DOES 3-D represent the future of the movies?

After a few months of ambiguous box-office results for stereoscopic movies, that’s a question Hollywood executives would love answered in the affirmative, because of the higher ticket prices they can charge. We won’t really know the answer for a year or so, when audiences respond — or fail to respond — to the big-budget 3-D films now entering the production pipeline, all chasing the phenomenal figures generated by “Avatar.” But 3-D is definitely part of the cinema’s past — never as gloriously and gaudily as in the approximately 45 stereographic features released by the American film industry between 1952 and 1955.

Fifteen of those vintage films, filled with flaming arrows, pointy surgical instruments, guys in gorilla suits and high-kicking chorines all hurtling from the screen and into your face, will be featured over the next two weeks in Classic 3-D, a series at Film Forum in the South Village.

For 3-D aficionados (and they are a dedicated bunch) that was the period known as the Golden Age. This is not as much for the blindingly high quality of the films themselves — as lovable as they are, “Cat-Women of the Moon” and “Gorilla at Large” are not “Citizen Kane” — as for the 3-D system then in use.

Generically known as “double system” — because it requires the use of two 35-millimeter projectors, running side by side in perfect synchronization — ’50s 3-D at its best produced an illusion of depth of such brightness and clarity that it puts many modern single-projector systems to shame.