— RANKING: 87 —
WHO SAYS SIZE DOESN’T MATTER? Shrunken by the diabolical Dr. Thorkel, the intrepid band of scientists and adventurers strike back. This sequence predates many episodes of The Twilight Zone that, a generation later, would deal with precisely this theme. Courtesy: Paramount.
CREDITS
Paramount Pictures; Ernest B. Schoedsack, dir.; Tom Kilpatrick, Malcolm Stuart Boylan, scr.; Dale Van Every, Merian C. Cooper, pro.; Gerard Carbonara, Albert Hay Malotte, Ernst Toch, mus.; Henry Sharp, cin.; Ellsworth Hoagland, ed.; Hans Dreier, A. Earl Hedrick, Robert Odell, art dir.; Natalie Kalmus, Henri Jaffa (Technicolor), color art dir.; Farciot Edouart, Gordon Jennings, F/X; W. Wallace Kelley, process photography; Jan Domela, matte artist; Paul K. Lerpae, optical cin.; Winton C. Hoch, cinematic F/X; 77 min.; Color; 1.37:1.
CAST
Albert Dekker (Dr. Alexander Thorkel); Thomas Coley (Bill Stockton); Janice Logan (Dr. Mary Robinson); Charles Halton (Dr. Bulfinch); Victor Kilian (Steve Baker); Frank Yaconelli (Pedro); Paul Fix (Dr. Mendoza); Frank Reicher (Prof. Kendall).
Now, I can control life—absolutely!
DR. THORKEL
BACKGROUND
It’s unlikely that Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack (1893–1979) of Council Bluffs, Iowa, would have found his way into movies if not for his assignment to the Signal Corps during the first World War. Following the armistice, he began work on highly acclaimed documentaries, including Grass (1925) and Chang (1927). Marriage to screenwriter Ruth Rose prompted Schoedsack to search for fictional vehicles that she might script while he maintained an interest in faraway lands, those lost worlds still existing on the globe. An old friend from the service, aviation pioneer Merian C. Cooper (1893–1973), was also working in Hollywood, planning an epic adventure for RKO. The three collaborated on King Kong (1933). Though science did not enter into the equation of that towering fantasy-adventure-romance, the team became ever more interested in incorporating the manner in which old superstitions could now be explained in technical terms.
THE PLOT
Deep in the Peruvian jungle, Dr. Alexander Thorkel secretly conducts tests on animals to determine whether radium might be employed to reduce the size of animate objects. When he moves from animals to humans and an assistant resists, Thorkel loses control and murders the man. Owing to his fast-fading eyesight, the now-mad doctor, realizing he needs expert assistance, summons two esteemed scientists, Robinson and Bulfinch. When they and their guides prove troublesome, Thorkel shrinks them.
THE FILM
Dr. Cyclops retains a major place in the history of sci-fi cinema as the first example of the genre to be filmed in color, however dated the processes may seem by today’s standards. It was not, however, the first to be projected in such a manner: Georges Méliès, at the turn of the century, had hand-colored his strips of celluloid. Introduced in 1916, Technicolor, in its two-strip form, was used for a few horror films, Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) most famous among them. Schoedsack, who had watched in fascination as three-strip Technicolor entered into the industry’s color paradigm during the 1930s, believed that the evermore advanced saturations, which eliminated the washed-out appearance of earlier forms, would function well for his return to a Kong-like tale (and theme), if on a mini-movie budget this time, with science now all-important.
THEME
Standing more than 6′6″, Schoedsack was very aware of his status as a giant among men. Some of his colleagues from that era suggest that the filmmaker’s height may have motivated, at least unconsciously, his desire to approach this subject in his artistic endeavors. While many mad doctors were played by actors who were relatively modest in size, Albert Dekker (who had never before been associated with this genre) was selected for the role in part because of the similarity between his own bulky build and that of the director. Size, and a more complete understanding of this concept, owing to Einstein’s theory of relativity, dominates here. “Strange how absorbed man has always been in the size of things,” Thorkel says. After shrinking his visitors, the mad doctor adds: “Perhaps you are not small at all. Perhaps everything else is big.” The film influenced then-budding author Richard Matheson, who would write The Shrinking Man (1956).
TRIVIA
Though never actually seen in full because of the tightly budgeted in-studio shoot, the great wall, built ages earlier by the Incas, around Dr. Thorkel’s compound recalls the omnipresent one in King Kong (1933). Character actor Frank Reicher, who has a supporting role here, played the captain of the ill-fated ship in both King Kong and Son of Kong (1933); Schoedsack and Cooper considered him their “lucky charm.”
This was not the first film to deal with radium as a great possible cure or a potential curse. The Universal Pictures B film The Invisible Ray (Lambert Hillyer, 1936) presented Boris Karloff as a scientist who is exposed to radiation while trying to create a universal panacea.
Dr. Cyclops received an Oscar nomination for Best Special Effects.
Despite this film’s box office success, Dr. Cyclops did not, as expected, initiate a series of color sci-fi films in the 1940s. As a result of U.S. involvement in World War II, supposedly escapist moviemaking was largely set aside in favor of patriotic flag-waving films. The onset of the atomic age in the late 1940s initially led not to speculative fiction but to reality-based dramas, such as The Beginning or the End (Norman Taurog, 1947). Sci-fi/horror flicks with atomic themes flourished during the 1950s, culminating in Beginning of the End (Bert I. Gordon, 1957), not to be confused with the similarly titled docudrama of a decade earlier.