THE FLY 1958
Movie Review

A distraught widow tells the horrific story of how her scientist husband's grave mistake created a monster from an experiment gone terribly wrong.

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REVIEW:

There seems to be a natural connection of the movies I am choosing. I don't think I developed more than one degree of separation between films. Last week's Kronos was directed by Kurt Neumann, and this week's The Fly was directed by him, too, which is perhaps his more famous one. Now that I have a good idea of what to expect, I may be eased into this film a tad bit more smoothly.

The best way to describe The Fly is this: take all the quality moments from Kronos, and give it a strong, Hitchcockian edge. You end up with a tense and intriguing film that's not so much scary as it is curious. Jump scares and bizarre occurrences are replaced with scenes of careful pacing, expert direction, and real dread.

The wife of a scientist is caught murdering her husband. Her curious, calm manner about the incident arouses the suspicions of her brother-in-law and the detective on the case. With some cautious prodding (along with some fly-related blackmail), the presumable murderer recounts the events that led up to this didactic situation.

The second question is important. TV and film is one thing; teleportation is another, especially as it utilizes the basic building blocks of mass and matter. Nothing says it can, and will, work. So, to the film's credit, it approaches these ideas through the disillusion of the happily-married couple. It is a sci-fi version of Godard's 1963 Contempt; in a few scenes, you see how such an obsession to perfect his creation destroys their relationship by deteriorating his humanity.

Turning into the fly by accident, and the deterioration of his mental capacity in that form is merely a reflection of the scientist's earlier behavior. When his first teleportation goes awry, he sinks away from his wife into a two-week sabbatical, focusing solely on his work. His attention doesn't waver until he fixes the problem - and even then, he immediately jumps to live animals, making one evaporate in the process. In a telling number of scenes, the scientist waxes formulas while with his wife at a ballet; he celebrates his accomplishments with her in the lab, while teleporting objects and animals at the same time! It's no wonder, then, that when promised to never use animals as test subjects again, he immediately jumps to himself, for dire consequences.

True love remains paramount, though, when the transformed scientist uses typed messages and oddly-creepy knocks to tell his wife what happened, and the lengths she will go to try and fix them. She looks downright insane when trying to capture one specific fly (her son and maid help, but are utterly perplexed). And when forced to kill her husband, it's a devastating moment, but a necessary one, to kill the beast inside before it escapes.

The Fly is a richly-developed sci-fi film. It was a hit for Fox when it was released; sadly, Neumann would not see the fruits of his labors reap its rewards; he died one month after its release. It's a wonderfully realized piece of work, which shows that for every film designed essentially for Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder, there exists one or two germs of sci-fi brilliance.

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THE FLY1958