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The Incredible Shrinking Man <span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), widely regarded as one of the finest SF films ever made, won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1958, and was later ranked by Entertainment Weekly among the fifty greatest SF works in any medium. As its creator, Richard Matheson, told Fangoria’s Paul M. Sammon, “The Incredible Shrinking Man was the start of my screenwriting career. And it also proved something that I’d always felt about screenwriters ‘breaking in’ in Hollywood. You see, before The Shrinking Man was published, I had lived out here in Los Angeles, and I’d been trying to sell some scripts for television, for shows like the old Dick Powell Theater. But nothing was happening. It was just a nightmare; constant excitements and disappointments. But when I had [the novel] published and Hollywood wanted to buy the rights to it, I stipulated that I would have to do the screenplay before any kind of deal was closed. And that was that. I still feel this is the easiest way for a writer to break in.” Issued as a paperback original by Gold Medal in 1956, The Shrinking Man was inspired by a scene from the film Let’s Do It Again (1953), in which Ray Milland accidentally dons the hat of the much larger Aldo Ray, which comes down over his ears. Still struggling to make ends meet as a writer in that early stage of his career, Matheson suddenly envisioned the same thing happening to a man who was putting on his own hat, and realized that he was shrinking. He explained in his laserdisc audio commentary for Burn, Witch, Burn (1962), “Things weren’t going that well. . . [so] I utilized this idea that I had of a man who started to shrink in size, and I wrote it in the [rented] house that we lived in [on Long Island]. I went down in the cellar every day and just described the man as I imagined him, which was perfect for me, because then I didn’t have to keep notes on the environment, because it was all there.” Universal-International quickly acquired the rights for producer Albert Zugsmith and its house SF expert, Jack Arnold, who had directed It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Plot
 The film opens with the vacationing Scott Carey (Grant Williams) sunbathing on a boat owned by his brother and boss, Charlie (Paul Langton), and playfully persuading his wife, Louise (Randy Stuart), to go below and bring him a beer, so that when the boat passes through a strange, glowing mist minutes later, Scott is alone on deck. He thinks nothing of the episode at the time, but six months later finds himself losing weight and height, attributed by Dr. Arthur Bramson (William Schallert) to overwork and errors in previous physical examinations, respectively, until X-rays spaced several days apart confirm the grim truth: in an unprecedented case, he is shrinking day by day. Bramson sends Scott to the California Medical Research Institute, where weeks of testing by Dr. Thomas Silver (Raymond Bailey) indicate a gradual loss of nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus due to a rearrangement of the molecular structure of his cells, caused in turn by the effects of radioactivity (which is deduced to have been in the mist) on an insecticide to which Scott was subsequently exposed. When Charlie’s ad agency loses a major account, Scott can no longer be kept on salary and, with his debts steadily mounting while the doctors develop an antitoxin, he is forced to accept Charlie’s suggestion that he sell his story to the media, which dub him “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” At a carnival, he meets a midget, Clarice Bruce (full-sized actress April Kent), with whom he enjoys a brief period of happiness as the antitoxin temporarily halts his diminution, but after it resumes he must move into a dollhouse. Although he never became a major star, Williams quite ably portrays the perplexity, bitterness, fear, frustration, and desperation of this slowly dwindling Everyman as he is menaced by the family cat, Butch, who knocks him into the cellar. Louise then believes he has been eaten. “The stairs stretched above me, as far as I could see, cliff rising upon cliff. I knew I could never scale them. Eventually, Louise would come to the cellar. Until then, I had to keep myself alive with whatever resources I could discover in my basement universe, and in myself,” Scott laments in his narration. “No desert island castaway ever faced so bleak a prospect.” While the optical effects are variable, with shaky matte lines in some shots and Louise convincingly confronting her waist-high husband in others, the special photography with which Clifford Stine enlarged the tarantula that Scott confronts in the cellar remains impressive. Living in a matchbox and subsisting on mousetrap cheese, stale cake left behind by Louise, and droplets from a leaky water heater (actually water-filled condoms), Scott vows to dominate his domain despite nearly drowning when the water heater floods the cellar. At last, he dispatches his fearsome arachnid adversary by impaling it with a pin, in a tense and utterly unforgettable climactic confrontation. Ultimately, in a metaphysical and surprisingly uncommercial ending, Scott has shrunk sufficiently to enable him to walk out of the cellar through the wire mesh of a window screen and onto the lawn outside, where he continues to dwindle, presumably to microscopic and then sub-atomic size, while contemplating the eternal mysteries of nature’s creation and the brave new world that now awaits him. “I didn’t really think much of it for a long time, until I finally thought, it’s very unusual for its time, very interesting visually, and certainly has an ending that’s totally atypical of what they were doing then,” Matheson told Robert Arnett in Creative Screenwriting. “Jack Arnold did a very nice job of directing that. I wrote a sequel to it, but they never filmed it. They had all these wonderful huge pencils and chairs and everything. It made an awful lot of money for its time. It cost about $800,000 and it made millions. But they didn’t make the sequel. It was called The Fantastic Little Girl. The adjectives were always added by the producer. . . .” Dana M. Reemes’s Directed by Jack Arnold includes extensive remarks by Arnold himself, in which he explains many of the methods used to integrate rear-projection footage, matte work, and the oversized sets and props. For the spider sequence, tarantulas of nearly six inches across were flown in from Panama, their movements photographed on a normal-sized basement ledge set and carefully timed. Then, Williams was photographed on huge sets of the wall, the web, and the ledge—which made him appear only one inch tall—from 250 feet away, to match the perspective of the spider footage, with his own movements synchronized to the tarantula’s by the beats of a metronome, and the two images later wedded by Stine and his team. Matheson’s script (with uncredited revisions by Richard Alan Simmons) hews fairly closely to its source, although omitting the Careys’ young daughter, Beth, and downplaying Scott’s unfulfilled sexual longings, which result in a morbid obsession with Beth’s teenaged babysitter. The most significant change was one of form rather than content, with the novel’s unusual structure dropped in favor of a more straightforward, conventionally chronological approach. After a one-page prologue in which Carey passes through the mist, The Shrinking Man begins in medias res with him already trapped in the cellar, and alternates between recounting the circumstances that brought him there, with flashbacks demarcated by his progressively shorter measurements, and chronicling what he believes will be his last week of life before he eventually dwindles to nothingness. As Matheson noted in William Johnson’s Focus on the Science Fiction Film, “Unfortunately, [Zugsmith] had a very commercial mind and weakened the script considerably, notably in the area of character. I am not sure that the film would not have been better if it had followed the form of the novel, which was to tell the front story in the form of flashbacks. But this kind of thinking was totally alien to Universal Pictures in those days and there was no way to do it other than in a straight narrative—which had the weakness of telling which caused me to scrap that form of telling when I wrote the novel. The story is quite weak in the beginning and I was not able to go into the character story in any depth because I had to ‘get to the good stuff’ as soon as possible—whereas, if I had started with the ‘good stuff,’ the audience would have accepted more character depth study than they got.” He added to Arnett that years later, “I thought they were going to remake The Shrinking Man, and I said, well, good, I’ll do the script, only I’d like to use the time sequence that I have in the book . . . It turns out they were going to do The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981) and that they were going to turn it into a comedy with Lily Tomlin. And even that I wouldn’t mind, as I have said, if they had turned it into a really funny comedy. But they turned it into a lousy comedy.” A second comedic remake, possibly to star Eddie Murphy, has been announced. External LinksCategories: Movies | 1950s movies | Universal Pictures movies | Growing and shrinking | Movies directed by Jack Arnold | Richard Matheson movies | Grant Williams movies | Randy Stuart movies | April Kent movies | Paul Langton movies | Raymond Bailey movies | William Schallert movies
2008, SCI FI. All rights reserved.
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