RetView #15 – The Fly (1958)

Title: The Fly

Year of Release: 1958

Director: Kurt Neumann

Length: 93 mins

Starring: Al Hedison, Vincent Price, Patricia Owens

“The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox.”

Andre Delambre

Before the famed David Cronenberg effort in 1986, came the 1958 original. I’d never seven seen it until relatively recently. I was thinking about covering the remake for this series, but I have a feeling there might be enough 80’s flicks here as it is, and the series might benefit from an entry dating from the late-fifties. You know, for context and stuff. So, here we are.

The premise: Canadian scientist Andre Delambre (Hedison) is found dead with his head and arm crushed in a hydraulic press. His brother (Price) comes on the scene to try to make sense of what has happened. Was a freak accident? Suicide? Gulp. Murder? The scientist’s wife (Owens) readily accepts liability, but says she’d rather not say why she did such a terrible thing. Which is not only unhelpful, but pretty odd. She then takes to her bed, and starts acting weirdly. It’s especially disconcerting when the housekeeper swats an insect and she freaks the fuck out. Apparently, she is becoming obsessed with a particular white-headed fly which buzzes around the house. From that point, the film shifts from a murder mystery to flat-out sci-fi horror.

Through a series of flashbacks it is revealed that her dead husband was engaged in a ground-breaking series of experiments concerning the transportation of organic matter in an invention called the disintegrator/integrator. The basic idea is to eventually be able to send things through time and space instantaneously, thereby doing away with costly and time-consuming modes of conventional travel. He has great fun successfully transporting inanimate objects like ashtrays, then progresses to Dandelo the family cat. That doesn’t go quite so well, as Dandelo fails to reappear but can nevertheless be heard meowing somewhere in the ether. Oops. Despite the missing moggie, curiosity soon gets the better of Delambre. He constructs a pair of man-sized teleportation chambers and proceeds to try to transport himself. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to him, when he tries the experiment he is sharing the chamber with a house fly which has snuck in, resulting in their atoms becoming merged. Yes, Delambre is now part fly, and the fly is now part Delambre. Hence the scientist with the missing head and arm, and the fly with the white head. Geddit?

Ignoring the obvious plot hole, whereby Delambre somehow ended up with the head of a fly but with his old brain in it, and the flipside of that eventuality where the fly ended up with Delambre’s head, but with a fly’s brain, yet could still scream “Help me!” when threatened by a spider, something picked up on by critic Carlos Clarens (who noted that the film, “Collapses under the weight of many questions”) The Fly can still be considered a landmark in cinema. Of particular interest is the sub-text, which warns against the march of progress and the often terrible price of success. Remember, this was the late 50’s, and the decade had already brought television, transistor radios and passenger jets. UFO flaps were common. It was a time of such technological and scientific innovation, all heavily influenced by fractious Cold War politics and the continuous threat of nuclear war, that anything must have seemed possible. All this would have made The Fly terrifyingly plausible. Furthermore, it might be camp and funny now, but by 1950’s standards, the famous “Help me!” scene near the end must have been utterly horrifying. And speaking of campy goodness, do yourself a favour and check out the original trailer.

Producer/drector Kurt Neumann, who also worked on Kronos and She Devil (both 1957) died of ‘natural causes’ at the age of 50, shortly after attending the premier of The Fly, not knowing he’d just made the biggest hit of his career. Without him, film went on to become one of the Box Office successes of the year, raking in $3 million from a budget variously quoted as being $325,000 – $495,000. Much of this expense was due to it being produced in colour, another innovation which was just coming into its own. The film went on to spawn two sequels, Return of the Fly (1959) and Curse of the Fly (1966). Sadly, neither were able to replicate either the success or the cultural impact of the original and sank without trace.

Trivia Corner

The Fly was based on a short story by French/British writer George Langelaan, an interesting character who had been a spy in World War II and was allegedly a close friend of ‘The Great Beast’ Aleister Crowley. The original version of the short story appeared in the June 1957 edition of Playboy.

Go here for the previous entry in the RetView series.

RetView #13 – Witchfinder General

Title: Witchfinder General

Year of Release: 1968

Director: Michael Reeves

Length: 86 mins

Starring: Vincent Price, Ian Ogilvy, Rupert Davies, Hilary Dwyer, Robert Russell

Though its historical accuracy has been questioned, this unflinching document of one of Britain’s darkest and most brutal periods, filmed largely on location in the sweeping countryside of East Anglia, is loosely based on the activities of one Matthew Hopkins. He was a lawyer who, during the English Civil War (1642–51) when society degenerated into general lawlessness, took on the role of ‘Witchfinder General,’ and rampaged across country torturing and terrorizing innocent (probably) people he believed to be cohorts of the devil. Historical evidence suggests that he and his associates were responsible for the deaths of up to 300 men and women. They got rich charging local magistrates for the ‘work’ they carried out.

One of his favoured methods of determining whether or not his intended victim was a witch or not  was the ‘swimming test’ or ducking stool, whereby he tied people to chairs and threw them into a lake or a river. It was believed that true witches who had renounced their baptism would be rejected by the water and therefore float. If they did, they were promptly executed. Obviously, with their arms and legs bound, it was far more likely they sank to the bottom where they drowned so either way, it would end badly. He would also search for ‘Devil’s Marks’ on the bodies of the accused, which could take the form of a scar, mole, or any other kind of blemish. If no mark could be found, he would make his own with a blade. As you can probably imagine, he was despised and feared in roughly equal measures.

Here, Vincent Price does a great job of portraying the self-appointed witchfinder general. His cruelty knows no bounds and at times, he seems to exude evil at will. He and his assistant Stearne ride into the village of Brandestone and round up a gaggle of suspects, including the local priest (Rupert Davies) who is quickly executed. When her soldier lover Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy, best known for assuming the lead role in Return of the Saint in 1978) comes home from battle, he finds the priest’s niece Sara (Hilary Dwyer) has been raped by one of Hopkins’ entourage, swears revenge, and goes off in search of retribution. In the interests of self-preservation, Hopkins and his assistant then devise a trap to capture Richard and frame him for practicing witchcraft, and the climax sees both he and Sara being tortured in a castle dungeon. In a fittingly gruesome finale, Richard breaks free of his bonds, stomps on Stearne’s face then sets about Hopkins with an axe. Hopkins is only saved from dismemberment when Ogilvy’s soldier mates finally show up to save the day and shoot him dead, but by then it’s too late as dear Sara has been driven insane.

One of the major talking points around the film’s release was the fractious relationship between Price, then a veteran of some 70-plus films (not the 84 he reportedly claimed at the time, though we’ll forgive him this minor indiscretion), and the novice director Michael Reeves who’s first choice for the role (Donald Pleasance) had apparently been stonewalled by the studio. Legend has it that on the last day of filming, Price turned up on set thoroughly pissed, as per the English sense of the word. As a final act of revenge, Reeves instructed Ian Ogilvy to “Really lay into him” with the stage axe used in Price’s violent death scene. The blows you see in the movie were not faked, but Price allegedly got wind of the director’s dastardly plan and wisely padded out his costume with foam to guard himself from injury. As a suitably chilling postscript, less than a year later, a 25-year old Reeves would be dead, the apparent victim of an accidental drug overdose.

Though it pales in comparison to today’s standards, Witchfinder General drew considerable criticism for the scale and ferocity of the violence on show, with Dilys Powell of The Sunday Times famously summing it up as, “17^th Century hanging, burning, raping, screaming, and Vincent Price as England’s prize torture overseer. Peculiarly nauseating.” However, helped in part to Reeve’s untimely death, the film went on to achieve cult status with few sparking so much discussion and in 2005 was named the 15^th Greatest Horror Film of all Time by industry bible Total Film. In the half a century since it’s release it has become not just an undisputed horror classic but an invaluable, if heavily dramatized, historical account of one of the darkest periods of British history.

Trivia Corner:

Witchfinder General was re-titled The Conqueror Worm for its American release in a shameless attempt to link it with the earlier series of Vincent Price films based on the writings of Edgar Allen Poe. This was despite the film having nothing to do with Poe, and only included brief voiceovers of the poem in question which were added later to justify the name change. Word has it that extra nude scenes were filmed especially for the German release.