BEFORE STEVEN SPIEL-berg and George Lucas, before ''The Wizard of Oz,'' before all other animated cartoon features, there was Walt Disney's ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.''
The return of this 50-year-old film to New York on Friday (at the Guild 50th Theater) for the premiere engagement of its seventh and ''Golden Anniversary'' reissue prompts a consideration of the revolutionary effect that ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' had in its first release - on the film industry, on the moviegoing public all over the world and on some of the greatest artists of the 20th century - an effect that has been largely forgotten as the film has gradually been taken for granted as that most respectable of commodities, a classic.
In 1934, when Disney announced his intention of making the first feature-length animated cartoon - perhaps costing as much as $250,000 - his sincerest well-wishers told him he was crazy. In the first place, there was a Hollywood truism that fantasies were failures at the box office. In the second place, the public wouldn't sit through so long a cartoon. In the third place, an adult audience wouldn't even go to see a fairy tale. And in the fourth place, the juvenile audience wasn't large enough to pay for the cost of production.
Disney, who always said that self-confidence was the most important element of success, listened politely and made the feature anyway - at a final cost of $1.5 million in mostly borrowed dollars. ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' had its premiere in Hollywood on Dec. 21, 1937, and promptly grossed $8 million in its first release - at that time, the most money a film had ever made. It played in 41 countries and soon had soundtracks in 10 different languages.
On Friday, it will open simultaneously in 60 countries around the globe, including the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. There is no place where it is not already known and loved. By now, it has grossed about $330 million worldwide - so it remains one of the most popular films ever made. People from Brooklyn to Bangkok can still recite the names of the seven dwarfs in the Disney version (they didn't have names in the original fairy tale as written down in the last century by the Brothers Grimm).
Seven years after the premiere, in an article for Film Review in Britain, Michael Powell, having just written and directed the but still three years away from ''The Red Shoes,'' called Disney ''one of the three persons necessary to the evolution of film making - Griffith, the master showman; Chaplin, the lonely genius; Disney, the experimenter and planner; the director of the future will partake of all of them; without them he could not exist, whether he ever heard of them or not . . .''
Mr. Powell tried to sum up what Disney had done with ''Snow White'': ''At one stride, with this feature-length cartoon in color, for making which he had been ridiculed, Disney became one of the world's greatest film producers. Few of them realized it; few of them realize it now, seven years later, such is the momentum of film production. Yet, in 'Snow White,' Disney abolished naturalism, established stylistic settings and backgrounds (echoed recently in Laurence Olivier's 'Henry V'), controlled his design of color and sound (a feat not yet in the power of any other producer) and held audiences enraptured all over the world . . .''
Unlike some films, whose greatness is recognized only in retrospect, the brilliance of ''Snow White'' was appreciated at once by some of the greatest of film makers. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Eisenstein, who was directing ''Alexander Nevsky'' when he saw ''Snow White,'' wrote: ''Although as yet there are all too few examples of the true cinematography of sound-and-sight consonance (only a few scenes, for instance in Disney's wonderful 'Snow White' or individual scenes from 'Alexander Nevsky,' such as the 'Attack of the Knights'), advanced cinema directors are engrossed in the problem of spectacle synthesis, experimenting in this field and accumulating a certain amount of experience.''
After the Hollywood premiere of ''Snow White,'' Charlie Chaplin, who was present, told The Los Angeles Times that the film ''even surpassed our high expectations. In Dwarf Dopey, Disney has created one of the greatest comedians of all time.''
''Snow White'' had its New York premiere at Radio City Music Hall on Jan. 13, 1938, three weeks after its Los Angeles sensation. ''It is a classic,'' wrote Frank S. Nugent, the film critic of The New York Times, ''as important cinematically as 'The Birth of a Nation' or the birth of Mickey Mouse.'' The next-to-last line of his review is still frequently quoted: ''If you miss it, you'll be missing the 10 best pictures of 1938.''
Such comments were echoed by both critics and the public around the world. ''Snow White'' ran for an unprecedented five weeks at Radio City Music Hall, then was pulled by Disney lest it take business away from New York's suburban theaters. As ''Blanche Neige et les Sept Nains,'' it ran an astounding 31 weeks in Paris; as ''Schneewittchen und die Sieben Dwerge'' it was a smash hit in Hitler's Germany; Italians spoke of ''L'esplosivo successo di 'Biancaneve e i sette nani' . . .''
