The Fly

Come Fly With Me

The Fly
USA 1958 
Directed by Kurt Neumann 
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone A

On the occasional times I revisit the original The Fly, I always come away a little more impressed by it and this new Blu Ray upgrade, part of a five film set of The Fly movies, was no exception. It probably helps that it’s been quite a while now since I last saw it. And, giving in to the Mandela Effect which a lot of people share with me on this film... I’d forgotten that it’s a colour movie as opposed to a black and white picture (like the two direct sequels which were both in monochrome) and in a proper cinemascope aspect ratio to boot. 

As such, it does play the full cinemascope variation of the 20th Century Fox theme at the start (something which is often misused in more modern films) before switching into some wonderfully stark titles of graphic illustrations of mesh in red, with a fly in them, accompanied by Paul Sawtell’s wonderful score. 

And then we get to the wonderful start of the movie and you can tell right away that the structure of this is different from most of the other ‘monster movies’ out there form this time in sci-fi Hollywoodland. This may be in part due to one of the main writers of the screenplay being the great James Clavell, who wrote such best selling tomes as Shõgun, Noble House and King Rat. In fact, we don’t meet the main scientist protagonist of the film until a good 20 - 30 minutes into the movie. Instead we start off with a night watchman hearing Andre Delambre’s death by the sound of the hydraulic press coming down twice. He investigates to find Delambre’s wife Helen, played by Patricia Owens who gives a performance that does a lot of the heavy lifting for the film, fleeing the scene. Then he sees the body of the man with his head and arm crushed by the press, the very red blood effect dripping down the side of the machine in a piece of gory aftermath which I think must have been quite incongruous with a lot of horror/sci-fi cinema at the time. 

And then the mystery starts, as both Andre’s brother Françoise, played by the wonderful Vincent Price (who would return for the first sequel) and possibly quite the nicest Police Inspector on celluloid,  Inspector Charas, played wonderfully by Herbert Marshall, try and solve the mystery of why Helen is saying she murdered her husband but won’t give any details... putting her as the number one candidate for the hangman’s noose. It’s only after a good while that she decides to tell the two men exactly what happened and we see the majority of the rest of the film playing out in flashback.

So we have the great David Hedison (billed here early in his career as Al Hedison) playing scientist Andre Delambre, who has cracked (almost, with a few alterations after accidentally disintegrating the household cat), the secret of teleporting anything from one cabinet in one room to another in the next. The film depicts the happily married couple as the obsessed scientist perfects his new invention and then, just as everything goes right, we discover that, sometime off-screen (and again, this is unusual and works a treat), Andre has tried to teleport himself and a fly that zipped into the machine with him has merged atoms with him, resulting in the fly (which escapes and becomes the major focus of his wife and child, trying to catch it) having Andre’s head and an arm, while Andre himself is left with a fly’s head and arm. This looks great when you finally see the reveal but it’s also something I conceptually have a problem with... okay, I’ll get to that in a minute. 

But again, rather than show what happened straight away, Hedison plays the fly-bound Andre silently, with a black towel over his head and pointing and rapping a desk to communicate with his wife... so the mystery element is kept in tact for a good part of the film and it works really well. And, of course, when Helen finally pulls that towel off, just like the unmasking of The Phantom Of The Opera in the 1925 version of that film, Helen lets out an iconic scream... iconic because, as she keeps on screaming, we see her from Andre’s point of view and it’s a fly’s eye view, with her screaming countenance replicated many times over the widescreen frame. Wow... this must have looked amazing in cinemas, for sure... it’s no wonder the film was such a box office hit. A box office sensation that, sadly, the director didn’t live to experience, since he died the week before it opened. 

Then, as Andre arranges for his wife to head press him to death, the film catches up to the start but, this isn’t the final iconic moment of the movie. In a much re-quoted scene, his brother and the Inspector only finally believe Helen’s story when they see the little fly caught in a spider’s web, with Andre’s arm and head, as it calls out “Help me! Help me!” as it’s about to get eaten by a spider. Apparently the scene was shot over twenty times because the two actors, Price and Marshall, were laughing so much at the scene that they couldn’t look each other in the eye.

And then comes the second of two problems I have with the movie. There’s no way their dodgy, hastily concocted explanation for the incidents in the film would be believed in a court of law but, here we are at the end with everyone free and living happily ever after. Apparently Clavell had written a much better ending where Helen kills herself after she has given her explanation but, this was sadly discarded. 

And my only other problem is... yes, we see the fly part of Andre trying to take over in his brain as he fights himself to hold on to his humanity (which looks quite ridiculous in a Doctor Strangelove kind of way) but, since his head is also on a fly, how in heck is his human brain also part of this fly head? I mean, I’m probably looking for verisimilitude where it doesn’t exist here but, the science doesn’t hold up here (yes, I know that’s a ridiculous statement about a film about a human fly but, it’s my blog, let me alone). 

And that’s me done with the absolute classic that is The Fly. A really great and somewhat different B movie which was given the budget and release of an A picture... definitely catch this one if you’ve never seen it before. And I guess I’ll at least be watching the next two films in the original series next... not sure if I want to bother with the two modern era versions again as yet.