Allen Ashley is training his eye on classic genre films for us, looking at not just the film but the context in which they were released. Here’s the second instalment in his new blog series.
The Incredible Shrinking Man
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
Director: Jack Arnold
Black and white
81 minutes running time
(All images taken from imdb.com)
This is a much-loved movie that competed well in the American box office ratings of 1957 against the big budget Hollywood production “The Ten Commandments” (released November 1956). “The Incredible Shrinking Man” certainly operates on a different scale to that epic! It has a tight script written by SF great Richard Matheson, three gripping set pieces and, perhaps most importantly for what is still primarily a visual medium, a couple of stills – our reduced hero being chased by a cat; our tiny hero in close mortal combat with a house spider – that people instantly recognise as being from this film. Iconic, one might say. In this essay, I’m going to dig a little deeper into why “Inc Shrink” (if I may!) works so well; and also to reveal its influence on my writing.
Size matters
Spoiler alert: the condensed plot. Scott Carey (played by Grant Williams) is a suburban, middle class professional who begins to lose height and body mass after being briefly engulfed by a mysterious white cloud whilst holidaying with his wife Louise on his brother Charlie’s boat. He continues to shrink despite the best efforts of doctors and medical researchers, and loses his job, his wife, his home, his sense of what it is to be a man, and, on a couple of occasions, almost loses his reduced existence. The plotting is pacy and grippingly logical once one accepts the basic premise that this could happen. Scott’s life enters a downward trajectory and he has no way of preventing it. His devoted wife Louise (played by Randy Stuart) tries to cope and adjust and, in modern parlance, be strong for him but there’s an inevitability to Scott’s gradual diminishment.
The film blends together many elements. There’s the creature feature – Scott being stalked by the cat and later the spider, both of which to him are gigantic beasts. The overturning of normal expectations, of biological pecking order if you like, is achieved not through having an animal become monster-sized (e.g. “King Kong”) but by drastically reducing the scale of our human protagonist.
By minute 31, Scott is so small that he is now living in a doll’s house. This is the cue for the household tabby Butch to initiate a deadly game of cat and mouse, leading eventually to Scott falling into a box of odds and ends at the foot of the basement stairs. Scott describes this as a “pit” and there are later references to a “deep abyss” (53m50s) and, “My prison – a grey, friendless area of space and time” (59m20s). He has fallen into Hell or Purgatory and his quest for continued survival takes on spiritual and religious overtness reminiscent of the works of Dante or Milton.
There’s an element of 1950s Cold War atomic anxiety with the mysterious seaborne mist – or mushroom cloud – first appearing at about 3m30s and engulfing Scott before passing on, the whole chilling scene lasts only about 45 seconds; but radiation does its work quickly. The reason for his progressive shrinkage is how this cloud caused a “diminution of the cells in your body” when it reacts to a mild insecticide to which he’d also been exposed (ca 13m to 15m). Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is very early recognition of the dangers of pesticides and agri-chemicals, way before Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962) and the eventual outlawing of DDT in 1972. We are, of course, very aware of chemical toxicity these days with issues such as the ongoing “Roundup” glyphosate weedkiller court cases; once again, science fiction writers were ahead of the curve.
A desert island in the basement
Richard Matheson based the script of “The Incredible Shrinking Man” on his recently completed novel “The Shrinking Man” (1956). Matheson is perhaps best-known for his short novel “I Am Legend” (1954) – a work that is now rightly part of the Gollancz “SF Masterworks” series. “Legend” is essentially a survivalist tale of the last true man on Earth, a subgenre that perhaps has its roots in castaway fiction, as exemplified by Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”. After Scott’s fall into the basement, he cuts down his now oversized clothes into ragged trousers and jerkin, looking very much like an inch-high Crusoe and describing himself as a “castaway” in a “vast primeval plain” (ca 41m07s). He now seeks water – the drip from a cistern; shelter – a matchbox; and food – the brilliant irony of the lump of cheese in a mousetrap. Later, he will quest after a piece of cake attached to a spiderweb, with the inevitable consequences of the classic climactic battle against the spider. As with all castaway and last person standing narratives, the hero has to call on his reserves of human intelligence, cunning and ingenuity (e.g. fashioning a lasso and a weapon out of sewing equipment) in order to prevail.
Matheson’s original intention had been to start with this dramatic spider fight scene and tell the rest of the story in flashback. Uncredited co-writer Richard Alan Simmons opted for a more conventional chronological sequence and that was the right move, adding to the fatalistic terror of the film as the domestic becomes the horrific, as we realise that human dominance is partly down to our regular physical size and may be more fragile than we realise.
Caught in a whirlpool
I mentioned that there was at least one more memorable set piece and it occurs between minutes 63 and 67. The water heater in the cellar bursts and floods out, and tiny Scott is nearly swept down a drain. Louise and Scott’s brother Charlie descend the staircase to investigate the problem and we see their giant shoes on the penultimate step as Scott swirls in the floodwater below, vainly shouting for help, but he is too small to be noticed. At approximately 68m11s, we see Scott bedraggled as if shipwrecked after the water has subsided and his last link with normal twentieth century civilisation has now gone.
The film rewards extra viewings. Note how the cat is subtly introduced at 4m49s or we first see the spider at 47m41s. Louise is sewing in the cellar at 22 minutes. Then there’s the six-minute sequence (25m to 31m) around the Carnival as three-foot Scott sneaks out of the house and has a brief, platonic affair with the similarly sized but incredibly glamorous sideshow performer Clarice (played by April Kent). The coy scene where she raises an oversized coffee cup to her lips will have set many hearts aflutter. And all of this to a background patter from the fairground barker (Frank Scannell) detailing the delights of what was still a common occurrence in the 1950s, the so-called ‘travelling freak show’. We have a way to go, of course, but society is generally kinder, better and more accepting of difference nowadays.
Does size really matter?
There are jaw-dropping moments in “The Incredible Shrinking Man”, such as at 17m27s when we first see Scott revealed as child-size. But this film is a thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of what it means to be human and how we cope with unpredictable adversity rather than being a short, sharp shocker of a tale. The element that really distinguishes the movie is its ending. According to Wiki, test audiences at the time wanted Scott to be cured, his condition reversed, the traditional happy ending. Instead, as he continues his downscaling from insect size heading towards the microscopic and ultimately oblivion, to a soundtrack of heavenly music Scott comes to terms with his fate, turning towards philosophy and feeling that yes he does have a purpose in “God’s silver tapestry spread across the night… I still exist” (ca 78m-80m).
It’s a psychological uplift rather than a restorative miracle. It also plays into the notion of ‘Man’ being just a speck in the huge cosmos. Somehow the writers, the director, the cinematographer and the actor have conjured up hope and purpose at the end of the descent. Yes, folks, I’m classing this as a happy ending.
When I was writing my breakthrough short story “Dead to the World” (“Fantasy Tales” magazine, 1982, widely reprinted since), I was following a similar plotline of something bad and medically untreatable happens to male protagonist (I named him Russell Parkes); things get logically and progressively worse, and worse… The conceit was that the hero’s skin pores and bodily orifices start to close up, isolating and ultimately killing him as he becomes dead to the world. But I didn’t want to simply just fizzle into oblivion. Like the final curse out of Pandora’s Box, I decided to end with a sliver of hope as Parkes embraces his fate and even sees it as an adventure, so I closed with:
“I am leaving one world, the world outside my body, and will very soon be totally isolated in another world, the one inside my sealed-up body. I wonder what I will find.”
For years, I thought I’d borrowed this technique from the ending of Robert Silverberg’s novel “Dying Inside”. But now I wonder whether I had some latent memory of the “Inc Shrink” film and channelled the spirit of Scott Carey into my mini-opus…?
You can watch “The Incredible Shrinking Man” for free on the Internet Archive. You should treat yourself and make time to do so.
What did you think of The Incredible Shrinking Man? Let us know in the comments below ⬇️
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