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Disney's final contribution to the fair is a modest attempt to revive Abraham Lincoln by rebuilding him out of steel, aluminum, gold, brass, soft epidermal plastic, air tubes, fluid tubes, pneumatic and hydraulic valves. Abe works a twelve-hour day at the Illinois pavilion. He does a show every twelve minutes, speaking without notes and repeating bits of six of his earlier speeches, reminding his countrymen that "right makes might."
With a Nudge. The World's Fair is so resplendently miscellaneous that it defies a blue ribbon for any one pavilion, exhibit or show. Nonetheless, there is nothing better on the grounds than a movie called To Be Alive!, presented by Johnson's Wax. It lasts 17½ minutes, has nothing to do with wax and does not even mention the company.
Its technique alone is of great interest. It uses three projectors, like Cinerama, but it resolves the problem of Cinerama with a simple touch of invention: the screens are set a foot apart. The mind fills the gaps without noticing them. Moreover, the separate screens enable the film makers—Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid —to use them in multiple combinations, now showing three aspects of one scene, now three separate scenes, now a three-dimensional, three-screen headlong ride down a plunging highway that kneads the stomach far more than the rollercoaster ride in the first Cinerama.
Beyond technique, however, Thompson and Hammid have made a film of surpassing excellence about the universalities of human experience. When it begins, it is speeded up like an old Charlie Chaplin picture, showing New York masses rushing to work. On the corner of 42nd and Fifth Avenue, buses and cars go by like military projectiles, and hundreds of people zip across the screen like clouds of buckshot. Then-ping—the whole wide scene suddenly contains nothing but a drop of water in a pool. The movie starts life over again. A little Chinese boy studies a land turtle he has found in a field. A little boy in New York stares through a prism with which he can change the very face of the city. A little boy in the jungle learns the rhythm of a drum. A narrator speaks in the first person, describing his life from childhood to manhood, while the images on the screen shift constantly from the familiar to the distant, from face to face, from suburb to desert, from young Africans flirting in canoes to young Italians at a wedding feast in the hills of Assisi. The film is funny, informative, poetic, moving, ingenious, instructive, entertaining and beautifully photographed.
Film Fair. After that one, the most discussed picture is Parable, presented at the Protestant and Orthodox Center. Its central figure is a whitefaced clown. The circus is operated by Magnus the Great—a kind of Barnum and Belial character who sits in his tent and manipulates human marionettes strung on ropes high in the air. The whitefaced clown releases the ropes that hold the marionettes and frees them from bond age, replacing them himself. Stabbed by the agents of the malevolent Magnus, he is lofted on high, bleeding and suffering. He lets out a cry of agony and dies.