Objects — and audiences — leaped during 3-D film fad

LOS ANGELES — Robert Stack recalls the audience reaction 50 years ago at the Hollywood premiere of a movie in which he starred: "People jumped up from their chairs and ran screaming out of the theater."

No, it wasn't a comment on Stack's acting. As he explains: "There was a long tracking shot of a train coming around a corner, then coming directly toward the camera. It looked as though it was going to run over everybody in the theater. . . . It scared the hell out of 'em."

Hollywood had entered the third dimension.

The film screening that night in late November 1952 was "Bwana Devil," a no-brain melodrama about rampaging lions preying on railroad builders. It might have been relegated to the lower half of double bills except that it was the first feature film ever shown in 3-D.

Audiences wore polarized glasses that converted double images on-screen into lifelike illusions. Life magazine's famous photo of an enthralled 3-D audience wearing the goofy-looking glasses captured the craze perfectly.

Battered by the loss of half of its audience to television, Hollywood hailed 3-D as a way to lure back paying customers. The movie world would be flat no longer, and it would be giving the public something television couldn't offer.

Studios scrambled to make more than a dozen major 3-D projects after "Bwana Devil," including Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder," a remake of the thriller "House of Wax" and the Cole Porter musical "Kiss Me Kate."

Soon, everything from lions to lingerie looked like they were flying into audiences. Even stars of comedy shorts such as Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Casper the Ghost and the Three Stooges were tossing pies and other assorted objects from the screen.

Actors who starred in those early 3-D films have vivid — perhaps even 3-D — memories of the odd new way of making movies.

Ann Miller, who tapped up a storm in "Kiss Me Kate," remembers that "every time we finished a musical number, we had to do a 3-D version as well. It wasn't easy, but we did it. The 3-D version was different, because we had to throw things toward the camera. When I did the 'Too Darn Hot' number, I threw scarfs and a bracelet, things like that."

Stack, known in recent years for television's "Unsolved Mysteries," recalls filming "Bwana Devil": "There were two cameras fastened to each other, and there was a line 3 or 4 feet in front of them. You couldn't get within a certain distance of them without projecting yourself OVER the audience.