NFR Project: 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' (1957)

NFR Project: “The Incredible Shrinking Man”

Dir: Jack Arnold

Scr: Richard Matheson, Richard Alan Simmons

Pho: Ellis W. Carter

Ed: Al Joseph

Premiere: March 27, 1957

81 min.

First, read Barry Keith Grant’s excellent essay on this at the National Film Registry, here.

This film is the culmination of the American science-fiction film tradition, a masterful imagining of a horrifying premise. In those stable/unstable 1950s, paranoia, anxiety, and fear were rampant. Fear of the effects of nuclear radiation was widespread. We seemed closer than ever to annihilation. In the person of a ‘50s Everyman, Scott Carey (Grant Williams in his biggest role), a decade’s worth of anxiety over loss of control over things manifests itself as the fascinating story of a man who gets a little smaller every day.

The film is the product of two geniuses – horror/sci-fi novelist and first-time screenwriter Richard Matheson (1926-2013), and director Jack Arnold (1912-1992). Matheson would go on to create classic novels such as I Am Legend and A Stir of Echoes. most of the Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe film adaptations, episodic TV and TV films such as The Twilight Zone, Duel, The Night Stalker, his adaptation of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and his famous Trilogy of Terror, and short stories galore. His prolific talents as a screenwriter are already evident.

Jack Arnold was a pro, a regular working stiff. He had already distinguished himself as a horror director by making It Came from Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and in 1955 not only Revenge of the Creature but also some of This Island Earth and Tarantula. The premises of his many projects may seem bizarre and outrageous to us today, but he took his assignments seriously and made them as compelling as he was able – and able he was. He sold some tickets in a corny genre.

The tale is simple. It’s a nightmare of castration anxiety, as our protagonist . . . shrinks away . . . to nothing. Out on his boat one morning, Scott Carey is enveloped by a glittering cloud that crosses him on the open ocean. Shortly thereafter, he begins to shrink. His clothes don’t fit him. He goes to the doctor. It turns out that the glittering cloud was radioactive, and that it had interacted with a chemical pesticide in his system. Carey is getting smaller, and nobody can stop it.

His wife swears she won’t leave him – and his wedding ring, too large, slips off his finger. CLANK!

He loses his job. He becomes a media sensation, and is bombarded by the exploitative, the outraged, the curious. He begins to lose it. The doctors stop him at three feet. He is resigned to being a little person, alone and rejected. Then he meets a little woman who works at the carnival. They hit it off – but soon Scott discovers he is getting smaller again.

He winds up in a dollhouse in his living room. He is a little dictator, staging self-pitying tantrums. His wife goes out – and accidentally lets the cat in. It of course scratches him and chases him, eventually driving him into a box in the cellar. Now only an inch tall, he is unable to make himself heard. Scott fights a deadly tarantula, which seeks to consume him.

Here the technology of the day was working overtime. There were trick shots, matte shots, giant props, you name it. The creative team of the movie does a great job of rendering a miniature world. Its convincing look seats the movie’s premise right square in our heads. This is what a shrinking man would encounter.

Scott becomes more primitive, instinctively acting to find food, shelter, and protection (straining his body, he lights an enormous kitchen safety match on the cellar floor). He wields a straight pin as a sword. He eventually triumphs over his nemesis in a scene that will haunt my nightmares forever.

After this, we move rapidly with Carey through a formerly restrictive screen out into the natural world, which dwarfs him. Uncharacteristically for the time, the creators do not bring Carey back to normal size, nor do they kill him. They (it is presumed that director Arnold penned Carey’ closing speech) give him acceptance and a serious attitude, a kind of poetic profession of faith.

As he walks away, Carey gives us, in voiceover: “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!”

They go for the big finish. I think they nail it.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Let’s All Go to the Lobby. 

 

NFR Project: 'The Hunters' (1957)

NFR Project: “The Hunters”

Dir: John Marshall, Robert Gardner

Scr: John Marshall

Pho: John Marshall

Ed: John Marshall

Narrated by John Marshall

Premiere: 1957

72 min.

This exemplary documentary doesn’t condescend. It doesn’t preach or make generalizations. It is simply a faithful, unrelentingly visceral account of one group of people living by their wits in the most primitive of conditions.

John Marshall was an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker who imbedded himself with the !Kung tribe in Namibia, on the fringe of the Kalahari Desert (the so-called Bushmen). He learned their language, got to know them individuals, earned their trust. He wandered as they wandered, living in the wild and scraping by on roots, berries, and the occasional influx of fresh meat.

This documentary could have been Disneyfied – made humorous and palatable. Or, it could have been pretentious and haughty. Marshall goes neither route. He respects his subjects, and presents their extraordinary lives in a very ordinary way. His narration is simple, straightforward, and descriptive. He does not project his own concepts onto his subjects. The result is a valuable portrait of people still living close to prehistory.

These are the seeming last of the hunter-gatherers. The women gather food, providing about 80% of the group’s diet. The men are fated to provide the remaining 20% in the form of protein, meat. Their lives revolve around catching and eating prey. They use sophisticated poisoned arrows; they are expert trackers and strategists.

The film opens by outlining the structure and routine of the group. Then four men set out together, determined to bring down some game. They hunt diligently, and finally they wound a giraffe. The animal runs from them, and they spend five days chasing her. The giraffe, exhausted, falls to the onslaught of their spears. They skin and butcher the animal, and recruit help from the base camp to being the bounty back to the tribe. They have nine more days of food.

Marshall delineates the characters of the men he studies. He illustrates character through action. Interestingly, when the men return, after the distribution of the meat, the travelers regale the group with the story of the hunt, with all its vicissitudes and trials. Sharing valuable survival information in the form of a story displays an innate desire of humans to tell their stories – whether around a campfire or on a movie screen.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Incredible Shrinking Man.

NFR Project: 'Glimpse of the Garden' (1957)

NFR Project: “Glimpse of the Garden”

Dir: Marie Menken

Premiere: 1957

5 min.

Marie Menken (1909-1970) was an experimental artist, a kinetic painter, and a pioneer of making cinema out of something as simple as a handheld camera. Not only handheld, but hand-cranked – a 16-millimeter Bolex.

Already established as a painter, she picked up a camera and began messing around with it in the mid-1940s. She produced Visual Variations on Noguchi in 1945; she would make 18 films all told through 1968. She taught Andy Warhol how to use a handheld camera. Stan Brakhage was inspired by her work.

Glimpse of the Garden is just a poetic meditation on the subject of the film. Purposely crude in technique, accompanied acoustically only by birdsong, the camera sweeps, pans, and runs alongside a field of varied flowers. In closeup, petals and stems glisten with rain. The film races, swoops, pauses, examines, and runs on. The film’s clarity is not strong; there are under- and over-exposed pieces, a rough hand-hewed feel. But in a scant five minutes, Menken delivers the evocation of a certain place on a certain day.

The film has no agenda. Its blunt simplicity celebrates the flowering world. It’s Whitmanesque. It preserves some sunny and quiet moments forever. Maybe that’s enough.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Hunters.