The Fly

The Fly (1958)

Runtime: 94 minutes

Directed by: Kurt Neumann

Starring: David Hedison, Patricia Owens, Vincent Price, Herbert Marshall, Kathleen Freeman

From: 20th Century Fox

Help me... help... me...

"He was searching for the truth. He almost found a great truth but for one instant, he was careless. The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world and the most dangerous".

As I saw The Fly remake last week, it only made sense to check out the original when it played on TCM last night. By modern standards there is camp value with seeing a man with a human-sized fly head and a fly appendage for a left arm. Yet even if there were some slow stretches, I was never bored and I can say this is pretty good.

The general idea is the same as in the 1986 film: a brilliant man (in this case, Andre; the movie was set and filmed in Montreal) creates a teleportation device-although it's not referred to as that in this movie-and he has more success with inanimate objects until improvements are made... he does it to himself but a fly enters the chamber so disaster happens. But, gross body horror does not happen... he just appears with a fly's head and appendage. Hilariously, it means that there's a fly with a human's head and arm; a subplot is this man's wife, son and maid attempting to catch such fly, which even before the accident had a white head.

Another change is that a decent amount of the story is told in flashback. The opening has the aftermath of Andre's gruesome death, and his wife Helene was responsible. After a half hour, the flashback is shown then we arrive at the ending. Vincent Price is the most famous cast member but he's not the lead and plus, he's not in most of the flashback footage so he is gone for long stretches. That does not sink the film as the cast as a whole is fine... although as usual, Price was the most memorable aspect. This is in Cinemascope so between the widescreen photography and the DeLuxe Color, it was a pretty movie to look at.

At least for me, the film is still solid even 60 years later.