Kurt Neumann, an émigré from Hitler's Germany, directed The Fly (1958). Neumann's first assignments in Hollywood were making German versions of American films for distribution in Europe -- he apprenticed as a sort of cinematic translator-copyist. Neumann died of a heart attack a few weeks after The Fly was released -- the rumor-mill immediately produced gossip that he had committed suicide, unable to live with himself after perpetrating the horrors of The Fly. And, in fact, The Fly is convincingly horrible in conception, an ingenious metamorphosis film that claws at the subconscious, much like some of Ovid's more garish tales. The film is oddly inept, however, in its execution. Nonetheless, it delivers one of the horror cinema's great shock sequences and, so, is memorable for about 15 seconds of its 80 minute length.
For some reason, The Fly is set in Francophone Montreal -- perhaps, this is a nod to the original short story published in Playboy and set in that place. Dalambre played by Vincent Price gets a call that his brother has been killed by his wife. Dalambre goes to the family factory that he managed with his brother and discovers a corpse with its right arm and head crushed into nothingness in a 50 ton industrial press. The dead man's wife admits to the killing and seems weirdly elated, even nonchalant. The only possible surmise is that she is insane. The woman continuously asks how long flies live and seems obsessed with capturing a fly "with a white head and strange leg" -- her little son, Phillipp, has seen the creature buzzing about the garden. The accused murderess is persuaded to tell her story and the film, then, proceeds in flashback. The dead man in the power press was a great scientist. Working in the basement of his suburban mansion, he invented a machine allowing for molecular teleportation -- the subject of the experiment is disintegrated into a stream of atoms and, then, reintegrated in a glassed-in cubicle a few feet away. The scientist demonstrates this to his wife -- he teleports a piece of china successfully, but the words on the back ("Made in Japan") are mirror-reversed. This alarms him and he scribbles more formulae on his blackboard and, even, makes calculations while attending the ballet. (We see part of the colorful ballet which seems a non sequitur nod to the wide-screen Technicolor format in which the film is shot.) Dalambre corrects the problem and tries to teleport the family's cat -- this fails: the cat meows sadly in the void but can't be found anywhere. Next, he teleports successfully a guinea pig. Of course, his last experiment, involving his own teleportation, goes horribly wrong. A fly gets into the teleportation machine with him and he ends up getting his atoms scrambled with the bug. Dalambre emerges from the machine with a fly's head and arm -- conversely, a fly equipped with his face and arm buzzes around the house. Dalambre demands that his wife catch the fly on which his head is mounted, but the insect eludes capture. Despairing, Dalambre gets his wife to crush his head and right arm in the industrial press. After telling this story, the criminal inspector determines that the woman is, indeed, mad. But while sitting in the garden, he hears a faint whisper: "Help me!" It's the fly with Dalambre's head crying out from a spider's web. There's a shocking close-up of Dalambre's white, contorted face with red, weeping eyes, a close-up of the spider's jaws, and, then, the inspector, with Vincent Price watching, picks up a rock and smashes both spider and fly. Vincent Price tells his nephew, Phillippe, a little boy that his father perished in the pursuit of truth and that "the search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world and the most dangerous." The little boy vows that he too will search for the truth -- a vow that sets up the sequel The Return of the Fly (1959). In that successor exercise, Phillippe grown to manhood tinkers with his father's teleportation equipment, now located in the family factory. The feature of the machine that sometimes disintegrates forms into the void is used to "store" bodies as corpses pile-up (or would if they were not dematerialized) as a result of a dimwitted subplot involving spying and industrial espionage. After some grotesque mash-ups (a guy ends up with hamster feet and hands), Phillippe enters the teleportation cubicle and gets hybridized with -- of course -- a fly. As half-man and half-fly, Phillippe staggers around killing the bad guys responsible for his condition. Ultimately, he returns home, the fly with his head and members is caught and, somehow, the hero is successfully reintegrated, emerging from the teleportation booth as a dapper, handsome young man. (We don't see what happens to the fly). There's yet another sequel (produced in 1965) that seems to have been a low-budget excuse to create half-man and half-animal monsters, a bit like the creatures on The Island of Dr. Moreau. I haven't seen that picture. David Cronenberg re-invented the concept twenty or so years later with his version starring Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum (as Brundlefly a homage to Phillippefly, as the monster is called in The Return of the Fly.)
Kurt Neumann's initial film is shot in extremely wide-screen cinemascope, a format that he doesn't know how to use and that results in two-thirds of the screen being crammed with distracting tchotchkes and knickknacks. The 1958 Fly was relatively big-budget and, also, shot in Technicolor. The film is odd in that it doesn't look anything like a horror movie -- it is all over-lit and pastel without any dark shadows or gloom. Despite it's odd appearance, the first film is reasonably good -- it delays the entrance of its monster until about ten minutes before the close, a good strategy because a guy limping around with a rubber fly mask on his face is not exactly frightening and, indeed, more risible than horrifying. Neumann's fly wears a floppy bag-like shawl over his head and fly-hand -- he looks like the elephant man in David Lynch's film and, until the reveal, he is actually pretty scary. (We see him sucking up milk doctored with rum, head covered, apparently through his proboscis.) The reveal is in the vein of Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera, the beautiful heroine snatches off the baggy covering over the monster's face and shrieks spectacularly -- in a moment of witty, pure genius, the film shows us the fly's point-of-view with the scream dissolved into a cloud of prismatic facets. The scenes involving the industrial press are mismanaged -- we can't tell how the press works or what is happening. The only part of the picture that is really frightening -- and this is genuinely nightmare-inducing -- is the short sequence where the tiny fly with a human face is menaced by the spider: that part of the movie, although totally ridiculous, packs a punch that you can't shake. Vincent Price is basically wasted in both films -- he's just someone to whom a story is told. The heroine in the first movie, Patricia Owens, is scary-looking in her own right -- her eyes are so widely spaced that she seems somewhat grotesque herself. The second film, made by a hack, Edward Bernds, is lower budget, shot in extremely wide format but, at least, in black-and-white. During the opening scenes, involving the funeral of the Fly's wife (and Phillippe's mother), the movie looks like a horror film -- there are bolts of lightning in the sky and the rain pours down on the graveyard. When Phillippe enters his father's dusty and smashed-up laboratory, the picture is reminiscent of the old Universal sequels -- for instance, the Bride of Frankenstein -- nicely atmospheric with menacing shadows. But the picture is astonishingly dull and the rubber mask for the fly-monster is even more unconvincing than in the earlier picture -- the actor playing the monster has to stagger around under what seems to be an enormous weight of bulbous rubber. His shadow shows his silhouette as a huge animate mushroom. In the first film, the wealthy Dalambre brother played by art connoisseur Vincent Price has a Modigliani on his wall. In the second film, the family seems to own a Renoir painting of a woman combing her hair. Like archy in the archy and mehitabel poems, the fly can't use the shift button on his typewriter and so he writes in all capitals (archy, the literate cockroach, I think, wrote in all lower case and without punctuation). Vincent Price says in The Fly -- "we must act now before his mind is taken over by the murderous brain of the fly." Although repulsive to me, I've never thought of flies as murderous. Some of the gory Liebestod imagery of the Cronenberg re-make is faintly suggested by the fly's scribbling "I love you" in badly distorted handwriting on a blackboard before his wife takes him to the factory and the 50 ton press. What are these late-fifties pictures about: people have to sue heavy-duty radiation goggles to watch the teleportation which involves a flashing proto-computer display, reel-to-reel tape, and a brilliant burst of light. One of the secondary actors in The Return of the Fly is the spitting image of J. Robert Oppenheimer -- we see him smoking his pipe, brooding, and waiting for the fly-man's appearance. It seems that the films, like other pictures of their time, have something to do with the nuclear menace. Radiation causes mutations and the industrial press is equipped with a huge misshapen red button, the sort of device, one suspects that might be used to launch missiles.
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