The Fly (1958)

Dr. McCoy was right -- never get in a transporter!

Wrong hand for a wedding ring. Unless they’re weird in Quebec. From this site, fair use.

The Fly (1958). Grade: C

So, so many questions about this story. A guy invents a teleporter, uses it to teleport himself, but — unbeknownst to him — a fly snuck in the teleporter, too. So now he’s half-man, half-fly. Also, for some reason, there’s a half-fly, half-man buzzing around somewhere.

Why isn’t he half dust mite? There’s a gazillion little unseeable things in the air and on every surface around us; there’s quite a few inside you, too. The Psychotronic Review website asks, why isn’t he now part bacterium? Per the BBC, only 43% of the cells in a human body are human; the rest is “bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria).” Like it or not, you quiet introverts, you’re actually part Fun Guy.

Also, this guy (credited name Al Hedison, actual name David Hedison) is supposedly co-owner of an electronics business, along with his brother (Vincent Price). But he regularly disappears for countless hours into his basement workshop/laboratory, behavior Price explains away as because the brother is a “genius.” While whenever somebody wants to find Price, he’s in the office late at night, actually running the company. And he’s unmarried, since the only lady he ever liked ended up marrying his brother. I think this guy is a Bad Brother. Dump him, Vincent!

Also also, “genius” Hedison is constantly doing stuff in the basement of his own house where his wife and his kid live, stuff that’s REALLY LOUD and would require enough electricity to run an aircraft carrier, and the wife/kid just, never go down there for some reason? Is it locked? Do they completely accept this arrangement? I wanna see a tense family dinner where the kid asks what the noises are and Dad yells SHUT UP and the maid asks, “more poutine, anyone?”

(Because they live in Quebec. In Quebec, you can get poutine. It’s delicious and probably not very good for you. Some people in this movie have kind of a French accent and some don’t and all the writing’s in English although everyone says “Monsieur/Madame” and try not to think about it.)

This was “directed” by Kurt Neumann (Tarzan and the Amazons, Tarzan and the Leopard Woman, Tarzan and the Huntress), who really gives meaning to the words “movie industry”; AKA, churned-out product that all looks exactly the same. It’s shot in Cinemascope (widescreen), so there’s nearly double the ugly interiors of a boring 1950s suburban-richy house to look at.

The script’s by James Clavell, who’d later be famous for his huge novel Shogun. (A TV series based on this novel was recently on Hulu, and it’s incredibly well made, and it kills off the only likable character and promises another season and I won’t be watching that season.) Clavell based his script on a sci-fi story by George Langelaan. Does any of that matter worth a dang? No. When you have lines like “into space... a stream of cat atoms...,” it doesn’t really matter who came up with what. (Oh, and after the cat gets disintegrated, we hear it meowing from Cat Limbo or wherever.)

From MuppetWiki, at this link.

There’s a few things that make this ridiculous slop watchable — one being, half the actors realize it’s ridiculous slop. (During the famous “help meeee” scene, Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall were cracking up so much, they needed 20 takes to do it straight.)

Another thing — an entirely accidental one — is that the setting (perfect suburban 1950s house, obedient pretty housewife) has a sort of innate tension to it. This is right around the time that you were seeing films like Bigger Than Life (in which James Mason takes steroids and becomes psycho, ruining his perfect suburban household); Betty Friedan would soon publish The Feminine Mystique (in which it’s stated that “perfect suburban housewife” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be). There’s a key contribution by someone in the sound department; the faint noise of a fly buzzing somewhere in the background. (Sometimes this is really subtly done, so much so that in some scenes I thought I heard a fly but I wasn’t entirely sure.) There’s something decaying here, alright; it fits to hear flies.

When the perfect wife (Patricia Owens) goes from happy to freaked out to zombified, and you’re not entirely sure how much of it is an act to fool the authorities, and how much is really that the events have zapped her ability to react (and how much is just standard B-movie acting), it has an effect that’s slightly like reading Friedan, or Sylvia Plath. You can believe in her going half-crazy just from this strange living situation, not just the fact that her husband might have turned into a half-fly monster.

So none of that subtext is intended… but I found it there, anyways. YMMV, as they say.

One person who loved the film for itself is writer Janne Wass, a Finnish/Swedish journalist who writes the website scifist.net. (That’s “SciFi-ist,” like typist or Marxist, but for sci-fi. Not “Sci Fist” like a movie about a robot hand that punches people.) Waas’s The Fly page is a huge, interesting read. In fact, it looks like ALL the pages in scifist.net are huge and probably very interesting: a very big hat-tip to you, sir! You’ve got to commend a guy who’ll write several thousand words about a 1958 Indian ripoff of The Invisible Man that’s 2 1/2 hours long, NOT subtitled, and the blogwriter doesn’t speak the language. That’s commitment to a project! With appropriate screenshots to boot!

From the movie Maya Manithan, screenshot by Janne Waas, at his website.

Was there anything I really liked about The Fly? Well, you can’t NOT enjoy Vincent Price in anything, even if he’s not doing much in this one. There’s a fun part where the half-fly-man’s fly half is making moves to paw at the wife, so the human half smacks the fly half away. Yes, because that’s what all flies secretly wish to do, have sex with Arr Wimmen. There’s enough goofiness here to make the duller parts tolerable; it would have been better at 74 minutes than 94, though.

And I liked how the teleporter gizmo has loud ramping-up sound effects and flashing lights (which are repeated every single time it’s used, which is tedious) — but in the middle of the ramping-up sound effects there’s a little bell that goes “ding.” Just like in a toaster oven!

Watch this if you’re a fan of goofy horror makeup, or a fan of Price. Go poke around Janne Waas’s website if you’re a sci-fi fan. (It intends to review every sci-fi film ever made, in chronological order; it got to The Fly last September.) And don’t ever get in a teleporter! Transporters are suicide! Which means that half the “happy ending” Black Mirror episodes are suicides, too!