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.
