Scent of Mystery


Scent of Mystery is a 1960 mystery film, the first to use the Smell-O-Vision system to release odors at points in the film's plot. It was the first film in which aromas were integral to the story, providing important details to the audience. It was produced by Mike Todd, Jr., who, in conjunction with his father Mike Todd, had produced such spectacles as This Is Cinerama and Around the World in Eighty Days.
The film was released in Cinerama under the title Holiday in Spain without Smell-O-Vision. In 2012, the film was restored, reconstructed, and re-released by David Strohmaier. In 2015, a version complete with reconstructed scents was presented at screenings in Los Angeles, Denmark, and England.
Jack Cariff called it the "one film I want to erase from my memory. The reason for this is that, through no fault of my own, the film was a complete disaster."

Plot

A mystery novelist, played by Denholm Elliott, discovers a plan to murder an American heiress, played by Elizabeth Taylor in an uncredited role, while on vacation in Spain. He enlists the help of a taxi driver, played by Peter Lorre, to travel across the Spanish countryside in order to thwart the crime. Some scenes were designed to highlight the Smell-O-Vision's capabilities. In one, wine casks fall off a wagon and roll down a hill, smashing against a wall, at which point a grape scent was released. Other scenes were accompanied by aromas that revealed key points to the audience. The assassin was identified by the smell of a smoking pipe, for example.

Cast

The screenplay was adapted from the 1947 novel Ghost of a Chance by Kelley Roos, the pen name of husband and wife mystery writers Audrey Kelley and William Roos. The novel was set in locations in New York City and was about a husband and wife investigating a possible murder of a woman whose existence they are unsure of.
Kelley Roos also wrote a 1959 paperback novelization of the screenplay, reset in Spain. The New York Times wrote "unlike almost all other film adaptations, it's a highly entertaining book - so light and bright and gay in its wild adventure in southern Spain that you never care whether it makes much sense or not."

Smell Technology

According to the Los Angeles Times in 1954 Mike Todd was introduced to a process which enabled certain odors to be released into a movie theater during a screening. The inventor of the process was a Swiss, Hans Laube. Laube had demonstrated this at the New York World Fair.
Todd considered incorporating it into Around the World in Eighty Days but decided against it. When Todd died, his son decided to use Laube's process in a film that would incorporate the sense of smell into the actual storytelling process.
For director, he chose Jack Cardiff who was a leading cinematographer - Todd Snr had wanted him to shoot the never-filmed Don Quixote - and who had just made his directorial debut with Sons and Lovers. Cardiff later said "using smells in a film was also an ambition I had had for years. "

Casting

Jack Cardiff says he recommended Peter Sellars to play the lead role and that the actor had a lunch with Todd but Sellars was so nervous he made a poor impression. The lead went tol Denholm Elliot.

Production

It was known in production as The Chase is On.
Elizabeth Taylor, Mike Todd's widow, made a cameo.
Filming started April 1959 in Spain, near Barcelona, and took three months. The film was shot entirely in Spain and involved travelling of 100,000 kilometres. It was shot in color in Todd-AO. Locations included Seville's San Tomo Bridge, El Chorro, Granada, Cordoba, Madrid, Barcelona, Pamploma, the Alhambra and Malaga Cathedral.
Beverly Bentley was a discovery of Todd's from Atlanta.
In May Peter Lorre suffered a heart attack while filming near Grenada. Cardiff says they got around this by employing a double for most of Lorre's scenes.
Cardiff says "Shooting the film was exciting and we were all convinced we had a great movie." Then half way through he asked Todd if he had smelt some of the effects from Laube. Todd admitted he hadn't so Labe sent over some samples from Switzerland. "It's hard to believe but each labelled glass smelled exactly the same as the others- like a very cheap eau de cologne," said Cardiff. "Rhe smells were nothing, they were a fake.
Todd said "we want to make a good picture with laughs, entertainment and thrills - and we hope it will be received with critical approval. Already our film has been referred to as the original smellodrama and the first picture that smells. But no matter what we call the process we are pioneers, and its got to be good or the boys will take full advantage of the connotation. I hope it is the kind of picture they call a scent-sation."

Scents Used in the Film

Scent of Mystery was not the only attempt to combine cinema and smell. The AromaRama system, which released scents through the air conditioning system of a theater, was first used for the travelogue Behind the Great Wall in December 1959.

Release

Scent of Mystery, released in 1960, used a more technologically advanced system, called Smell-O-Vision. It was designed to pipe scents individually to each seat in the theater. Costs of the system were high. It took an estimated $25 to $30 per seat to install and use Smell-O-Vision at a time when a movie ticket cost less than $1.
Ads for the film proclaimed: "First they moved ! Then they talked ! Now they smell!" Producer Mike Todd, who was a bit of a showman, engaged in such hyperbole as "I hope it's the kind of picture they call a scentsation!" He also got help from newspaper columnists such as Earl Wilson, who lauded the system, saying Smell-O-Vision "can produce anything from skunk to perfume, and remove it instantly." The New York Times writer Richard Nason believed it was a major advance in film-making. As such, expectations for the film were great.

Previews

The film opened in three specially equipped theaters in February 1960, in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Unfortunately, the mechanism did not work well. According to Variety, aromas were released with a distracting hissing noise and audience members in the balcony complained that the scents reached them several seconds after the action was shown on the screen. In other parts of the theater, the odors were too faint, causing audience members to sniff loudly in an attempt to catch the scent.
Cariff recalled the screening in Chicago worked well. "Exactly on cue you'd get the whiff of the smell coming up from the seat in front of you, so you'd smell it," adding that the "ress and everybody, they all said the same thing: there is no particular smell about anything. It was all a kind of cheap eau de cologne. This was a disaster. And then later on we ran it in New York, and that was the end of that because it had terrible notices because it was not a genuine Smell-O-Vision at all. It was a very interesting story with a marvellous photographic background of Spain, but the smell, for which it was made, didn't exist."
Laube's daughter later claimed the technology used at these screenings were different from what his father envisioned. She wrote "The producers realized they could save a fortune if they air-conditioned the scents in rather than install the elegant, costly little units in front of each theatre seat. Hans's concept was, install the scent emitters in front of a certain number of seats. Send the scent; send some neutralizer. Personalized. Tidy and elegant. So very late in the game, one of the producers decided they could make much more $ by using the air conditioner to waft in the scents. And, screw the neutralizer. So the film became known as Mike Todd Jr's only Stinker."
Technical adjustments by the manufacturers of Smell-O-Vision solved these problems, but by then it was too late. Negative reviews, in conjunction with [word of mouth, caused the film to fail miserably with theatrical rentals of only $300,000 in the United States and Canada. Comedian Henny Youngman quipped, "I didn't understand the picture. I had a cold."
Todd later said his press agent Bill Doll "had an idea that would have saved the damned thing if we' d thought of it before the film opened. And that was to reverse the pump. It sucked air back, so that there was no overhang on the previous smell. Otherwise it just sort of drifted in between smells. It wasn't over powering, but just enough not to make the clearest delineation. Bill got this idea after the third opening. It was used, and it worked perfectly, but by that time the ship had sailed."

Critical

Variety said the film "has many elements that are derivative of a Hitchcock chase film, the late Mike Todd's "Around the World in Eighty Days", and the Cinerama travelogue technique... The travelog is neatly integrated as part of the chase."
The New York Times said:
As theatrical exhibitionism, it is gaudy, sprawling and full of sound. But as an attempt at a considerable motion picture it has to be classified as bunk... It is an artless, loose-jointed "chase" picture... Whatever novel stimulation it might afford with the projection of smells appears to be dubious and dependent upon the noses of the individual viewers and the smell-projector's whims... Indistinct is the right word for the whole silly plot of the film and the casual, confused performance of it, which is virtually amateur. Except for the job of Peter Lorre... the acting is downright atrocious.

The Los Angeles Times called it "good family entertainment and while it is doubtful whether the smellies are here to stay you'll find this one worth a look... and smell."

Box Office

The film made only $300,000 in North America. The producer later said he felt the idea "was just a novelty gimmick. Maybe, if it was a gigantic hit, you might make a second film, and at the most, a third, but that would have been it."
Todd did not produce another film until 1979's The Bell Jar, which was also his last film.

''Holiday in Spain'' Release

The film was eventually retitled as Holiday in Spain and re-released, sans odors. Its primary release was by Cinerama which needed new product for their specially equipped theatres. For the Cinerama release the film was converted into three-strip prints that could be exhibited on the very wide, deeply curved screens in those theatres. Having been converted from Smell-O-Vision, however, as The Daily Telegraph described it, "the film acquired a baffling, almost surreal quality, since there was no reason why, for example, a loaf of bread should be lifted from the oven and thrust into the camera for what seemed to be an unconscionably long time."
Scent of Mystery was aired once on television by MTV and syndicated on local TV stations in the 1980s. A convenience store promotion, similar to that for the movie Polyester, offered scratch and sniff cards that viewers were to use to recreate the theater experience.

Restoration

In 2012, Holiday in Spain was completely restored and digitally reconstructed by film editor and Cinerama restoration specialist David Strohmaier. Only portions of the original camera negative remained in usable condition, so the remaining parts of the film were reconstructed from two archival 70mm Eastmancolor prints. Not enough of the deleted footage from the original Scent of Mystery was recovered to be able to restore that version as well. The newly restored film was released on Blu-ray in 2014 by Screen Archives.
In 2015, Australian film producer Tammy Burnstock and artist and scent creator Saskia Wilson-Brown revived the Smell-O-Vision experience, presenting David Strohmaier's restored film at screenings in Los Angeles, Denmark, and England. The only information about the scents used in the original production was a list with entries such as "happy odor of baking bread" and "the faint smell of a yellow rose". Without any perfumer's or chemist's specifications, Wilson-Brown had to recreate the smells for the film from scratch, by blending possible aroma ingredients.

Soundtrack

The Scent of Mystery soundtrack was released on CD in 2011 on the Kritzerland label. It features a score composed by Mario Nascimbene and two songs from the film sung by Eddie Fisher.