Smellie on Seventh Avenue

That frenzied race described by Variety, back in October, as The War of the Smellies came to a finish a few weeks ago when Continental Distributing opened Behind the Great Wall in AromaRama at the DeMille Theater in New York, simultaneously getting a month’s running start on Mike Todd Jr.’s Smell-o-Vision and bringing right to Seventh Avenue “the sights, the sounds, yea, the very smells of another world.” (Credit: Chet Huntley’s AromaRama narrative.)

Although both Todd’s Scent of Mystery and Behind the Great Wall as- sertedly smell forty different ways, I counted only twenty-seven of the very smells of another world wafting in and out of the DeMille, and twenty-seven were, let it be clear, quite enough. Somewhat snoof from a cold (snoof, according to the AromaRama people, implies a defective sense of smell and is a word “used in modern times only by John Galsworthy”) the night I saw (?) Behind the Great Wall, I expected to miss some of the fun. Not at all, and I came to pity those members of the audience not protected as I was by a subtle counterattack of Ben-Gay.

JD

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Joan Didion

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That frenzied race described by Variety, back in October, as The War of the Smellies came to a finish a few weeks ago when Continental Distributing opened Behind the Great Wall in AromaRama at the DeMille Theater in New York, simultaneously getting a month’s running start on Mike Todd Jr.’s Smell-o-Vision and bringing right to Seventh Avenue “the sights, the sounds, yea, the very smells of another world.” (Credit: Chet Huntley’s AromaRama narrative.)

Although both Todd’s Scent of Mystery and Behind the Great Wall as- sertedly smell forty different ways, I counted only twenty-seven of the very smells of another world wafting in and out of the DeMille, and twenty-seven were, let it be clear, quite enough. Somewhat snoof from a cold (snoof, according to the AromaRama people, implies a defective sense of smell and is a word “used in modern times only by John Galsworthy”) the night I saw (?) Behind the Great Wall, I expected to miss some of the fun. Not at all, and I came to pity those members of the audience not protected as I was by a subtle counterattack of Ben-Gay.