The Fly (1958)

 

The Fly

(1958)

 

 

Though Supernatural thrillers didn’t disappear, 1950s Horror-cinema seemed dominated with SF themes. This was a reversal, almost all SF except children’s serials had disappeared after 1936 and didn’t re-emerge until 1950. But in the post-WWII era there was a monster-craze that reflected the increasing anxieties of the seemingly all-powerful magic of emerging Science, most importantly the Atom Bomb, but also Space Exploration and a million other transformative and seemingly incomprehensible things.

 

The decade was defined by the work of Director Jack Arnold, who redeemed Universal Studios and brought the genre in new territory, but there was also a longing for lost glories, the Golden Age of Universal Monsters from 1923s and 1941, which were the movies that the filmmakers of the 1950s grew up with. As it happens, Arnold, working at Universal, created one of the decade’s great examples of trying to move the genre forward while simultaneously trying to recapture the past with, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954).

 

“The Fly” is another such project, this was coming from 20^th Century Fox, which had helped spur the craze with the landmark SF film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) but after that great success was surprisingly inattentive to both SF and Horror.

 

This film was based on a highly regarded Short Story by George Langelaan; its huge popularity was surprising, giving the tale’s pretty retro-feel, but somehow it hit the perfect mixture of old Horror (so comfortably familiar) and new (but still Horrific) and the film showed the tale’s accomplishment in its due respect with a pretty faithful adaptation (except for the less downbeat ending).

 

Though the story is pure Mad Scientist stuff, this Scientist isn’t crazy, just irresponsible when his ambitions got the better of him; this makes him somewhat more akin to Victor Frankenstein from the original novel by Mary Shelly (published 1818) than almost any of representations of that character in the almost two centuries of film and TV adaptations that have followed. But this story goes father down that road, making the Scientist, André Delambre (David Hedison) a loving family man, both more appealing and normal seeming than the novel’s Victor, who had isolated himself from friends and family because of his obsession. In the film, André realizes far faster than the novel’s Victor how terrible the consequences of his actions will be, and so familiar themes of “These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know” take on an unusual poignancy.

 

Critic Christopher Stewardson convincingly makes the case the André’s characterization owes more to Robert J. Oppenheimer than Victor Frankenstein and by the time this film was made, it was already public knowledge that Oppenheimer was questioning the morality of his work on the Atomic Bomb, and was facing Investigation and Persecution because of his moral qualms --  by 1953 Oppenheimer was stripped of his Security Clearance on dubious grounds which it was later revealed was largely because of the back-stabbing he received from his friends and colleagues Haakon Chevalier and Edmund Teller. (Sidebar: Teller thought it was a good idea to use Nuclear Weapons in Alaska to build more maritime harbors faster.)

 

The opening scene of “The Fly” is the aftermath of a gruesome murder, and across its one-and-a-half-hour running time, there are two more terrific shock scenes, but otherwise the story-telling is remarkably restrained, so the telling shares more with a serious-minded SF film like the above mentioned, “The Day the…” than the more typical Drive-in fare of its day, for example: Hammer’s lurid “The Revenge of Frankenstein,” released the same year as “The Fly,” and more explicitly tried to evoke Universal’s Golden Age.

 

As it happens, Fox considered making this film cheaply, for the Drive-in movie crowd, but then committed themselves to making it a major project. Even after choosing to invest more than one would expect, they still turned to those familiar with this kinda subject. Fox had a subsidiary, Regal Films, which made their B-movies, including the ambitious SF film “Kronos” (1957) and the more conventional Monster movie “She Devil” (1957); both tales, like this one, were of good science gone bad, and both directed by Kurt Neumann who was far better known for Comedies and Tarzan films, so guess who got the job here?

 

Neumann’s hiring for the project was due to uncredited Producer Robert L. Lippert of Regal Films who also was responsible for the casting. Different sources cite different figures for “The Fly’s” budget, but the lowest I’ve seen, $325,000, which was still twice that of the more FX heavy “Kronos,” and moreover “The Fly” was shot in Cinemascope and Technicolor instead of B&W.

 

What probably attracted the filmmakers to the short story was its structure (which the film retained) echoed the best works of Edgar Allen Poe better than any other work of its era that I can think of, including increasingly popular Poe adaptations. It’s a Murder Mystery, but not a Whodunnit, but a Whydunnit. This was the first script of James Clavell’s that was ever produced (soon he would become far more famous as a Novelist than a Screenwriter), and it’s very good, deftly paced, economical and with sharp dialogue for the cast to work with. Even before the first half-hour had passed we understand where the tale is going, but that’s not a detriment, but a draw, we’re now deeply immersed in the flash-back so we know its tragic end, and our foreknowledge creates its own kind of suspense.

 

The film opens with Hélène Delambre (Patricia Owens), exquisitely dressed, being discovered where she should not be, in a factory in the middle of the night. Moreover, she’s doing what she should not be doing, crushing her husband André to death with a hydraulic press. She flees the scene, but she’s not exactly fleeing justice. She calls her brother-in-law, François (Vincent Price), to confess her crime and asks him to call the Police. Confused François then calls family friend, Police Inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall), these two first confirm the killing and then proceed to André and Hélène’s home.

 

Hélène greets François and Charas with bizarre cheer and calm. She again confesses to the crime but refuses to explain why she murdered a man that all know she adored. She keeps getting close to a revelation, then backing off. Charas suspects, or perhaps hopes, she’s insane. Because of the family’s stature and connections, she’s not immediately arrested but put under surveillance by both Police and Medical professionals. Arrest and imprisonment was inevitable though, and François, appalled by the looming scandal, worried about the children, and more than a little in love with Hélène, tries to plum the mystery in vain hope that the unknown “why” will mitigate the terrible “what” that has happened.

 

Ownes is wonderful as Hélène which was a complex and challenging part in the opening scenes. Knowing she can’t hide her guilt, she’s surmised her only hope is to pretend to be insane, but she’s also an actual trauma victim, so legitimately, emotionally, unstable. Ownes is sensitive to the script’s ques, sliding from a woman hiding behind a strange façade to a more desperate woman whose façade is slipping, with conviction.

 

Price, and actor with a great love of broad theatricality is required to constrain himself, which was never his forte. He’s good, but pales in comparison to the other leads. His François plays more of the Detective role than Policeman Charas, and following very odd clues regarding Hélène’s obsession with a white-headed fly, then deftly lies to her to trick her into telling him the real story. After that, most of the rest of the movie emerges in flashback.

 

Color cinema was common enough going back to the late ‘30s, but it was expensive and problematic in cases that demanded low-light settings and the deep shadows (essential for Crime and Horror films), so for both budgetary and artistic reasons B&W was a reasonable choice in commercial cinema until the mid-‘60s (color film became the default in cinema long before the technical issues of low-light filming were overcome). In this case, the choice of filming in color was not only the studios statement of faith in the project, but an aesthetic principal as well, because much of the film is set in a colorful, sunlit world, and when the material grows darker, it is not reliant on shadows, it moves into interior spaces, where instead of darkness we get harsh, industrial, blues and grays. The contrast in not between light and dark, but between loving family life and cruel scientism.

 

The film goes back and forth between André with his family and his lab. He loves to show Hélène, but no one else, his latest work; this sets up a line that is funnier today than when the film was first made. François pokes fun at Andre’s newest and greatest invention to Hélène saying, “Well, what is it? A flat screen?” Because of these confidences, after things go horribly wrong, Hélène becomes the bridge between these two worlds.

 

Andre’s latest breakthrough is truly astounding, nothing short of a teleportation machine like those we SF fans got so familiar with because of TV series “Star Trek” (first aired in 1966), and though the film’s Science will get progressively more dubious, it must be admitted that the introduction of the bold concept was a much better grounded here that we ever saw in the TV series.

 

There’s a great scene when André is demonstrating his machine to Hélène: he teleports an ashtray across the room. Hélène is amused to see the reconstituted ashtray is a bit altered, “MADE IN JAPAN” is now spelled backwards. This is a sinister foreshadowing of what will happen later, most important is Andre’s reaction -- he instantaneously withdraws from his wife, goes to his desk, and digs through his papers to find his error. Up to this moment he seemed the perfect husband, but now we see that obsession knaws at him and his starting to walk down a bad road.

 

The film is filled with understated symbolism, like the appearance of stray cats in the opening scenes, they foreshadow events later in the film (but because of flashback-structure, events that have already unfolded) where Andre crossed an unforgivable line, so the stray cats represent divine retribution on the Scientist assuming the power of God.

 

What was Andre’s sin? Feeling he’s worked out the kinks in his machine, he impulsively tries to teleport the family’s beautiful pet cat. The animal doesn’t appear on the other side of the room though, its atoms lost in time and space, its ghostly and plaintive meows echoing in the basement lab. Because Andre doesn’t stop then and there, I guess he deserves everything he gets.

 

More time passes, and after success with a guinea pig, Andre enters the teleporter himself. When he does, he fails to notice a fly had crawled into the chamber with him.

 

David Hedison (billed here as Al Hedison) was an unknown when he was cast in this very juicy role. This was an incredibly lucky break for him, and largely because so many others turned the part down (examples: Michael Rennie, star of Fox’s biggest SF hit “The Day the…,” and Rick Jason who at the time was an actor of increasing prominence having notable roles in productions by all three major studios). The other actors’ aversion to the role was that as soon as Andre made his fatal mistake, he was rendered voiceless, his whole head obscured for the rest of the film, and with little use of one arm, which was, to say the least, inhibiting on a performance. Worse, André doesn’t become a character in the tale until nearly the half-hour mark, and is cripplingly deformed barely after the forty-five-minute mark. Hedison takes on these challenges effectively, after his transformation he doesn’t overplay his gestures, but seems somewhat lethargic except when overcome by frustrated rage, and later, feels the creeping subversion of non-human instincts. In later interviews, Hedison made a point on how difficult communication of craft was under these circumstances.

 

We are not immediately told, but can easily guess, the consequences of his experiment-gone-bad. Regarding this, as in so many other things, the film loves dragging out the inevitable to heighten tension. After André had shut himself in his lab, Hélène demands to be let in, and finds him scurrying around, head covered with a black cloth, able to communicate with her only by typewriter or scrawls on a black board:

 

"Plees help—find fly—LOVE YOU."

 

Andre needs find to fly that went through the machine with him to reverse the experiment and maybe save himself. We already know that the search failed, and this makes Hélène’s efforts, for which she recruited her son and housekeeper, all the more excruciating.

 

The first great shock scene when the cloth over Andre’s head falls away revealing what he had become, he’s now a human with a fly’s head (and one arm). It evokes the unmasking of the Phantom from “The Phantom of the Opera” (1923, the first of Universal’s classic Monsters). The mask, even bulkier than that from “The Creature from…” was the creation of Ben Nye who would go on to make the test-makeups for “Planet of the Apes” (1968), though ultimately the bulk of the credit for that film would go to John Chambers.

 

When the monstrous head is revealed, Owens renders a quite convincing scream of terror (Owens was deeply afraid of insects and Neumann exploited this, never letting her see the grotesque mask until that moment).

There’s also a famous cut to the Monster’s POV where Hélène’s scream is shown in kaleidoscopic-multiplications. It’s very effective, and much mimicked effect (example: “Empire of the Ants” (1977)) but also the easiest to explain of the film’s numerous Scientific fallacies -- Flies don’t see the world that way, and if they did, they’d be unable to negotiate their environment or feed, in other words, they’d go extinct. A better cinematic simile of a fly’s POV was the view through the Android’s eyes in the original “Westworld” (1973).

 

That great effect, absurd but flawless in context, was dreamed up by Cinematographer Karl Struss, who’d been a cameraman for the great F. W. Murnau, Alfred Hitchcock’s mentor and the great proselytizer of the “unchained camera.” Here, the camera proves remarkably static for a film of its era, and more remarkable still, that’s not a bad thing; it’s an odd, but effective, choice, playing into the over-all restrained telling of this shocking piece of Pulp-fiction

 

After the search for the white-headed fly proves in vain, and Andre, feeling his humanity erode, demands that Hélène assist in his suicide. This is where the flashback ends, and it leaves François with nothing he can present to Charas to save Hélène from humiliating prosecution and a long imprisonment.

 

All tales of the Uncanny walk a razor’s edge between the sublime and ridiculous, this one more than most. The whole length of this film sets up the film’s second terrific shock scene. The discovery of the white-headed fly, and well-remembered line, “Help me! Help me!” is one of those odd and memorable moments in cinema that chill you to the bone in context, it was rightfully called by “Dave” of the 2,500 Movie Challenge, “one of the best endings in horror movie history,” yet it begs to be mocked when the lights of the theatre come up and you leave that hypnotic chamber and re-enter the Real World. (Apparently, even during production, this shock scene, out-of-context, was hard to execute with due seriousness. In later interviews, Price stated it required several takes because he and Marshall kept cracking up.)

 

Though mercilessly parodied in the decades since, “The Fly” was one of Fox's biggest hits of the time. It is regarded as Director Kurt Neumann's best film but he never got to enjoy the acclaim, he died of a heart attack (this is sometimes reported and a suicide, that is incorrect) just after the film’s premiere and before he learned what a success it proved to be.

 

Though now justly viewed as a classic, reviews of this film were initially, and would continue to be, mixed. Especially notable was prominent critic Ivan Butler denouncement "the most ludicrous, and certainly one of the most revolting science-horror films ever perpetrated." Amusingly, he wrote that in 1967, and the next year, “Night of the Living Dead” came out -- this was one boy who totally wasn’t ready for what was coming.

 

The success demanded a franchise, but the ideas worth following up (what happens next with the teleporter) encouraged the continuing story that would distance itself from the original (if the machine works, there will be no “Fly” and maybe even no Horror). The films went the lazy route in terms of story, and the cheap, switching to B&W film. “Return of the Fly” (1959) was a rehash more than a legitimate sequel and a complete waste of celluloid.

 

The third (and financially unsuccessful) entry was shabby, but of some interest. “Curse of the Fly” (1965) gives us an entire family gone mad with the obsession of perfecting the World-changing technology. They do get it to work (jaunting back and forth between Canada and England), just not all the time (in a wonderful Gothic touch, the victims of the failed experiments are kept in garden outhouses). As their promising project degenerates into savagely diminishing returns, an emotionally disturbed woman enters into the already more-than-half-deranged family and this, inadvertently, draws public scrutiny. Finally, there’s a desperate need for the assorted Mad Scientists to escape – at that critical juncture, everything goes wrong. It’s was obviously cheaper than the previous sequel, but more ambitious and visually arresting.

 

Then came the remake by David Cronenberg (1986). It is superior to the original, and it is especially worth noting why: Cronenberg’s version was full of shock effects and gore, but also recognized what made the original distinct, namely strong characterization and fine performances, so Cronenberg gave us even better characterization and performances. Cronenberg’s rare gift was always his fusion of grotesque visuals and deep analysis of the human condition; though he is clearly a master of the latter, his analysis often comes off as coldly forensic but, as it happens, his version of “The Fly” is clearly his warmest and romantic film (or at least it is until all hell breaks loose).

 

Cronenberg’s “The Fly” has his Mad Scientist slowly transform into a monster, not the instantaneous head switch of the original. In the context of our evolving understanding of these Fantastic genres, this feels much more logical than the first version but I defy anyone to make the case that what “feels more logical” is in fact more Scientifically accurate than the increasingly maligned conceits of the first film.

 

Cronenberg's “The Fly” spawned its own sequel, “The Fly II” (1989), which was Directed by Chris Walas who was in charge of the FX make-up on the Cronenberg film. This movie is much better than its reputation. Unlike “Return of the…” it is not a rehashed remake, but a legitimate sequel, taking the first film’s ideas into new narrative lines and full of its own ideas. Moreover, it showed a devotion to strong characterization and was blessed by a (mostly) gifted cast. Though not a financial failure, that branch of the franchise ended there. I suspect the reason was that the ideas were ambitious, requiring an ambitious follow-up, and the sequel-verse is generally one of less money expended with each progressive installment.

 

Eventually (2002) there was a comic book sequel (which I haven’t read), and the themes of the series became World-wide and apocalyptic.

 

There was also an opera (2008) based on Cronenberg's remake. I have no idea, but I admit I am dubious.

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjuocw-_NlY