
My first entry this Criterion Month is very steeped in the sci-fi of a very particular era – the 1950s, which was influenced by American paranoia over nuclear destruction and saw the rise of aliens from another world, giant insects, and creatures from black lagoons. 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, focuses on something not quite as spectacular: a man who, as you might guess, can’t stop shrinking. It’s a fairly straightforward premise, but in the hands of B-movie maverick Jack Arnold and writer Richard Matheson, it becomes something as unsettling (and entertaining) as anything the era produced.
The film begins on a boat in the middle of the ocean, seemingly miles away from land. On the boat are two newlyweds, Robert “Scott” Carey (played by Grant Williams) and his wife, Louise (Randy Stuart), who are relaxing in the sun. Louise goes into the cabin of the boat when Scott notices a nondescript cloud of mist making its way toward him. Scott makes a feeble attempt to get away from the cloud, but before he knows it, he’s enveloped in the mist before it passes by. A strange metallicy substance clings to Scott’s chest, which him and Louise clock as strange, but after that, go back to their lives as much as they can.
However, that becomes a bit hard when weeks later, Scott notices that his clothes aren’t fitting as well as they used to and that he seems to be losing weight and height more suddenly than anyone on a mere diet. He seeks medical help, and after going through some rigorous testing (and what Scott can plainly see with his eyes), it becomes obvious that he’s shrinking. The doctors deduce that what’s making him shrink is the mist he was exposed to (seemingly of atomic origins) combined with a pesticide that he was later exposed to. Despite Scott’s resignation to the inability to ever live a normal life, Louise commits to staying with him.
We then cut to months later, and Scott is now the size of a child and has become a media phenomenon due to his distinctive… stature. At this point, scientists are able to find an antidote to keep Scott from shrinking, bringing him some sense of relief, though it seems that they’re far from ever finding a way of giving him the ability to grow back to his normal size. He then forms a friendship with April (Clarice Bruce), a dwarf who works at a local carnival, complete with its own troupe of “freaks”. However, he becomes even more disillusioned when one day he notices that he’s grown shorter than her. It appears that the antidote is no longer working, so we then cut to months later, where a miniature Scott is living inside of a dollhouse and his and Louise’s marriage has become even more strained.
One day while Louise is out, Butch, the family cat, attacks the mouse-sized Scott, who must fend off the cat while scrambling across the living room floor to find any tiny, sharp object to protect himself with. He escapes the cat’s wrath, but in the process falls into the house’s basement, and after Louise returns to find nothing but a bloody piece of Scott’s clothing, assumes that Scott was eaten. While Louise makes arrangements to move away with the help of Scott’s brother, Scott is still living in the basement, isolated and trapped, but still determined to find some way out. His desire for survival becomes even more dire when he finds out that a giant (to him) spider is living in the basement, which he decides he must find a way to kill in order to escape his seemingly hopeless fate.
The thing that first stands out about The Incredible Shrinking Man is how surprisingly somber and existential it is. This is no doubt due to Richard Matheson’s first draft of the script (based on his novel that was being written as the film was shooting), though screenwriter Richard Alan Simmons’ pass on the script gave it a bit more conventional structure and a more Hollywood-esque style. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of inventive scenes filled with charming uses of special effects that are occasionally thrilling. But there’s also this doom that hangs over the film, as it seems like things are never going to get better for Scott, while this inability to control the transformation of his body feels like a bit of a precursor to the body horror genre.
The most apparent example of the film’s delectable downward spiral is in its ending, where it ends on a note of Scott being content with his place in the universe and finding some sense of solace in his own unique existence, even if the audience is never given the sense that Scott is ever going to get better. The ending supposedly tested pretty poorly with audiences at the time, since you would think a film so interested in simple thrills would be able to muster up some sort of happy ending. However, director Jack Arnold was adamant about keeping the film’s downbeat ending, which helps elevate the film above being pure kitsch.
Which, to be fair, there are plenty of kitschy elements in the film. Though there is something a bit frightening about seeing Scott get smaller and smaller, there is also something absurd and hilarious about it, whether it’s intended to be funny or not. I just love the use of giant furniture and objects that we see Scott use over the course of film, since it’s the kind of old-school movie imagination that you’re just not going to see much of nowadays (though we did see human actors living in dollhouses just last year in Barbie). These effects hold up a little better than all of the instances of super-imposing the smaller Scott into scenes, so as to make him smaller than his wife, his cat, and the giant spider that threatens to end his existence. But overall, the effects hold up pretty well, and suitably add to Scott’s terror, even if they are very much of their time.
Speaking of, it seems that the process of creating Scott’s ever-shrinking world was fairly painstaking, or at least for a studio picture on a smaller budget. A lot of tarantulas were killed in the name of filming the movie’s climax, while lead actor Grant Williams injured himself several times while filming the movie’s various stunts that forced him to leap across chasms and spar with giant household creatures. One of the film’s stranger effects is when we see a water leak from Scott’s perspective and giant globs of water splash in front of him. The effect was created using condoms filled with water, which apparently was inspired by a childhood incident where Jack Arnold got into his father’s condoms. The results are impressive, but wouldn’t water balloons have been cheaper?
So in the end, what makes this movie rise above being a mere campy curiosity is the uniqueness of its special effects combined with its bleak existential undertones. Scott’s condition is certainly fantastical, but it’s also easy to draw parallels to any degenerative disease that eats away at a person until they become nothing. Also, at a concise 81 minutes, the movie’s unique vibe is pretty easy to get hooked into, especially when it does a nice job of pairing Scott’s hopelessness with enough set pieces that are genuinely suspenseful and thrilling that it still qualifies as the 50s version of popcorn entertainment. It’s all a very nice little package that somehow manages to feel larger and larger than the sum of its parts.