1958
DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER: KURT NEUMANN SCREENPLAY: JAMES CLAVELL, BASED ON A STORY BY GEORGE LANGELAAN STARRING: AL HEDISON (ANDRÉ DELAMBRE), PATRICIA OWENS (HÉLÈNE DELAMBRE), VINCENT PRICE (FRANÇOIS DELAMBRE), HERBERT MARSHALL (INSPECTOR CHARAS), KATHLEEN FREEMAN (EMMA), BETTY LOU GERSON (NURSE ANDERSONE), CHARLES HERBERT (PHILLIPE DELAMBRE)
The Fly
TWENTIETH CENTURY-FOX • COLOR, 94 MINUTES
When an inventor is killed by his wife, his brother and a police detective learn the gruesome truth about his failed teleportation experiment.
On the subject of performing in monster movies, horror legend Vincent Price once remarked, “You have to make the unbelievable believable.” Perhaps no science-fiction thriller of the 1950s accomplishes that feat better than Kurt Neumann’s The Fly. At once preposterous and disturbingly credible, the story of a scientist who accidentally turns himself into a monstrous half bug has remained embedded in our culture’s collective unconscious since 1958. After generating two sequels (Return of the Fly [1959] and Curse of the Fly [1965]) and a popular 1980s remake with its own sequel, The Fly retains its morbid fascination today.
Neumann, who had been directing in Hollywood since the 1930s (he was Carl Laemmle’s first choice to helm Bride of Frankenstein in 1935), had never quite distinguished himself until The Fly. The German director wisely stays faithful to George Langelaan’s 1957 short story and opens with a grisly death: scientist André DeLambre (Al Hedison, later known as David Hedison) is pulverized in a hydraulic press by his loving wife, Hélène, played by Patricia Owens. Vincent Price, cast against type as André’s mild-mannered brother, François, plays it straight and subdued as he and Herbert Marshall’s police inspector learn the incredible story told by Hélène. Veteran cameraman Karl Struss photographs the shocker like a Douglas Sirk melodrama, a nightmarish soap opera viewed from the perspective of a ’50s housewife. Because its setting is a plush upper-class home—not a dim Gothic castle or a barren planet in the depths of space—The Fly festers with an undercurrent of sickening abnormality beneath its glossy CinemaScope surface.
Except for a few memorable visual tricks (courtesy of makeup artist Ben Nye and effects photographer L. B. Abbott), psychological horror dominates the film. André’s transformation is left up to the viewer’s imagination; we never see his ill-fated teleportation excursion, unwittingly made with a housefly inside the “disintegrator-integrator.” Over an hour into the film, Hélène learns that her husband’s atoms became tangled with the fly’s—even the insect’s brain has somehow merged with his own. André’s typed explanation for wanting himself destroyed is disconcerting, to say the least: “Brain says strange things now.” Lines such as this were not in the original story, but furnished by screenwriter James Clavell, who would later pen The Great Escape (1963) and the 1975 novel Shōgun. Clavell enriched the script with smart, idea-driven dialogue that questions blind technological advancement. “Rockets, Earth satellites, supersonic flight, and now this,” Hélène says of her husband’s invention. “Everything’s going so fast.” André is not frightened by progress, he says, but “filled with a wonder of it.” Like most inventors in sci-fi movies, this intoxication with scientific progress becomes his downfall.
One of the most iconic scenes in science-fiction cinema occurs when Hélène whisks the black shroud from André’s head to reveal his hideous fly-face. Patricia Owens’s shrieks of terror are multiplied into a honeycomb of screams, a fly’s eye view created by Abbott’s innovative use of a prism lens. Hélène faints at the bone-chilling sight, but soon emboldens herself to carry out André’s wishes—she literally squashes the fly. As Jonathan Malcolm Lampley observes in his book Women in the Horror Films of Vincent Price, “In a very literal sense, The Fly is about a woman who must clean up the mess made by a man.” Indeed, in the end, Hélène seems relieved, even happy, to be rid of the filthy abomination her husband had become.
Unlike many of the era’s monster movies, The Fly was critically praised. The New York Times called it “a quiet, uncluttered, and even unpretentious picture, building up almost unbearable tension by simple suggestion.” Sadly, Kurt Neumann scarcely had a chance to enjoy his magnum opus—he died a month after the film’s release.
Patricia Owens, Vincent Price, and Al Hedison take a break.
Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly
Nearly thirty years later, David Cronenberg’s 1986 version of The Fly was a much-buzzed-about hit and an Oscar winner for Best Makeup. Where Neumann’s film relied on suggestion, Cronenberg took the opposite approach, illustrating every disgusting detail of Seth’s (Jeff Goldblum) gory transformation into a massive insect, as his girlfriend (Geena Davis) watches in abject horror and pity before finally finishing him off with a shotgun.
KEEP WATCHING
DONOVAN’S BRAIN (1953)
THE WASP WOMAN (1959)