Scent of Mystery: The Movie that Really Stunk

New York City, 1960. Beneath a glowing theatre marquee, an aspiring young filmmaker rummages for change, desperate to see a new movie he hears may revolutionise the medium. But tickets are expensive, and he’s 40 cents short. He paces by the box office — could he plead with the attendant? Or just beg for the rest? Soon it’s too late: the movie

begins and the young man slumps away, heartbroken to have missed a moment of real cinema history.

The young man’s name was Francis Ford Coppola. He didn’t know it, but the film he couldn’t afford was already one of the dumbest disasters Hollywood had ever seen.

The story began 21 years earlier, when a Swiss entrepreneur named Hans Laube brought his invention to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He called it “Scentovision”: a technology that synchronised on-screen action with in-theatre scents released beneath the seats, creating a movie you could smell. But Hollywood didn’t bite, and Laube waited until 1959, when producer Mike Todd Jr decided to try it out. He rebranded it “Smell-O-Vision” and brought in renowned cinematographer Jack Cardiff (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus) to direct a whodunnit-adventure that would showcase everything the process had to offer.

The film, Scent of Mystery, follows a British novelist and a cab driver who discover a plot to murder a mysterious woman in Spain and try to rescue her from her unknown assassins. 30 smells are incorporated into the story, from atmospheric smells of flowers and the sea, to sensory gags like brandy following a drunkard, to plot devices like pipe tobacco revealing the killer to the audience. Todd dumped $2,000,000 into the project and outfitted three theatres with the full Smell-O-Vision system at a steep $25 per seat. It would be, in his words, “a scent-sation.”

But disaster struck halfway through shooting when Cardiff asked his producer if he’d tried the scents yet. Todd hadn’t, so he asked Laube to ship them samples. According to Cardiff, they all smelled exactly the same — like cheap cologne. Smell-O-Vision was a bust.

Nevertheless, Cardiff finished his movie, and Todd sold it like the New Testament with the ads Coppola still remembers: “First they moved, then they talked, now they SMELL!” He couldn’t call it the first smelling movie, though, since one month earlier, a rival system called AromaRama released Behind the Great Wall, a documentary on China with smells pumped into the air conditioning. Not only did the film steal publicity, it flopped too, dragging the concept’s reputation down with it before Scent of Mystery could reach opening.

It didn’t matter; the opening screenings were a catastrophe. Laube’s system hissed during the film, the smells reached the balconies too late, and some theatregoers couldn’t catch the scents, leading them to “sit there sniffling and snuffling like a lot of bird dogs” in the words of critic Bosley Crowther. He suggested Todd pump in laughing gas instead. They fixed some of the issues after opening, but it was too late. The ship had sunk. Todd tried to save his losses by releasing an edited scentless version as Holiday in Spain, but that flopped too, since there was suddenly no reason why the characters should be smelling everything.

When asked why he didn’t change the Smell-O-Vision name to something more dignified, Todd said there was nothing dignified about introducing smells into movies. To him, it was just another failed gimmick, one he only squeezed one movie out of instead of three or four. But Cardiff, the artist, did take it hard. He spoke tragically about the film, calling it the one film he wanted to erase from his memory. He’d wanted to bring smell into film for years before Scent of Mystery, after a theatre production incorporating incense had a powerful effect on him. Even after the film, he still believed in the idea and that one day it would be done right.

In one episode of Futurama, Smell-O-Vision is a success and has even evolved to nostril tubes. Maybe in that universe, Cardiff has perfected his dream of olfactory cinema. Or maybe Coppola found 40 cents, and we can smell the mix of blood and red wine in The Godfather.

Illustration by Mokshita Nagandla