The Smellies

"Going to the Feelies this evening, Henry? I hear the new one at the Alhambra is first-rate. There's a love scene on a bearskin rug; they say it's marvelous."

The feelies--movies in which audiences could not only hear and see, but feel the clinches--were a major diversion in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the Utopian state where people were not born but mass-produced in retorts and female yearnings for motherhood were assuaged by a quick shot of "pregnancy substitute." The only utopia currently available for study is not up to feelies yet, but it is ready to report progress. Last week, Russian Movie Director Grigory Alexandrov announced that the Soviet film industry was on the verge of producing smellies. Said he: "We want to look through the screen as through a window. We want to hear, to see, but also to smell the breeze of the sea, the perfume of flowers and of green pastures."*

*The West has also dabbled in smellies, but seems to have outgrown them before they ever had a chance. Scented motion pictures were tried at the Swiss Pavilion of the New York World's Fair, one film aired 37 different smells in 35 minutes. One of the technicians responsible, a Swiss named Hans Laube, stayed on in the U.S., but in 1946 disgustedly left for Europe since, he said, there were no takers for the smellies in America.

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