Until tonight one of the bigger (nearly wrote “bugger” there, which would’ve been kind of appropriate, I suppose) gaps in my film knowledge has been The Fly, both the original and the Cronenberg version… I have now filled at least one of these holes, and finally got to know one of the major works of the genre from that period; the 50s were a great age for monster horror, and though the man-fly hybrid actually gets surprisingly little screen time it’s still a worthy example. Also, if you’re doing horror films for October, you need something with Vincent Price, and even if he’s really secondary here, this fits the bill. The Fly‘s impact has perhaps dissipated a bit over the decades through familiarity and parody, but it kicks off in a grisly way that still surprised me, with our nice scientist lead having a fatal close encounter with a hydraulic press operated by his nice wife, who then proceeds to tell a very strange story…
The Fly is a tale of well-meant science going terribly wrong; André, our good doctor, envisages his matter transportation technology as a way of delivering food and medicine and stuff like that to wherever it’s needed, maybe even transporting people. But when he’s experimenting with the latter, he gets a bit careless… There’s a review on Letterboxd that calls this “Maybe the cruelest story in the sci-fi canon”, and I find that hard to argue with, because the characters are all, you know, perfectly nice and appealing; André’s drive is essentially altruistic, so there’s something terribly tragic about how things turn out. It’s a handsome production for what was effectively a jumped-up B film (actually produced by Fox’s Regal Films unit, overseen by Robert L. Lippert whose films were usually a lot cheaper than this), mostly interiors shot in Cinemascope, and well-played by all involved; alas that director Kurt Neumann died just after finishing it and never saw it become a hit. I should really have seen this decades ago (though if I had I’d probably have been stuck with a shitty pan/scan version), and I really must get around to the Cronenberg remake at some point too…
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