The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
The Incredible Shrinking
Man (1957)
“Kaijū” is
the nickname for a Giant Monster Movie, and this film is Kaijū in reverse, or
at least a reminder that “Giant” is only comparative: If you’re small enough
yourself, a house-cat or spider is Kaijū. Looking at this film that way, this
is the only Kaijū film ever to explore Gender Politics, Shifting Economic Status,
Social Exclusion, and the challenges faced by people with Physical Disabilities.
It opens with Robert
Scott Carey, mostly called "Scott" (Grant Williams) vacationing on a pleasure boat with his
wife Louise (Randy Stuart). Scott jokingly
calls Louise “Wench” and she laughingly calls him “Captain.” These trivialities
will have more significance later.
The
scene is essentially prosaic, but made sinister to the audience in ways the
Characters are unaware of through musical ques. The score is evocative was strangely
uncredited; apparently had at least four Composers working on different
sections the most important being veterans SF/Horror film Composers Hans J. Salter and Herman Stein, and it’s
(mostly) unusually low-key for the Genre likely because of the insightful Music
Supervision of Harris Ashburn. The reliance on dialogue/narration deceases
radically in the film’s last half-hour and then music then really takes over.
It is not until months
later that same incident that the Uncanny emerges, at first with a small,
mundane thing: Scott’s pants legs are suddenly too long.
We’re soon told the cloud was Radioactive but it hasn’t, Real-World Fallout
would’ve, poisoned him; somehow it combined with an insecticide used in a suburban
setting (this is when DDT was considered wholly safe, which it wasn’t really,
so the film accidently anticipated the revelations of Racheal Carson’s book “Silent
Spring” (1962)) created something akin to the transformative Magic of a
Philosopher’s Stone. Instead of Transmuting lead into gold it is making Scott inexplicably
shrink and proportionally lose weight.
Interestingly,
given the film’s Masterpiece status, the Science herein is (quietly)
non-sensical. The film casually violates Antoine Lavoisier's Law of Conservation of Mass. Because the shrinking
didn’t appear to leave a trail of shredded body-mass behind it, the only reasonable
possibility is that body-mass is being compressed, but that isn’t happening
either. The script doesn’t bother to address this, which is all for the better,
because it is important to the dramatic power of this film that Scott isn’t
just getting shorter, he’s diminishing. This is a wholly Irrational tale but
told with such perfect Rationality, making it perhaps the most prefect
representation of the Domestication of Surrealism in USA cinema history.
This was
the first produced screenplay by Richard Matheson, based on his then-unpublished
novel, “The Shrinking Man” (1956, the novel saw its publication because of the
film’s production). Matheson was a leading figure in SF,F&H prose starting
in the ‘50s and continuing into the 21st c. He was a leading figure
in redeeming of SF and Horror cinema following their WWII slumps and also bring
them to the new medium of TV with rare maturity and dynamism. Novelist Stephen King wrote of Matheson, “He was
the first guy I ever read who seemed to be doing something that Lovecraft
wasn’t doing … the horror could be in the Seven-Eleven store down the block . .
. that was a revelation that was extremely exciting. He was putting the
horror in places that I could relate to.”
The movie Directed
by Jack Arnold, whose long and diverse career (86 Directorial credits over nearly
forty- years) has been mostly defined by a mere handful SF/Horror film for Universal
Studios in the ‘50s. Arnold can be credited for the revival of their Horror
films, the legendary Universal Monsters, which once had once been a dominant
Genre force but had slipped into juvenilia after 1941. His first SF/Horror film
for Universal was “It Came from Outer Space” (1953) and it set the style and
tone for most of the rest of ‘50s SF cinema.
Scott
eventually goes to the Doctor (William Schallert) who is, at first, dismissive of unfamiliar
phenomena, but concerns heighten and Scott continues to grow shorter. When the
Uncanny becomes undeniable, Experts have less to say than many ‘50s SF because
they don’t know what to say. Because it can’t be properly Defined, it can’t be Cured.
Throughout the film Arnold’s
camera (Cinematography by Ellis
W. Carter)
shows great sensitivity to Scott’s perspective even though POV shots though
Scott’s eyes are mostly avoided. Instead, we get into Scott’s shoes because the
film shows him in relationship to spaces around him growing larger and larger.
Camera tricks and Rear-Projection abound, but Chroma-key and split screen were
mostly avoided and those processes were unreliable in that era, risking either bad
product or expensive reshoots. This is, with a few exceptions, a Practical FX
film, and those few exceptions did trigger some expensive reshoots.
By the time Scott has reached
the height of a small boy, his condition becomes known to the public. He starts
hiding in his home, but when encouraged to sell his story he begins keeping a
journal which provides the film a narration.
The
condition terrifies him but, more deeply, diminishes masculinity. He lashes out
at his loyal wife, Louise (Randy Stuart). She does love him but, inevitably, she
becomes more patronizing as she becomes more powerful than he (one telling POV
shot shows her tower over him as a Giantess). When he tells her she’s free to
leave, she stands strong in her commitment to their marriage, but in that same
scene his wedding ring can no longer stay on his finger and falls off.
He gets a reprieve from his
despair when Doctor’s develop a serum that can halt, though not reverse, the process
combined with his encounter with a Carnival Dwarf, Clarice (April Kent, who wasn’t a real dwarf because that eras Spit-Screen
technology wasn’t good enough), and finds great encouragement in her words. Infidelity is
never one to this film’s themes, but Scott is clearly attracted to Clarice and,
sadly, we all know it's mostly because she’s the same height so he doesn’t feel
his masculinity threatened anymore …
… until the serum stops working
and he finds he’s shorter than Clarice. Then he runs away from her.
Scott keeps getting smaller.
He’s obliged to give up his martial bed and move into a Doll House in the
living room, a particularly cruel irony as the family is childless and now will
forever remain so. He can no longer fulfill any of the obligations of the Head
of the Household and is often alone because Louise has been forced to become
the Breadwinner.
Both Williams and Stuart were promising young Actors whom
Arnold was luckily able to cast while they still came cheap. There’s a lot of
that in Arnold’s films, Actor Clint Eastwood got his start with bit-parts in the
Arnold Directed films “Tarantula” and “Revenge of the Creature” (both 1955)). Williams’
and Stuart’s performances are both excellent and also very much of their era.
‘50s Acting styles could (unkindly) be put in two
categories, over-wrought for the Three-Hankie-Melodramas and wooden for Dramas.
This is an exaggeration of course, but you can see the pattern, which probably
reflected a culture forced to increasingly embrace of conformism amidst radical
change: Prosperity had increased Class Mobility and that, plus improved roads, had
sparked vast Internal Migrations and the creation of the post-War Suburbs (where
Carey’s live), the Baby Boom had already begun and those children were growing
up in the newly-minted communities so the Extended Family was eroding and the Nuclear
Family dominating (though the Carey’s intimate crisis is splashed over the
newspapers, only one other relative makes an appearance in the film, Scott’s
brother Charlie (Paul Langton)), women were more visible in the peace-workforce
more than ever before (like Louise). Issues not addressed in the film, like the
emergence of Civil Rights Movement and Cold War (this is a rare ‘50s SF film
that isn’t built around Cold War metaphors, but Scott’s predicament was
triggered by the Evil Magic of Radiation) were swirling around the Audiences, therefore
every film that was made, and this was reflected styles of Characterization,
generally either Stoically in control in the face of tumult or full-of Hysterics.
Arnold’s films certainly had their emotional explosions,
but he preferred stoicism as his default position of his Characters when faced
with disruptions of the norm. His first SF/Horor for Universal, “It Came From
…” is a Moral Parable of the triumph of Stoic Compassion over Hysterical Prejudice.
Both Williams and Stuart are wholly convincing as they
chart the progressive disintegration to the Carey marriage in what has to be
Arnold’s most Domestically-focused Drama. Stuart’s Louise proves the more Stoic
of the two, metaphorically biting her lip while not physically doing so, but it’s
clearly just as painful.
Meanwhile, Williams’ Scott goes through even more emotional
transformations than physical ones, at first he’s a Man’s Man displaying a instinctive
intelligence more impressive than his dismissive Doctor, then becomes Bratty as
he’s overwhelmed by despair, then, after losing everything, surprisingly Triumphant.
This is among the best acting in any Arnold film and
it is truly surprising those two didn’t become bigger stars. Williams and
Stuart were certainly more promising -looking here than Eastwood in his bit-parts.
These two’s unpresumptuous performances saved the
film’s sense of the Ordinary as the Uncanny took over their World, and this was
reflected in Arnold’s restraining his stylistics. For all the camera tricks, he
wasn’t playing much to Expressionism in lighting or camera angles. He relied
none-at-all on sinister shadows until the action moved into the house’s
basement and even showed restrain there. But then, was there need for any overt
stylings when the physical pops were becoming weirder and weirder anyway?
Author Elaine Tyler May wrote in “Homeward
Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era” (1988) that the USA “wanted
secure jobs, secure homes, and secure marriages in a secure country. Security
would enable them to take advantage of the fruits of prosperity and peace that
were, at long last, available. And so they adhered to an overarching principle
that would guide them in their personal and political lives: containment … Within
its walls, potentially dangerous social forces of the new age might be tamed,
where they could contribute to the secure and fulfilling life to which postwar
women and men aspired. Domestic containment was bolstered by a powerful
political culture that rewarded its adherents and marginalized its detractors.
More than merely a metaphor for the cold war on the homefront, containment
aptly describes the way in which public policy, personal behavior, and even
political values were focused on the home ... In the postwar years, investing
in one's own home, along with the trappings that would presumably enhance
family life, was seen as the best way to plan for the future."
She then goes on to describe how this “Domestic
containment” didn’t really “Contain” the abstract menaces, in fact it was its
own trap. She describes a society plagued with general unhappiness, dwindling
privacy, marital stress, exhaustion from working too many hours, anxiety over
the need for conformity, fear of any deviance from that conformity. Almost all
50s SF reflect this, none brought it into the realm of the Domestic as potently
as this one. As Scott continues to diminish, the
house becomes his prison and what was once safe and comforting becomes
increasingly threatening.
When Scott’s barely larger
than a mouse, and the family cat has taken a dangerous interest in him. (Butch
the cat was played by Orangey, a prolific animal performer who seemed to
specialize in SF,F&H, including “This Island Earth” (1955, which Arnold was also involved
in) and “The
Comedy of Terrors” (1963)) This leads to Scott becoming trapped in
the basement and to Louise presuming he’s dead. Soon the house is abandoned, so
he’s completely alone. “The cellar stretched before me like some vast primeval
plain, empty of life, littered with the relics of a vanished race.”
Tools he used to hold in his hands have become
extraordinary massive, becoming part of a landscape and therefore purposeless. He
builds a house out of a matchbook. He drinks from a leaky pipe and eats moldy
bread from a forgotten cake and cheese from a mousetrap. He’s so tiny, a spider
takes a dangerous interest in him. "My enemy seemed
immortal. More than just a spider, it was every unknown terror in the world.
Every fear fused into one hideous night-black horror."
Ironically, his masculinity is redeemed in the Alien
World, now he’s Tarzan or Robinson Caruso, alive again in Struggle and Isolation.
Scott transversing the gaping canyon of an open paint can is worthy of an “Indiana Jones” film (first movie in the
franchise 1981). He brandishes a needle and thread like an Eskimo’s
harpoon. He survives leak in the
water-heater that for him is akin to a Biblical Flood only by clinging to a pencil
was a life-raft. The battle with the spider is akin to Gladiatorial Combat.
Scott’s narration concerning the cheese, ““This was the prize I had won. I approached it in an ecstasy of
elation. I had conquered. I lived. But even as I touched the dry, flaking
crumbs of nourishment it was as if my body had ceased to exist. There was no hunger.
No longer the terrible fear of shrinking. Again, I had the sensation of
instinct. Of each movement, each thought tuned to some great directing force.”
Arnold had worked in of all cinema and
TV Gernes’, but it was in SF/Horror that he achieved his greatest control of
projects in comparison to his Producers, and in those Genres he best displayed
his imaginative skills. The ‘50s were his best decade and there were few Directors more skilled
regarding FX, Arnold was comparable to the Japan’s even more prolific Inoshiro Honda,
creator of “Gojira/Godzilla” Kaijū franchise (first film
1954). This reverse-Kaijū, “The
Incredible Shrinking …” was the only film where Arnold attempted Honda’s Epic
Scale. His FX man was Clifford Stine and the Art Directors Robert Clatworthy and Alexander Golitzen were,
all acknowledged Masters, but key FX were Arold’s own invention.
The illusion of enormous water drops proved
was difficult because just shooting magnified drops of water didn’t look
convincing. Then, well, I’ll let Arnold speak for himself:
"He's
now about an inch and a half or two inches tall, and he makes his home in an
empty match box. The match box is under a heater, and the heater begins to
leak. I was confronted with the problem of getting drops to fall in proportion
to the size of the man. We tried everything, but no matter how we spilled the
water, it didn't look like an oversized drop. Then I remembered how in my
ill-spent youth I found some strange rubber objects in my father's drawer, and
not knowing what they were, I filled them with water, took them to the top of
the building where we lived in New York, and dropped them over the side. I
recalled that they looked great when they hit, and that they held a tear shape.
So, I asked the crew, ‘Has anyone got a condom on him?’ With much reluctance,
one of the guys finally confessed that he had one. We filled it with water,
tied it at the top, and dropped it. It had a tear shape, exactly in the right
proportion, and it splattered on impact. So, we ordered about 100 gross of them.
I put them on a treadmill and let them drop until the water pipe was supposed
to burst, and it was very effective. At the end of the picture, I was called to
the production office. They were going over all my expenses and they came
across this item of 100 gross of condoms, so they asked me, ‘What the hell is
that for?’ I simply said, ‘Well, it was a very tough picture, so I gave a cast
party.’ And that was all I told them."
In his earlier film “Tarantula” he avoided the high-costs of
Stop-Motion animation by frequently using real tarantulas for his Kaijū one; he had discovered he was able to
direct the spider’s movements with puffs of air and did the same here. By the
way, the tarantula actor’s name was Tarama.
In the last scene, Scott is so
small he’s able to slip through a window screen that blocks insects. He escapes
empty house into the manicured lawn which is now a dense and alien jungle. He
really has nowhere to go, but he finds he is unafraid, even joyous.
Early on, this film about the Terrors of the Uncanny and Powerlessness.
The conflicts that Masculine Identity are so wrought with became center stage,
but soon replaced by the Physical Terrors that are part of a desperate struggle
for Survival. Finally, in Scott’s final soliloquy, we see all of this was really about the Search for Meaning,
not only Scott’s but all Humans, because we are all inevitably too small to affect
the Universe, so we must seek to be one with an Infinite which can’t even see us:
“I was continuing to shrink, to become… What? The
infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future?
If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and
continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So
close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really
the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably
vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if
somehow I would grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God’s
silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, 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 is 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.”
Critic
Richard Scheib noted, “The ending … has a grandiose
portentousness that only 1950s science-fiction would dare … the moment of
vanishing becomes a great cry of self-assertion, an existential throwing of
oneself into the vastness of the infinite and the hope that its limitlessness
will provide. It is a moment of both extraordinary nihilism and extraordinary
poetic grandeur and hope. In the decade to come, science-fiction would
constantly reach towards the infinite in films like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968). Right here is that first
moment where American science-fiction cinema began to reach out toward the
enormous transcendental ache that is part of science-fiction’s ongoing
conceptual quest.”
That speech wasn’t, in fact, Matherson’s words, but they do reflect
his novel’s ending. Arnold was committed to Matherson’s vision but frequently
over-ruled the Author during production; there was a big fights between them
over not only script changes but Arnold attempting to give screen credit to
Matherson’s unwanted co-Writer Richard Alan Simmons.
With those words, quite surprisingly, “The Incredible
Shrinking …” proves to be one of the finest explorations of Existentialism in
USA Cinema and among the few to perceive the Moral Foundations of that
challenging Philosophy. I wonder if Matherson and Arnold had read Victor
Frankel’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” (1946) which was a huge best-seller at the
time.
Even without the Existentialism, there’s the explicit Transcendentalism,
likely drawn from Poet Walt Whitman’s “The Song of Myself”:
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
This was era of the Hollywood Blacklist,
or as Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo called it, “the Time
of the Toad." Though “The Incredible Shrinking ….” isn’t about the Cold
War and one wouldn’t expect the Blacklist to have any bearing on it, that list was
swirling around every motion picture, effecting decisions on all content, even content
that which didn’t seem Cold War related.
As the big-studios attempt to
sanitize almost all forms content resulted in pushing most substantive content into
the marginalized Genres. Allegory became the main language of statement through
the grittier Westerns, Film-Noirs and SF, voicing the fears of our American
Dream turning into a Nightmare. Critic Kevin Hagopian saw ‘50s B-movies as an unacknowledged
Social Movement and listed his heroes, “Directors like Samuel Fuller, Phil
Karlson, Jack Arnold, and Don Siegel … left us with some of the most genuinely
political films of the 1950's.”
All Arnold’s best films have a hint of the “Auteur” (meaning a
film Director whose Filmmaking
control is so unbounded and personal that he is the true "Author" of
the film) even though he was never viewed as such (the term had only just been
coined by French Critic/Director François
Truffaut and was almost completely unpracticed in the
USA at the time). The
ending of the film is perhaps the best example of Arnold’s “almost-Auteur.”
This was not a bleak ending, but certainly not a “Hollywood
Ending” one, and there was an alternate ending that Universal was pushing on
Arnold. Things got worse when a Test Audience proved hostile (comments came
back reading "Should've
had a different ending, should've grown again," "What happened at the
end?" "Can't you do any better? This is pretty sad," "This
is an insult to the brain power of my two-year old son") triggering a titanic battle to have Scott
return to normal-size and reunite with Louise. Arnold said, “Over my dead
body!”
It’s important to realize the context: Though this was a
decade after Director Alfred Hitchcock split with Producer David O. Selznick following “Spellbound” (1945)
and became the first great Auteur in USA cinema, almost no one except Hitchcock
won such victories. It was still three years before Producer/Writer/Director/Star
Jerry Lewis’ triumph in “The Bellboy” (1960) which put for more power in the
hands of far more Directors, at least for a little while.
Arnold won the day, saving the picture.
The USA’s Auteur era lasted through the ‘60s until the early ‘80s and its
final epitaph came almost exactly
thirty-years after the release of “The Incredible Shrinking …” when Director Adrian Lyne’s “Fatal Attraction” (1987) faced a similar Test-Audience challenge
and a new ending shot, at great expense, showing the Mentally Ill Antagonist to
be even more Evil than first perceived and therefore getting punished far more
cruelly, this added a level of spite to a film that was already button-pushing
in its Sexual Politics. This surrender of the responsibility of creative vision
was much imitated in Hollywood, much resented by the Artists, and cruelly Parodied
in the film “The Player” (1992).
Arnold was undeniably inventive when it came to visualizing the Impossible and
forceful in Allegory, but it’s hard to put him in the Pantheon of Genius. He couldn’t
re-imagine the language of cinema the way Hitchcock seemed to do casually, and
he didn’t have Lewis’ miraculous gifts of getting everyone in a production to
sync with his own unique Comedic Timing. Arnold was a Master Craftsman that Shined
Like the Sun in one Genre, but was only solidly Workman-like in others. “The Incredible Shrinking …” was both his
Masterpiece and sort-of a Swan Song though his
professional successes would continue for decades.
Arnold’s slip away from true greatness
was caused by Universal’s was poorly disguised disrespect for the Genres, the
same thing that ruined the Universal Monsters after 1941. Producers
deliberately inhibited Arnold’s ability to continue in his best vein and blamed
it on cheap Imitations of Arnold’s work flooding the market from the likes of Director
Honda’s studio Toho and Producer/Directors Roger Corman and Burt I. Gordon studio
AIP, but that argument was fallacious as Arnold’s films were never expensive
productions.
“The Incredible Shrinking …” was his
biggest-budget film and a hugely complex production. It was burdened with repeated
delays caused on-set injuries (Matthew’s role as Scott was a very physical one,
I wasn’t kidding when I compared him to Tarzan) and FX reshoots, but even going
over-budget it still wrapped and the modest $700,000 - $800,000.
That same year’s “The Bridge
on the River Kwai” cost $30 million to make.
And “The Incredible Shrinking …” proved popular. The
reviews positive but featured a few raves (and it got an out-right one from the
New York Times), too few Critics recognized the film’s Maturity, Intelligence,
or Drama, they just admired the spectacle. By
the end of the year, it grossed $1.4 million, close to the more expensive and
heavily promoted “The Prince and the Showgirl” (released two months after “The
Incredible Shrinking …” but stayed in the theaters longer and ultimately pulled
in $4.3 million).
That $1.4 million (which was not the final
First-Run take, I don’t have those figures) made “The Incredible Shrinking …” not
only profitable, but one of the highest grossing SF films of the decade, but
coming in at less-than-twice the initial investment, the profits was still only
modest, as it was only about double the cost of making. Worse, the first-year Box
Office came in behind “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” which was only $82,000
- $123,000 to make and that, seemingly, was only comparison that counted to
Universal. SF/Horror clearly had an audience, as evidenced by this
film’s success, but it was still a ghetto evidenced by the cheaper and more Juvenile
film outshining it. Producers seemed to only like SF/Horror that cheaper and less
mature than what Arnold struggled to deliver.
Maybe only a modest hit during its
first year, but seemingly more profitable across the rest of its First-Run, Matherson
insisted it made “a lot of money.” Either way, it was still profitable enough
to justify a sequel. Arnold’s “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954) saw a better
return-on-investment but brought in less actual cash and it got two sequels. But
no sequel to “The Incredible Shrinking …” was realized even though Matherson was
paid to pen a 43-page script (so it needed to expanded to be feature-length) titled “The Fantastic Little Girl.” That story followed two narrative lines:
Louise becomes convinced Scott is still alive so she returns to the house,
only to find herself now shrinking, meanwhile Scott explores his new Microscopic
World and encounters its strange Creatures. Matherson eventually published the
script in his collection “Unrealized Dreams” (2005).
After “The Incredible Shrinking …” Arnold had difficulty getting Studio
support for significant SF projects because though the number of SF films in
the USA continued to increase, they declined in quality (at the same time their
quality and quantity was increasing in the UK). USA studios didn’t commit big-budgets
to SF projects again until after 1965. In the medium of theatrically released
features, Arnold would do two more SF or Horror films for Universal, “The Space
Children” and “Monster on Campus” (both 1958), both were shoe-string,
unambitious, and less-thoughtful. Arnold made one more ambitious SF for
Highroad Productions and Columbia Pictures, “The Mouse that Roared” (1959), a
mostly UK production in which Arnold enjoyed the Producer’s title, but it’s far
removed in tone and style from his Universal work. Arnold later declared “The
Incredible Shrinking …” and “The Mouse that …” were his two favorites of his
films.
Even before “The Incredible Shrinking …” Arnold was already shifting into
TV, and soon thereafter that medium became his almost exclusive output. His
product proved mostly successful, but unmemorable, and the work only
occasionally touched on the Genres of SF,F&H. He also increasingly took the
Producer’s role, but didn’t return to SF,F&H in that capacity either.
His last theatrical feature was the Crime Thriller “The Swiss Conspiracy”
(1976), his last feature-length outing was a made-for-TV Biopic, “Marylin: The
Untold Story” (1980), and his very final Directorial credits were eight
episodes of the TV series “The Love Boat” (final credit 1984), two years before
the release of “Fatal Attraction.”
When I was a child, “The Incredible Shrinking …” was on regular rotation on
Saturday morning TV and I can’t help but conclude the ghettoization of
SF,F&H helped redeem it. Local TV stations chose what we got to watch, but need
to pay for the films they aired, so had motive to only air the cheapest rentals
from the Distributers. They also had to pay back the cost of rental and earn
their own profit through advertising dollars, so had please an audience and sustain
a viewership. This gave them motive to carefully choose the best among the
cheapest, which by default because the most disrespected greatness of the
recent past.
Keeping to 1957 films, this created filters for what others chose to show
us impressionable kids. Prestige films like “The Bridge Over …” or Hitchcock’s
still in production “Vertigo (released 1958) were expensive rentals and aired
maybe once a year, if that, always with heavy promotion so I watched them in
the evening with my dad. Foreign-language and Art-house films were dead-on-arrival, so I grew up without Ingmar
Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” and “Wild Strawberries,” or Akira Kurosawa’s
“Throne of Blood.”
But the ghettoization of SF,F&H made those films cheaper to rent so in
heavy rotation so accidently creating larger and generally a younger and more
impressionable Audience. Kurosawa’s good friend Honda’s SF was dubbed (generally
poorly) into English and as a result he got a larger audience for “Rodan” than
the more legendary Kurosawa. The studios treated many Masterpieces like the
trash, so I saw “The Incredible Shrinking …” just as many times as I did the inept
and coat-tail riding “The Amazing Colossal Man” from Director Gordon and AIP, which,
not for nothing, got a sequel.
It’s no wonder that Horror Novelist Stephen King became the world’s
best-selling Author, he grew up watching these films and so did his
massively-large Audience. We were spoon-fed SF and Horror. It was “The
Seduction of Innocence” I tell you, “The Seduction of Innocence”!!!!
(Note: “The Seduction of Innocence” was a 1954 book by Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, calling out a warning to
parents that Horror comic books and other Low-Culture mass-media was Corrupting
our children and encouraging Anti-Social Behavior. This work is now much mocked
by those of us who watched SF,F&H on Saturday morning TV.)
Over time, the film’s reputation
has just grown and grown. Critic Martin Rubin made a point of comparing “The
Incredible Shrinking…” to the other SF around it at the time, pointing out it
was above the "schoolboy cynicism and moralizing
of a Roger Corman film,
nor any of the hysteria common to the Red-scare science-fictioners of the
Fifties."
Critic Ian Nathan called the,
“confrontation with a 'giant' spider, impressively realized, as are all the
effects, for its day, has become one of the iconic image[s] of the entire
era."
Critic Tim Lucas said it,
"remains one of the perfectly realized science fiction films", noting
it was "less about science than a masterful example of the 'what if'
branch of speculative human drama.”
And Arnold, speaking to the
audience at a revival screening, said he was happy that they still enjoyed the
now-old film and that they "got all the nuances that I put in. It was a
joy to me, just to watch their reaction to the film."
“The Incredible
Shrinking …” largely disappeared from circulation in the late-1970s, that was a
studio decision prompted by the troubled pre-production of a Parody of it that
was eventually made by Director Jane Wagoner, “The Incredible Shrinking Woman” (1981).
Seemingly the studio feared the older film would distract the Audience instead
of buttressing the new product.
Arnold, and most
others familiar with the original, “hated” this version. Arnold said it had "no
point of view...the major fault is that it's not a comedy even though they
tried so hard to make it funny." I
agree, it’s a one-note Satire on Consumerism with a $10 million budget,
more advanced technology, yet inferior FX and Production Design – BUT - in
fairness, it did feature the always brilliant Actress Lilly Tomlin in the title
role. Watching it, you’ll be annoyed, but laugh
anyway.
After that, we entered an era where local TV stations were dying and VHS
was emerging, so fewer old movies were shown on broadcast TV. That hurt “The
Incredible Shrinking …” a lot because didn’t make it to VHS till 1992.
Come the 2000s a few remake projects were considered, including a Comedy
one to star Actor Eddine Murphy, but nothing came of that. In 2013 it was
announced that a remake was being scripted by Matherson and his son, Novelist
Richard Christian Matherson, but that was the year Richard Matherson died and
the project subsequently disappeared.
Trailer:
The
Incredible Shrinking Man Original Trailer (Jack Arnold, 1957) - YouTube
Comments
Post a Comment