by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi film screening (http://sdvsf.org/) consisted of two movies from
the 1950’s in which people are either shrunken or enlarged and have to cope
with the fate of their new sizes: The Incredible Shrinking Man and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. I won’t comment on Attack of the 50-Foot
Woman again since Charles and I had seen it
relatively recently and it’s on the moviemagg blog at http://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/09/attack-of-fifty-foot-woman-woolner.html,
but The Incredible Shrinking Man
— which I hadn’t seen since the 1970’s — is a great film, a deserved classic from
Universal-International. (Charles groaned when he saw the
Universal-International logo, mainly because he associates it with such
infamous Mystery Science Theatre 3000 targets as Tarantula, The Deadly Mantis and the awesomely awful The Leech Woman, but they also made great films with major directors
like Douglas Sirk, Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick and, in the last year they
were still using the “International” suffix, they released To Kill a
Mockingbird.) It was produced by Albert
Zugsmith (whose career after he left Universal-International descended into
horrible schlock, most of it
starring Mamie Van Doren, but while he was at U-I he was responsible for great
movies like Sirk’s Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels
and Welles’ Touch of Evil),
directed by Jack Arnold (who had established himself as a major director in the
sci-fi/horror genre with The
Creature from the Black Lagoon and It
Came from Outer Space, and who’s in superb
form here) and written by Richard Matheson, who got the job of adapting his own
novel published in 1956, just a year before the movie was made. (They moved a
lot faster in those days.)
The plot of The Incredible Shrinking Man is quite simple: Scott Carey (Grant Williams, a
quite good-looking man who delivers a marvelously understated performance in a
role that should have marked him for biggers and betters, but didn’t) is on a
boat trip with his wife Louise (Randy Stuart — a woman named Randy?). He
decides he wants a beer and, like a typical 1950’s movie male chauvinist, sends
her below deck to get it for him — which turns out to be a good thing for her
because, while he’s alone on top of the boat, a strange cloud of mist comes up
off the water’s surface, envelops him and leaves him covered with shiny flakes
that make him look like he’s about to become the world’s first glitter-rocker.
Instead, as we learn later, the mist contains some sort of radioactive energy
that interacts with some powerful insecticide Scott had been exposed to earlier
to cause his entire body to get steadily smaller and smaller. At first he
notices the difference when his clothes are suddenly too loose around his body,
and his family doctor, Arthur Branson (William Schallert, unctuous as usual),
is baffled by how he can be losing so much weight and even getting two inches
shorter. Dr. Branson refers him to the researchers at a local medical
institute, whose head, Dr. Thomas Silver (Raymond Bailey), figures out how he
got smaller but it takes him a while to develop a serum to counteract it, and
even then the serum will only arrest the incredible shrinking process — it
won’t revert him to his normal size. In his three-foot state Scott visits a
local carnival and is cruised by a lady little person, Clarice (April Kent),
even though she’s already married to a fellow little-person carnival performer
(played by the great little-person actor Billy Curtis, who made quite a lot of
movies but very few as good as this one), and he asks how he can be happy in a
world of “giants.” She answers, “I’ve lived with them all my life. Oh, Scott,
for people like you and me the world can be a wonderful place. The sky is as
blue as it is for the giants. The friends are as warm.”
Alas, the serum stops
working and Scott starts shrinking even further, to the point where he’s living
in a doll house in the Careys’ home (though what they were doing with a doll
house when they have no children is something of a mystery) and, in one of the
film’s most famous terror scenes, he’s menaced by the family cat, who was
loving towards him when he was normal-sized but now that he’s the size of a
mouse is treating him as one. (The scene in which the cat’s-paw comes through
the window of the doll house to grab Scott reminded me of the scenes in King
Kong in which the giant ape put his hand
through windows to grab normal-sized people — and I suspect Arnold intended the
allusion.) Later Scott gets even smaller and ends up trapped in the Careys’
basement, having to use such common household items as matches and pins as
weapons against a tarantula who’s going after him; Scott is searching for
whatever crumbs of food he can get (in one great scene he figures out a way to
trigger a mousetrap to get the cheese out of it, but the mousetrap catapults
the cheese down a grating, well out of his reach) while the tarantula is
obviously anxious to make Scott his
dinner. “In my hunt for food I had become the hunted,” Scott explains in one of
the bits of first-person narration that stud the film. “This time I survived,
but I was no longer alone in my universe. I had an enemy, the most terrifying
ever beheld by human eyes.” In Matheson’s original novel the spider that went
after Scott was a black widow, but it was changed for the film, probably so
Universal-International could recycle the stop-motion model of a tarantula they
had built for the 1955 movie Tarantula, in which the humans were normal-sized and the tarantula menacing them
had been artificially enlarged — the scenes with the tarantula appear to be the
only shots in The Incredible Shrinking Man in which stop-motion was used: the earlier scene in which Scott is
attacked by a cat look like they were shot with a real cat, with the images of
the cat and Scott combined by Clifford Stine’s excellent process photography.
(We’ve seen enough bad process
work in films of this vintage — including Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, in which Allison Hayes’ appearance as the title character
shows her with a black ring around her, telltale sign of a poorly matched
process shot — to appreciate really good effects work.)
As Scott shrinks
smaller and smaller, his battle for sheer survival gets more and more
difficult, to the point where by the end he’s almost literally reverted to
prehistoric status — he’s got a full growth of beard (this is not one of those movies in which the character looks
clean-shaven throughout even though he’s supposedly been on a voyage of
thousands of miles of open ocean or had some other arduous fate that would
prevent him from grooming himself normally) and his clothes have shrunk to
something that looks vaguely like a Roman tunic. He’s almost literally
devolved, having to live by his wits and his resourcefulness in a world where
ordinary objects have suddenly turned terrifying and meeting the simple, basic
needs like food has become incredibly arduous — I suspect it wasn’t until The
Hunger Games that a movie was this good
about plunging the central character(s) this far down the evolutionary ladder
this fast and forcing them into thinking about nothing but sheer survival —
until the ending, in which Carey gets a soliloquy aimed at giving the story
power and meaning beyond a sensational horror tale. An imdb.com “trivia” poster
said Jack Arnold added this to the script even though one of the attendees at
our screening brought a copy of Matheson’s book and read the final chapter to
us after the movie — and the two are surprisingly good even though Matheson
made one change that actually strengthened its impact: he had Carey narrate it
in the first person instead of telling the story in third-person as he had in
the novel. Carey tells us that he finally realizes what his experience meant in
the broader scope of cosmic philosophy: “I knew the answer to the riddle of the
infinite. I had thought in terms of man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed
upon nature. That existence begins and ends in man’s conception, not nature’s.
And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away.
And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had
to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the
smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist!” (In
Matheson’s book the last line is, “To nature, there is no zero.” Obviously the change was made to
placate the Jesuits who were still in charge of the Production Code
Administration and the overall social religiosity of the 1950’s, the time in
which our Cold War enemy was defined not merely as “Communism” but “Godless Communism,” the Pledge of Allegiance was defaced
with the words “under God,” and “In God We Trust” was added to our money.)
The
Incredible Shrinking Man is a great movie, hitting on conventional science-fiction and
horror tropes but transcending them, including marvelous touches like having
Scott pledge that he will remain faithful to his wife “as long as that wedding
ring remains on my finger” — whereupon it immediately falls off because his
finger has shrunk to the point where the ring is now too big for it. The
Incredible Shrinking Man was remade in the
1970’s as The Incredible Shrinking Woman, starring Lily Tomlin and directed and written by her partner Jane
Wagner, and it got terrible reviews when it came out but I remember it as quite
good (and I’d love to see the two back-to-back sometime) — in her version what
shrunk her was a toxic fume formed by the cross-reactions of all the chemicals
she used as a housewife to clean her home. There may have been a straight remake since but I haven’t been able to find it, and
neither was anyone else at our screening — there was Honey, I Shrunk
the Kids, a Disney comedy from 1990 or
thereabouts in which Rick Moranis was the star and the film copied the
man-vs.-arthropod battle from this one (though with ants instead of a spider),
but it’s probably just as well no other recent filmmakers have gone near this
premise and come up with a bloated version that would compare to this one about
the way the bloated remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers compared to Don Siegel’s near-perfect 1956 original.
