with nostril-appeal.” The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther was the rare critic who disliked the film itself, from the “whole silly plot” to the acting (“downright atrocious” and “virtually amateur”). As for the smells, Crowther seemed to have trouble getting them; he said they were “the least impressive or even detectable features of the show” every so often, he detected something “faint and fleeting.”
The Smell-O-Vision scents played off the screen action in clever ways. When Peter Lorre’s character drank coffee, the audience smelled the brandy in it. When Denholm Elliott slipped and almost fell in an outdoor market, the audience smelled (but didn’t see) a banana—an aromatic twist on a very old sight gag. Topping it all off, the smoke from Peter Lorre’s pipe holds the key to the plot’s mystery.
Who Won?
Comparing Smell-O-Vision to AromaRama, Hollis Alpert, writing in Saturday Review, was even-handed but unsympathetic, saying that “neither is particularly successful or desirable. Differ