This one has the advantage of its performers' elaborate comic skills and the spectacular quality of the jeweled dragon that does, at least, fill the huge screen.The enactment of the tale of "The Dancing Princess" is an uneven blend of fanciful and naturalistic styles, with Yvette Mimieux and Russ Tamblyn dancing and racing through a conglomeration of adventures in a sometime fairyland, sometime natural world. Most amusing is the rendering of the story of "The Singing Bone," with Terry-Thomas and Buddy Hackett performing as the knight and his faithful servant who go to slay a dragon in a cave. Indeed, it is of such a modest nature - so diminutive, in many ways, and fanciful-that the effort to make it fill the huge panel by the use of much obvious pictorial padding and photographic stunting is perceptibly strained.It is simply a bit of the story of the two brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, who lived in Germany in the late eighteenth century and wrote many familiar fairy tales, three of which (all among their less familiar) are interpolated in highly fanciful enactments in this film.These fairy-tale enactments are attractive and beguiling in a whimsical way, being wrought with much pictorial production and lively acting in bold, bravura style. But the several optical flaws that have been noticeable in the process in the past-the saucer or arch shape of the horizon, according to whether it is being viewed from an orchestra or a balcony seat the inconsistency of the color quality in the different panels, and, especially, the marginal lines at which the separate images blend-are still often noticeable in this picture, so that the process cannot be said to be perfected yet.And the drama or story that is offered in "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm" is certainly not of such a vast or special nature that it justifies or is even helped by the use of the giant screen. THE first all-out utilization of the Cinerama motion picture process to convey a complete dramatic story, not just string together a lot of photographic tricks and travel shots, is made in the king-sized production, "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm," It had its world première last evening at the old Capitol Theatre, now considerably refurbished inside and renamed Loew's Cinerama.As historic as the achievement and the occasion have been made to seem in the advance promotion, it appears, from the critical point of view, that nothing especially new or notable in the way of motion-picture entertainment-or even Cinerama entertainment-has been accomplished here.Although the familiar giant-screen process-the device by which an image composed of three separate but connected images is projected upon a huge arcing panel from three projection machines-has been dubbed Super-Cinerama, it is still the same process that has been used in several previous productions shown at the Warner Theatre here.The total image itself is stupendous, so that it fills and bewitches the eye with a sense of miraculous nearness or panoramic magnitude.
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