Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: The Incredible Shrinking Man

00:00:04
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is Rob Lamb and hey, you caught us on Cat Week. All the episodes in the feed this week are going to be cat related. Should be a great time. We've got an episode on folkloric cats of the Bridge Isles, the Cats of Cyprus. There's going to be a monster fact about a particular magical animated cat that everyone's crazy about right now. And you know that Weird House this week is going to revolve some sort of crazy cat movie, so tune in for that. But hey, we're going to kick it off here with our Weird House Cinema Rewind selection for the week. It is The Incredible Shrinking Man, a classic and legitimately great nineteen fifty seven miniaturization movie. This episode originally published three twenty four, twenty three. Why put it out on Cat Week? Well because it features a terrific special effects scene in which are incredibly shrinking man is attacked by an incredible life size housecat. A great sequence, and you know it does right by the ferocity of cats toward smaller creatures. So let's dive right in.

00:01:16
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. A production of iHeartRadio.

00:01:26
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

00:01:28
Speaker 2: This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And today's movie on Weird House Cinema is the nineteen fifty seven introspective science fiction adventure The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold and based on a screenplay by Richard Matheson. And man, I've got to say this one totally surprised me. This is not what I was expecting at all for a late fifties shrink movie from the director of Tarantula. I was. I was expecting something much sillier and much campier, and instead what we got here is in many ways a rather thoughtful and fascinating science fiction tale about the search for meaning and dignity in the face of absurdity and doom. And I suspect that a lot of the intelligence and the soul of this movie is sort of there on the page, like it comes from the story by Matheson. But also the special effects are excellent for the time, and most of the performances in this movie are very kind of a nuanced and warmly human This was a shockingly great film and not at all what I thought. We were going to get based on the title and the premise.

00:02:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I had the same experience with it. The only thing I'd ever seen from this film is I'd seen a kind of famous sequence from it in which a kiny man has been reduced to the size of a doll is hunted by his own house cat living room, and I believe I saw it, and it came from Hollywood that, you know, that older picture that had a lot of trailers and clips and a lot of joking and riffing of the material there. The riffing wasn't particularly funny, but in isolation that that sequence was amusing and kind of hilarious, and I just figured, yeah, the rest of the film would kind of fallow suit. And we ended up picking this one up because we were actually, I think we're going to watch the amazing Colossal Man. I went to Video Drum to rent it and it's not available on disc anywhere, and which is a crime crime. Yeah, yeah, but they said, well, we do have the incredible Shrinking Man, and not only do we have it, we have it in this excellent criterion collection edition. So I was like, well, I didn't think this was the type of film that really merited that sort of treatment. But it looks looks interesting. I love that one sequence. Let's check it out, and here we are.

00:03:56
Speaker 2: Well. This is another way I was surprised because I have so. I had also seen the cat attack part of the movie in isolation, in which it seemed quite funny to me, but in context I saw it in a whole new light, even though I'd seen the exact same footage before, in the context of the plot, I found it a rather frightening and effective action set piece.

00:04:22
Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the effects in this are great for the day. They were ambitious for the day. And you know, you can't you can't look back in a film like this without seeing a few scenes and special effects generally speaking, and that's the case here. But by and large everything looks looks wonderful. And if you take the film in its entirety and you let it do its work on you, yeah, everything holds up really well.

00:04:45
Speaker 2: Another way in which I think we have to take it as from its time is I did say the film is very like thoughtful and introspective, which it is, but a lot of that thoughtfulness and introspection comes in the form of kind of ponderously delivered stentorian narration. You know, it's like the voiceover narration that like tells you all of the main character's inner thoughts about his own search for meaning. Is maybe a bit blustery in its delivery, but nevertheless, like the sentiments expressed in the writing in those sections I think are really good.

00:05:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of it does have to deal with like fifties American masculinity, and there are plenty of nineteen fifties pictures that we've watched that have that masculinity of the time period prominently featured. But usually it's not self reflective. Usually it's not at all analyzing what this is that? What is this? What are these ideas? These fears and expectations that everyone's trapped with the right. Instead, it's usually just like here is your jawline, who's ready to punch the alien that stands in for a communist? Yeah? As I was watching it, I kept thinking a little bit about the television series mad Men, And in fact, my elevator pitch would be what if the male characters in mad Men physically trunk and were attacked by their own cats and household pests?

00:06:11
Speaker 2: I mean that nails it. The main character in this movie is literally an advertising I don't know if he's an executive, but he's he works in advertising. He's an.

00:06:22
Speaker 1: Three interesting stats just for weird House Cinema here. This is our second Jack Arnold picture. This is our second Richard Matheson screenplay, and it's actually our second miniaturization film. We previously discussed nineteen forty's Doctor Cyclops.

00:06:36
Speaker 2: Which Doctor Cyclops also had really excellent special effects for the time. That was a great looking movie, though, I think this one is a lot more interesting in terms of the characters.

00:06:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely.

00:06:49
Speaker 2: The other Jack Arnold movie was Tarantula, which was not nearly as good as this, but was a lot of fun in that campier direction. I was expecting this time. What was the other Matheson movie?

00:07:02
Speaker 1: The other Madison picture was The Devil Rides Out. It was he was adapting someone else's novel, A Weekly Novel. In this picture he adapts his own.

00:07:13
Speaker 2: Novel, simon I'd rather see you dead than dabbling with shrink misted.

00:07:18
Speaker 1: All right, Well, let's go ahead and listen to the trailer. Some trailer audio here. This one's a lot of fun, and I love how this one begins with the incredible. Shrinking, man, shrink, You.

00:07:56
Speaker 3: Are getting smaller. There's no medical precedent for what's happening to you. I simply know that you're getting smaller. I want you to stop thinking about us our marriage.

00:08:10
Speaker 2: Some awful things might happen as long.

00:08:12
Speaker 4: As you've got this wedding ring on.

00:08:14
Speaker 1: You got me.

00:08:21
Speaker 3: This is Awson Well speaking. I have forty five seconds to tell you about something I think you will remember the longest day you lived. It's about a man named Scott Carry. A few months ago, he was six feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds. To day, he's two inches tall and you can hold him in the palm of your hands. Now he lives in a world where he must fight for his life, a world or a friendly house cat. He's a predatory monster.

00:08:49
Speaker 4: Incredible because it's almost beyond imagining. Incredible because every hour.

00:08:56
Speaker 1: He gets smaller and smaller.

00:09:00
Speaker 4: In front of all of it, called every moment the pro homes.

00:09:15
Speaker 1: A note before we keep going if you want to watch this as well. We watched it on the excellent Criterion collection disc, which features a great four K digital restoration of the film itself and a load of great extras. I didn't get to go through all the extras, but I went through some of them and there they're pretty great. Highly recommend this edition. It's available on DVD and Blu Ray rented the Blue from Video Drome. It's also available for digital rental on most platforms. All right, well, let's start talking a little bit about the people involved here. Some of these are people we've covered before, in which cause I'm going to try and cover them just a little a little differently than before. But yeah, at the top of the picture we have Jack Arnold, the director who lived nineteen twelve through nineteen ninety two. Again, this is our second Jack Arnold film, following nineteen fifty five Tarantula. He learned cinematography and filmmaking under rock for Jay Flaherty while serving in the US military in World War Two, and following the war, started the Promotional Films Company with Lee Goldman. He directed the nineteen forty eight short Chick Enough Tomorrow. This one is riffed on Mystery Science Theater two thousand. So I'd seen this one many times, but I did not know until this week but it was a Jack Arnold production.

00:10:20
Speaker 2: I have never seen this in full, and I haven't seen it rift, but I was skipping around in the link you sent me and there are parts where like it shows maps and the map segment the animated map segments reminded me of the World War II propaganda films that Walt Disney made, like Victory through Air Power.

00:10:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it makes sense given where he came out of, where he learned his craft. And in nineteen fifty he directed the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union documentary With These Hands, which was nominated for an Oscar.

00:10:51
Speaker 2: This immediately caught my eye because, okay, so this is an independent promotional film for the ILGWU, but the International Ladies Garment Workers Union is also the subject of my longtime favorite commercial that appears on many tapes of the Star Wars Holiday Special where they sing the union song you know, you know the one I'm talking about one. Yeah, yeah, it's great. It's tied for my favorite with Tobar. Of course.

00:11:25
Speaker 1: You know, our coworker Annie Reese really wants to come on the show and discuss about the Star Wars Holiday Special.

00:11:32
Speaker 2: This year.

00:11:33
Speaker 1: She has made it known.

00:11:34
Speaker 2: Oh, Annie and I have discussed the International Ladies Garment Workers Union commercial and to war the Telesonic robot a number of times, so we can maybe when she does come we can do a full ranking of all the holiday special commercials.

00:11:49
Speaker 1: Sounds good. So anyway, with these hands was was a hit, didn't win the Oscar, but was nominated, and this enough, it was enough to catch the attention of Universal Studios, so they signed Jack Arnold on is one of their directors. So I mentioned there's a great there's some great extras on that Criterion collection disc and there's a great about an hour long bio about Arnold's career, and one of the things that they stress in it is that when you got hired by a major film studio as a director during this period, you were expected to deliver on whatever they needed. So a studio like Universal they had to bust out the full menu of films. You know, it wasn't just the pricey specials. They also had had appetizers, you know, they had to have the crowd pleasers, so you know, they had their prestige titles all the way down to the genre dregs, and certainly in this time that's where you would find your science fiction.

00:12:38
Speaker 2: So if you are a studio employed director, like Jack Arnold at this time, you're probably not doing a lot of what many people probably imagine directors doing today, which is like striking out on their own with like a script that they're really excited about and then finding funding for that and putting together a production. It's a lot more kind of like work for hire, like the studio says, here's the movie you're making.

00:12:59
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, they might assigned you a Western, a horror, a sci fi film, you name it, and it was up to you to make it work and deliver. I guess this. This was referenced a good bit in the Coen Brothers film the titles Eluding Me at the Moment Wrestling Pictures.

00:13:15
Speaker 2: Oh, Barton Fink. Barton Fink.

00:13:17
Speaker 1: Yes, he was a writer in but he was very much in the studio system and was expected to deliver what they needed.

00:13:25
Speaker 2: He was going to write for Wallace Bury or something.

00:13:28
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Arnold comes aboard their universal and the first thing they give him his nineteen fifty three's Girls in the Night. This is a troubled youth picture with fittingly aged youths, you know that are clearly like in their thirties or something. But he apparently did well with it and he was handed it came from outer Space, which ultimately came out the same year. Now I haven't seen it came from outer space, but the way they were discussing it in this extra made it sound like something we might want to check out sometime because it was based on a story treatment from Ray Bradberry, and it was pretty ambitious and ahead of its time in many ways. So it's one of these films where the aliens are not villainous but merely just difficult to understand. And also this is pretty crazy too. You were actually never meant to see the aliens. And this is the way they initially shot the picture and approached the picture. It wasn't until the studio basically had some time to think about this and they're like, look, we can't put nothing on a poster. We need to put a monster on the poster. This is a monster movie, Gosh darn it. So they ended up having to compromise and actually came up with like a pretty interesting looking creature to fit in there. And still, even though they had to compromise, the results were supposed to be pretty good.

00:14:40
Speaker 2: Oh, I would be absolutely game to talk about this one.

00:14:42
Speaker 1: So that film was a hit, and for a long stretch it kind of cemented Arnold's place as their sci fi guy, you know, and this was a solid position, even though you're further down the ranks and fifties Hotllywood his follow up, certainly when we look back on Jack Arnold's pictures, like this is maybe the one that made the biggest impact on popular culture. Nineteen fifty fourth Creature from the Black Ligo Ah.

00:15:05
Speaker 2: The creature from which, of course becomes one of the pantheon of universal monsters, the big ones you know about.

00:15:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and I mean it really just strikes through to the public horror consciousness, becomes this enduring pop culture figure and was a huge hit at the time, so huge that it actually inspired a sequel, which wasn't like the normal like nowadays we just think, you know, that's what you assume is going to happen. If there's not a sequel, then I guess the first one wasn't successful, but it wasn't a given back in the day, so he ended up doing the sequel, which is not as good or I don't know. It's hard to really judge the Creature films because the first one is it's both mostly about just how good that creature suit looks.

00:15:50
Speaker 2: Yeah. The first one I think of as wonderfully atmospheric and having that great monster in it. But I've seen it several times and I really couldn't tell you anything about the human characters. I don't recall at all. Yeah, yeah, I just remember the humans come off as jerks, like they come to where the creature lives and they start shooting at him and stuff. They're like, he's not attacking cities or anything. He's just hanging out in a bog or in a lake somewhere in the jungle and they come to him.

00:16:20
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So it's kind of hard to digest that. And then the second one they kind of rehash it, except they make the suit look goofy, like the eyes look goofy in the second one. Yeah, And then the third one is more disturbing, and perhaps there's a lot to talk about with the third one, but also it's just it's not as fun it's the first one by any stretch. So anyway, it was a huge hit. Arnold comes back with Tarantula, which we've talked about on the show, and then in nineteen fifty seven he pulls off easily his greatest achievement in sci fi cinema, The Incredible Shrinking Man. It's like we've been saying, it's really the total package, a big budget effects movie for the time and for the genre, with a great, intelligent script built on solid formances. This wouldn't be his last sci fi film, but outside of the sheer popularity of the creature itself from Creature from the Black Lagoon, this one is kind of his career defining film.

00:17:11
Speaker 2: Okay, now, we also talked about how this film benefits from some excellent writing by Richard Matheson.

00:17:19
Speaker 1: That's right. Richard Matheson lived nineteen twenty six through twenty thirteen, American writer who's in large part I think best remembered for his nineteen fifty four novel I Am Legend. But for a few different reasons, like some people who just are really fond of the book, and I've loved the book. I haven't read it in many years, but I read it a couple of times and loved it. But of course it became the basis for I think three different film adaptations. Sixty four is The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price, nineteen seventy one's The Omega Man starring Chuck Heston, and then two thousand and seven's I Am Legend starring Will Smith, each one a very distinct, very set in its time adaptation of the source material.

00:18:01
Speaker 2: I got an idea, someday we should do three weeks in a row where we do all three of these movies.

00:18:07
Speaker 1: It could be fun, it could be we could learn a lot about ourselves. I think yeah. But it wasn't a one trick pony. He also wrote the excellent Haunted House novel hell House, the thriller Duel, The Shrinking Man. All of these were adapted into films A Duel by young Steven Spielberg. Some other books he had read it adapted included What Dreams May Come and A Stir of Echoes.

00:18:29
Speaker 2: So in this case, he wrote a screenplay for this movie based on a novel he had published just the previous year. I think right, yeah, it was still hot, still hot. Yeah.

00:18:39
Speaker 1: He also wrote a lot of TV, including sixteen episodes of the original Twilight Zone, including such episodes as Nightmare at twenty thousand Feet. He also wrote for such shows as Night Gallery, The Original Star Trek, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and thriller. So as we've been discussing an Incredible Shrinking Man based on The Shrinking Man the novel, and yeah, it's you know, it's not just about the fantastic scenario of gradual miniaturization, but it is this kind of analysis and rumination on masculine ideals in middle class America of the time. The book and this movie would also serve as inspiration for The Incredible Shrinking Woman in nineteen eighty one that was scripted by Jane Wagner, and I believe that was directed by Joel Schumacher. Oh, okay, I personally haven't seen it, but I hear it's good and it's a great idea, you know, to take this older movie that is all about like masculine miniaturization and what does that mean if you approach it from a feminine perspective.

00:19:51
Speaker 2: Oh, I just looked up. It's Lily Tomlin is the film character.

00:19:55
Speaker 1: She's our shrinker. Yeah, our shrunken man in this film, however, playing the character Scott Carrey is the actor Grant Williams, who have nineteen thirty one through nineteen eighty five. Williams was a versatile American actor of stage, TV, and screen. It's noted in the Criterion Collection edition that his casting in this film was very much that of an ascendant talent who could play a relatable character, as opposed to what you sometimes got in genre films of the day, some sort of pure Hollywood actor type who's kind of square job guy who's sort of fallen down the ladder of success and winds up in your B picture or your genre picture. But yeah, Grant Williams does it, really, I think a great job, and it's very tremendous, a very sort of isolated, self reflective kind of performance.

00:20:47
Speaker 2: This guy had a little bit less of the stink of westerns than a lot of fifty sci fi movie protagonists do.

00:20:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Like you look at him and you don't instantly think, when's this guy going to punch some body?

00:21:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:21:01
Speaker 1: So Williams had smaller roles in TV and film before this, But what really made him stand out was a bit performance in the nineteen fifty six film a Rock Hudson picture titled Written on the Wind's I think he's like a gas station attendant in it or something. Not a very big part, but it made an impact. And yeah, The Incredible Shrinking Man is a great showcase for his acting talents and allows him to really stand out. He followed this up with the lead role in The Monolith Monsters. An interesting looking picture from one of the writers of Tarantula, and we talked about that a bit in our Tarantula episode that I have not seen it.

00:21:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've eyed Monolith Monsters for Weird House before.

00:21:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, because that one. Like the basic idea is, let's do you know a fifties monster movie, but the monsters are geology. It sounds like a terrible idea. So it's like I have to I have to look and see, you know, yeah, or it sounds like a studio might have stumbled over. Anyway. Williams found some success here. Then he moved from Universal to Warner Brothers in fifty nine. He did various TV and film roles after that. Some of the standouts include nineteen sixties The Leech Woman. This is one that was also featured on Mystery Science Theater. This is the one that has a great line from The Leech Woman where she says, you will never escape me. You are the one in my dreams of blood. Great line, how romantic, it's not supposed to be romantic exactly, but anyway. He was also in sixty threes, p two, one oh nine, nineteen seventy one's Brain of Blood, and nineteen seventy six's Doomsday Machine. He did fifty episodes of TV's Hawaiian I, and he pops up in one episode of the original The Outer Limits. He also did one episode of The Monsters.

00:22:46
Speaker 2: Oh is he a boyfriend that Marilyn Munster brings home? And then he gets scared and runs away, and they said, oh, you did it again.

00:22:54
Speaker 1: One assumes yes, all right, So he's the I mean, he's the centerpiece in this picture. Most of your screen time is spent with him. But we also have a major character in Louise Carey, his wife, played by Randy Stewart. Who lived nineteen twenty four through nineteen ninety six. She was an actor in numerous popular movies of the forties and fifties like Late forties and in the fifties, and later a frequent TV player. She was a supporting player in Howard Hawks, I was a male Warbride from nineteen forty nine, All About Eve from nineteen fifty and she did a lot of TV in westerns leading into The Incredible Shrinking Man, and afterwards it was mostly TV westerns and police shows until the mid nineteen seventies. Now, there's another female character in this that we'll discuss when we get more into the plot. This is a character named Clarice, played by April Kent, who lived nineteen thirty five through nineteen ninety eight. She has only six film credits to her name. She was the daughter of noted actor June Havoc, who lived nineteen twelve through twenty ten, and was niece of the legendary burlesque dancer Gypsy rose Lee, who lived nineteen eleven through nineteen seventy.

00:23:57
Speaker 2: She's only in a couple of scenes, but she's very good. He's kind of the soul of the movie in a way.

00:24:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, you're right, Okay. The Shrinking Man also has a brother named Charlie. Charlie is played by Paul Langton, who lived nineteen thirteen through nineteen eighty TV and film actor who appeared on a couple episodes of The Twilight Zones, a nineteen fifty four Yetti movie called The Snow Creature, and nineteen fifty eight's it The Terror from Beyond Space, which I've heard great things about that. One might be one to look at in the future. This guy is your square job.

00:24:29
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, he plays just kind of like he's like a business executive. I don't remember him being super notable.

00:24:36
Speaker 1: No, but you know who is notable? Oh my god, a feline actor. We don't get to talk about feline actor. Its I'm weird health cinema. But Orang the Cat plays Butch the cat.

00:24:47
Speaker 2: Orang not super creative name, Butch also kind of a strange name for a cat, It seems to me. I don't know why.

00:24:55
Speaker 1: I think Butch could work for a rough and tumble tom cat, you know, maybe a indoor outdoor cat that shows up bleeding from a lot of fights, that sort of thing. But Orang Orange is very much the sort of name that a that a toddler gives a stuffed cat.

00:25:14
Speaker 2: Yeah. But orangy, Wow, what a presence in this film, and not just in the attack scene. There are some interesting moments from before that that sort of rides the line between cute and ominous, especially because you sort of sense what may be coming.

00:25:32
Speaker 1: There are basically two ways of looking at Orang as a as a career actor in Hollywood. Either this is one cat, and I tend to maybe I want to side with that because that sounds it's a better story that way. But it's also possible that this was more than one cat that was marketed as Orangey to Hollywood. So I'm probably going to lean more into the idea of this being an individual cat that lived nineteen fifty through nineteen sixty seven because Rangi had star power. Orang was a rare male marmalade tat cat owned and trained by the famous Hollywood animal handler Frank in In's other animals included the dogs of the Bingi franchise Woa Yeah. And Orange is a true Hollywood legend and the only two time winner of the Patsy Award that's Picture Animal Top Star of the Year, which the American Humane Association put on.

00:26:22
Speaker 2: What do you think Orange's a reward was when he won this prize, you get like three hole cans of tuna to himself, just faced down in the can.

00:26:30
Speaker 1: I would hope. So what pictures was Orang in? Well, between nineteen fifty one and nineteen sixty five, Orange was in Roubard, which I think is about a cat that owns a baseball team or something. This Island Earth, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Obviously, The Matchmaker, The Diary of Anne Frank, plays a cat that almost gives up Anne Frank's family to the Nazis. Oh, No, visit to a Small Planet, Breakfast at tiff Denise, Okay, Gidget, The Comedy of Terrors, and the Village of the Giants.

00:27:06
Speaker 2: Oh that's a mister big movie.

00:27:08
Speaker 1: Yeah. On the small screen, he acted in such shows as Alfred Ditchcock Presents, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, My Favorite Martian Mission Impossible, and the old Batman TV series.

00:27:20
Speaker 2: Was he a villain on Batman called Orange g I.

00:27:23
Speaker 1: Don't know, because you know, sometimes you just need a cat for a small part of the set. Sometimes you need a cat to try and eat your hero. So it varies what you're going to bring Orange in for. But Orange you got to work with a number of actors. And these are actors that he actually shared scenes with. Audrey Hepburn, Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Lourie.

00:27:46
Speaker 2: Amazing.

00:27:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, all of these actors petted this cat. Yeah, you know, there's there's scenes of like Vincent Price holding Orange. There's a there's a you can see screenshots of like Boris Carloff pretending to be dead while Orange is on his chest. So sometimes he's right up in there.

00:28:05
Speaker 2: Of all those actors, who do you think gives the best pets?

00:28:10
Speaker 1: Vincent Price? Right?

00:28:11
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the Vincent Price belly rubs are superb.

00:28:16
Speaker 1: Now, rang was apparently not the nicest cat, As is sometimes the case with human actors. He often lashed out at his co stars. He might bite them or scratch them. He might leave the set for no apparent reason, shutting down the production, which again, some human actors may do this from time to time.

00:28:34
Speaker 2: But he was Orange.

00:28:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I can imagine Orange only communicating with the director via post it notes, that sort of thing. But he was also considered like the best, and I guess you're also it's basically, I mean, you're hiring frank In for his animals. And one of the things about Orange is that Orangy was not as prone to watering off the set. Cats, as many filmmakers have testified to over the years, are harder to work with than dogs. It's harder to convince them to do what you need them to do.

00:29:05
Speaker 2: For a given shot or sequence ORANGI was Marlon Brando filming The Island of Doctor Moreau.

00:29:11
Speaker 1: Just basically yeah. I remember seeing some extras where the Coen Brothers were talking about filming with a cat on what was it, the the Lewin the Lewyn Davis movie, the Folk Singer movie. Yeah, yeah, there's a cat that plays a prominent role in the plot, and they were like, it was so hard to shoot with this cat. We'll never make a film with a cat again.

00:29:32
Speaker 2: Oh that makes sense, But that kind of comes through in the movie because the point of the cat is that, like he's trying to keep it from getting away.

00:29:40
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, yeah, all right. Some other bit players in this, So Raymond Bailey, who lived nineteen oh four through nineteen eighty plays one of two doctors that our hero goes to, our main character goes to. We've talked about him before because he was in Tarantula. He played a character with a nim of Townshend, and he's probably best remembered for playing mister Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbill. He's from nineteen sixty through nineteen seventy one.

00:30:06
Speaker 2: Oh, is this the first doctor that dude goes to.

00:30:11
Speaker 1: This is the This is not the skinnier doctor, this is the other doctor. So this might be the later doctor.

00:30:16
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, yeah, mister Drysdale. Okay, yeah, later doctor. I seemed Tarantula. I I don't remember who townshend was.

00:30:23
Speaker 1: It's hard to remember anyone other than our two main characters, the Tarantula and Clint Eastwood in that movie. Yeah. Well, then of course our scientist Leo G. Carrol with a mutated face. Yes, right, they are multiple memorable characters, but Raymond Bailey's not one of them.

00:30:41
Speaker 2: Oh okay, I think. I think Raymond Bailey played the small town doctor in Tarantula who's arguing with John Agar about who died of what reason?

00:30:51
Speaker 1: Yes, I believe so.

00:30:52
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:30:52
Speaker 1: Now the other doctor in this is played by William Shallard, who lived nineteen twenty two through twenty and sixteen. American acts through with a very long career stretching from nineteen forty seven through twenty fourteen. That's eight decades and three hundred and eighty eight TV in film credits on IMDb. One time president of the Screen Actors Guild, he also played a doctor in Joe Dante's Interspace from nineteen eighty seven, which is fun because it's another miniaturization film, and I think Dante used him a few different times, like he shows up in Gremlins, for example. But other film credits include Singing in the Rain and The Heat of the Night Written on the Wind, which we talked about already, them the Forben Project, Mighty Joe Young, the Man from Planet X, The Monolith Monsters, Gog and tobor the Great.

00:31:40
Speaker 2: Oh, which we covered just a few months ago.

00:31:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:31:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I'm just looking at this relationship and thinking Joe Dante, I think, is very fond of making movies that call back to movies he saw when he was a kid. So I'd be surprised if he made a Shrink movie that has this guy in it who is in another famous Shrink movie from a couple of decades earlier. That that can't be an accident.

00:32:03
Speaker 1: Oh no, there are no accidents with casting like that from Dante. All right. Finally, when it comes to the music, this is one of those films where there's in the credits there's no like credited you score composed by that they credit the main trumpet player, but there are like four uncredited names on the studio soundtrack when you look it up in the databases, suffice to say that it's a very traditional and melodramatic score for the most part, not the kind of thing that I would ever listen to an isolation, But it works really well in this film, providing I think, a mostly serious musical framework for the visuals.

00:32:39
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:32:39
Speaker 2: I thought there were parts here where the musical score was more distinctive than most movies of this time.

00:32:47
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, and certainly towards the end.

00:32:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, because like I recall thinking with the opening credits that I was like, what does this music remind me of? And obviously it wasn't this, but I realized it reminded me of Ershwin, Like it kind of sounds like the It had this blooming trumpet motif that reminded me of Rhapsody in Blue.

00:33:07
Speaker 4: Oh.

00:33:07
Speaker 1: Interesting. The trumpet soloist who is credited in the credits was Ray Anthony born nineteen twenty two and, as of this recording, the last surviving member of the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

00:33:27
Speaker 2: All right, well you're ready to discuss the plot.

00:33:30
Speaker 1: Oh, let's get into it.

00:33:31
Speaker 2: So in the opening credits, while this music plays, we see a blank white silhouette of a man on a black background. Again, there's this this horn, heavy music playing. And I really like the sort of abstract imagery of the credits because we start by just zooming toward a jagged, irregular white shape in the distance. It's like a black background in a white shape, and you're thinking, what is it? Is this some kind of like cloud maybe, or is it a low crystal? And eventually you realize that it is sunlight. You are zooming through a cave to the mouth of the cave, out of the dark cave into the daylight, and so that growing white object in the distance was the mouth of the cave and the light outside. And so when we come out, we see the ocean. There are waves breaking, birds of boat rocking in the tide, and there begins narration. And I'm gonna be a little harsh here, because overall I think this is a fantastic movie. I think it has a really just flat on its face opener, not good, not good opening lines. It starts with the narration saying, the strange, almost unbelievable story of Robert Scott carry began on a very ordinary summer day. I know this story better than anyone, because I am Robert Scott carry why would you phrase it that way? So it's like some kind of reveal, but you're only two sentences in. You're not gonna be blowing anybody's mind with a twin whist at this point, Like would people be saying, oh, whoa the narrator who just now started talking is also the guy he's talking about.

00:35:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, like Herman Melville does it right off the bat right, Yeah, but I know what you made. Yeah, this kind of struck me as being maybe something I haven't read the original novel, but maybe this is kind of tightly bound to the original novel.

00:35:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe it's better on the page, that sort of thing. So, yeah, it's a great script, but this is not a good opener. You could have come up with something better anyway. So in the beginning, we see a man presumably Robert Scott Carey from the narration, and a woman and we find out this is his wife, Louise, and they're lounging side by side in the sun on the bow of boat. And the situation is they revealed they've been married for six years. They are on vacation. The boat belongs to Robert Scott Carey's brother. Robert Scott Carey needs to get beer in him, and he yearns for Louise to retrieve the beer on his behalf, and Louis desireth not to bring him the beer and tells him he should fetch his own beer.

00:36:07
Speaker 1: This is a very simple scene, but I thought it was very good, very well acted. Yeah, it comes off playful, but it also in some ways lays the groundwork for the developments in their relationship to come, the problems that will emerge, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, And one other thing. This took me a little bit to break down about this scene, but okay, these two characters are wearing bathing suits, you know, nineteen fifties bathing suits that are distinct. They would look a little old fashioned today, but they're not that different from what a couple might wear on a boat today. And for some reason, I thought this made them feel a little more relatable in this scene to modern audiences, because, unlike many other scenes in the movie, they're not wearing those nineteen fifties domestic uniforms, you know, the sort of standard dress of a merry, middle class couple in nineteen fifties America that you see in every other film.

00:37:00
Speaker 2: Right, leave it to Beaver wearing a coat and tie while sitting on the couch at home.

00:37:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they're again, they're also being very human and relatable in this scene. And they're not because there are plenty of films from this time period in which you have people in bathing suits. So it's not just the bathing suit, but so many of those sequences are people being yep in bathing suits, and these characters are being real.

00:37:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're being playful and their relationship is sweet, so like that. They playfully argue about this, But eventually Louise is like, Okay, I'll get him a beer. I think he promises her something and he's gonna make dinner. He's gonna make dinner. Yeah, So she goes down into the cabin to get him a beer, and as soon as she disappears, down below, Robert Scott Carey here witnesses a bizarre site. There is an ominous white cloud of vapor billowing rapidly in his direction over the surface of the water. And this is totally unexplained. It's not like one of those scenes in a movie where you know you've heard already a radio announcement in the backgrounds, like a cloud of vapor escaped from a chemical transport is blah blah blah. You just have no idea what this is.

00:38:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I love how how unexplained it is, because it could It almost takes on the feeling of vision or prophecy, though of course, with the context of the film, we are to assume this is something that actually does happen to him. Yeah, but I like how it the way that it is, like on the horizon, the way the film that the scene is shot too, with we're we're viewing him back turned to the camera, the cloud in the distance moving ever closer. It ends up taking on a kind of temporal quality to it, you know, like the thing that is approaching is not only like an actual physical sci fi threat and the scene, but it also represents like the uncertainty of the future, the known and unknown challenges of the future.

00:38:50
Speaker 2: It's coming on faster than he can react, and he can't see through it to what's on the other side. Yeah, So before he really has time to understand what's happening, the cloud of overtakes the boat and it envelops him, and then it just blows on by, and so it's gone before Louise even emerges from down below, but it leaves Scott here covered in what looks like glitter.

00:39:13
Speaker 1: This is probably a good time to mention for anyone who's purely listening to this and has it's saying, this is a black and white film, so the glitter, the glitter, You can still laugh at it by all means, but it is at least in black and white and not like sparkling purple or anything.

00:39:28
Speaker 2: So we cut from here to six months later, and it's a pleasant domestic scene. Louise is at their home calling out to a cat to give him some milk. This is the first time we meet Orange or Butch in the movie. And as soon as I saw this, I was like, oh, everybody here is going to recognize a Chekhov's cat in a shrink movie when they see it.

00:39:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think the cat was prominently featured in promotional material, so I think a lot of the original audience saw this coming as well.

00:39:57
Speaker 2: And actually I think the movie, in a smart way, play into that, because instead of trying to keep it secret, like, oh, you know, there's gonna be a big twist that like the cat attacks him. It plays up the fact that the cat is going to be a threat, I think, by in a very subtle way. A few times after Scott starts shrinking, having these little moments where like, the cat does something cute, but it's photographed in a way that could be interpreted as a little bit unnerving.

00:40:26
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:40:27
Speaker 2: Anyway, so we go into the house and it's you know, the kitchen looks like the I Love Lucy kitchen, the old school refrigerator with round edges, it's that kind of mid century home. Scott's getting dressed and he's running into a problem. It seems like none of his clothes fit anymore. They're all too big, and he even thinks Louise might have picked up the wrong bag at the dry cleaners. And he's eating less than he used to. He has one egg for breakfast instead of two. So he goes to the doctor to get this checked out, and the doctor confirms that he is not only ten pounds lighter than he used to be. He measures Scott's height and Scott's like, that doesn't make sense. That's several inches shorter than I used to be. How's that supposed to happen? But this scene was good because the doctor has very reasonable things to say. So he attributes the weight loss to stress, and then he doubts that Scott is actually getting shorter. He says, you know, like he brings real knowledge. That makes a lot of sense. He argues that, well, maybe your previous height measurements, you know, you only have a couple of sources for that. That was a couple of physicals over the last many years. Those might have been early in the morning when we're actually a bit taller than we are later in the day, which is true due to compression of the spine from being upright throughout the day. Generally you lose, you know, some small but real amount of height. And maybe there was just errors on top of that, so that seems possible. And back home, Scott seems preoccupied after this doctor visit. Louise asks him, Hey, what did Charlie that's referring to his brother, What Charlie think about your idea for a newspaper ad? So, Scott, we learn as an ad man, what is the It's not a wheel, it's a carousel of shrinking down to the size of an atom.

00:42:12
Speaker 1: I don't know.

00:42:12
Speaker 2: We'll keep that in mind as we go. Yeah, but they start putting several lines of evidence together, so it's undeniable that he's getting smaller every day because Louis is used to have to like stand up on her toes to kiss him, and now she doesn't. And this kind of foreshadows the way the premise of the movie comes as an injury to his sense of manhood.

00:42:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, and also that it's he's thinking he's shorter, just in a large part because things are changing, his relationship to things are changing. So one of the great things about this the way the picture treats this shrinking, which again is very much a sci fi miniaturization gimmick. But they're always playing, at least a little bit with the metaphorical nature of this. What does it mean that you are changing in relation to the rest of the world, and how many things in the modern life could that be compared to?

00:43:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, the story is rich with metaphors in that way. So he eventually he goes back to the doctor and it turns out there's no mistaking it. They do X rays to confirm that Scott is definitely actually shrinking, and the doctor sends him off to a special medical research institute in California to discover the cause of his condition and hopefully to cure it. They do a bazillion different kinds of tests shown in what I thought was a very effective montage. It almost reminded me of the freaky, alienating montage of medical tests and the Exorcist.

00:43:40
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, they're doing a number of things. He's describing some of them in the narration. But yeah, they're seeing they're looking all inside him, they're looking at all these test results, just trying, mostly in vain, to understand what's happening and what can we do to treat it.

00:43:55
Speaker 2: Eventually they come up with a diagnosis. They figure out what's going on. They say, quote, it's a re arrangement of the molecular structure of the cells in your body. And you know, that's a funny phrase when you pull it out of context here. But I'm going to give this movie a lot of credit. It does a very good job of selling its sy tech babble.

00:44:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, in the scene, you believe it, and more to the point, you can tell that our main character believes it, like and he's finding comfort in the fact that Okay, they figured it out. Now we can move on to the next thing, the modern world can fix this.

00:44:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they even put together, like what was probably the cause? They they think that it was sort of a two stage chain of causes. One was that he was recently exposed to an insecticide, which he remembers a case of like being around past control people spraying. But then before that they were like, have you ever been exposed to any radio activity? Because that, in combination with the insecticide, did something. And then he remembers finally the boat, the mist, the mist, And they determine and he might just keep shrinking. They don't know what to do about it yet, And so there's a discussion between Scott and Louise where he becomes quickly quite fatalistic about it. You know, this may kill him or make him no longer the man she married, in which case he says, well, there will be limitations on her obligations to him, and she poo poos this. She tells him she still loves him. But right in the middle of the scene, his wedding ring falls off of his finger onto the floor of the car.

00:45:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, that may have been all over the top, but I think that's one of the really fun things about these pictures that there's still moments like that that are a little overly dramatic and you can laugh at but your laughter doesn't really take you out, you know.

00:45:44
Speaker 2: Well, there's another one that comes up, so we more time passes, and there's a scene where we meet Scott's brother, Charlie, and you see Charlie and Louise in like a living room together and Charlie's just kind of like talking into a chair that appears to be empty, and he's saying, you know, his business has turned. Things have gone bad at the plant. His income is gone, so he's running out of ways to help support Louise and Scott. But he does know of another way to bring in money, which is that reporters are offering to pay for the story. They've heard the rumors about the rumors of the incredible shrinking Man. So Charlie's like, hey, what if we just take the money and we you know, let you become an objective media fixation. And then there's a reveal. There's a reverse shot and we see that Charlie has been speaking into this chair the whole time, and we finally see Scott in the chair, but now he has shrunken to the size where like he doesn't you know, his head doesn't reach above the cushion and his feet don't dangle below the cushions. It seems like he's about three feet tall here.

00:46:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's this is a this is I guess, our first look at some of these fantastic sets they put together to utilize with other effects methods in order to make it look like he's smaller, you know, in this case is like a giant chair. But h but this reveal is also quite funny. It's something about the really dramatic music that hits when we see him there. Yeah. I mean, I don't know to what extent it was meant to be funny, but like I'm saying, you can you can laugh at moments like that in the film and it doesn't really detach you from the serious nature of the film as well.

00:47:22
Speaker 2: I agree, I don't think it was meant to be funny at all, but and it is kind of funny, but I think that's just a I don't know, time and film convention thing, and the movie still works. Yeah. Now there was another thing I was wondering about though, and this is sort of getting into the unspoken themes of this movie. A lot of what's interesting about it is unspoken but implied. The thing is that, you know, Scott doesn't have a job anymore, so he's, uh, he's having to get support from his brother and ultimately support from these you know, these media vultures who want to who want to make a buck off his story. But I was thinking, why doesn't Scott have a job anymore? They say he works in advertising, and obviously, like his shrinking would not interfere with his ability to come up with ideas for advertisements, Like he could still pitch ideas for you know, magazine spreads about how cigarettes are good for you. But I guess maybe it's implying that he lost his job because it is something about like like embarrassment or fear of how he'd be perceived or the way people would treat him. Just the idea that like he can't go out to the workplace and be seen like this.

00:48:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, I think to a large extent, that's that's part of it, right, Like this fear of being ostracized for now being different, for not fitting in, for not you know, for not fitting the sort of template for for what it meant to be a man anymore in that time because he's he's physically reduced, he's literally reduced. On the other hand, I don't know, it's like you, I don't know exactly what his job consisted of. But I instantly come back to Mad Men, you know, and all the various schmoozing and socializing that our various characters, professional characters in that show have to do, and he just like he can't do it anymore. How's he going to go and drink and eat oysters with other businessmen at lunch if he's now three k tall?

00:49:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, faced with no other options, Scott decides, Okay, I will become a media sensation, and that's what they do. They apparently get some money out of this, but it leads to people like reporters and just gawkers gathering outside the house hoping to get a glimpse of him, and the special effects really start to be revealed here, Like Scott is shown in an extremely convincing set of the home living room where the couch cushions are taller than him and the cat comes up to his waist and so forth, and it looks great.

00:49:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's he's not so small that the cat will attack him yet, which I don't know. Depending on your experience with your cat at home listeners, you may have a different take on all this. I know that I'm a full sized human being and my cat attack my feet on an almost daily daily level. It's like daily assaults daily. I'm hunted for sport by this creature that I feed and care for, so I don't think I would have to get much smaller to experience worse treatment by my own cat.

00:50:19
Speaker 2: Well, we'll have to compare the movie's depiction of cat feline viciousness to the reality that you may have experienced in a little bit here, okay, But also in the scene we get the first glimpse of Scott's real anguish about what's going on. He's, you know, obviously somebody who was going through a medical situation like this would be afraid. But Scott is also An important aspect of how this works is that he's humiliated. He feels humiliated by how people see him. Of course, he's afraid of what he'll become, and he turns this into anger, like he lashes out in anger at Louise for no good reason that he does feel remorse about this.

00:51:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and again This is some of the stuff that kind of works nicely with what we see of their healthier relationship earlier on. You know, there's this kind of you know, subtle, playful teasing there. But but at this point, like they're there, you know, their relationship is a little more out of more than a little bit out of whack due to his condition, the way he's handling his condition, and the way he's taking it out on her.

00:51:29
Speaker 2: We also learned here that he's writing a book about his experience, and this seems to be sort of where the narration, the voiceover narration is coming in, Like the uh, it's sort of based on the thoughts he's writing in his memoir, I think.

00:51:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is where we got it. We get you know, all of this reflective, analytical content where he's you know, thinking about his anger, he's thinking about the way he's processing everything and beginning to tease it apart to the best of his ability.

00:51:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, and through this narration, we learn that Scott just wants he wants to hide, He wants to get away to somewhere where nobody can find him, nobody can know about him. Now, the doctors eventually do come up with something they come up with a treatment that they think will have about a fifty percent chance of curing him, and they do the injection and they run some tests and it seems like it works. It does stop the shrinking at least for now, though they don't have any guarantee that he will recover to his original size, but it seems for a while like he's not going to get any smaller than he was, which they say is installed at thirty six inches fifty two pounds. And again here there are scenes that are what I was talking about earlier with the cat scenes where the camera it seems to me, kind of meaningfully captures the cat. There's no direct indication yet that the cat will be any kind of threat, but there are these little cuddles and meows that I are perfectly bound between cute and kind of ominous. Now, ultimately, in his search for relief from his hopelessness and his emasculation, Scott leaves the house one night. He just like leaves. He goes out walking, and of course people stare at him as he walks by in the sidewalk, but he makes his way to a carnival in town where there is a there's a Barker advertising the Freak Show, which has all the usual performers, and there is like so the Barker is announcing a dwarf factress named Tiny Tina, and watching all of this, it's very interesting, like Scott has. It's much of it is unspoken, but you can tell Scott is having this mix of I think self pity and remorse. So he has the self pity of realizing that people now would look at him with the same dehumanizing lens through which they see the people in the Freak Show. But I think it's also implied that he realizes, you know, before the radioactive cloud, he would have been just like those people in the audience looking on the performers, people like Tiny Tina as inhuman curiosities.

00:54:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, this whole sequence here and what is about to come. I remember thinking this is exactly the sort of sequence that might feel like just filler in another film about somebody going through some sort of a change. In fact, I think I think it has essentially been such filler in films, but perhaps inspired by this sequence, But it really works here. It feels like it is basically we're getting to kind of like the soul of the picture.

00:54:36
Speaker 2: And speaking of this is where we're about to meet the character Clarie. So he goes into a nearby cafe across the street from the carnival, and he orders a coffee and sits by himself, and he is joined at his table by a woman named Clarice, who is also a dwarf performer, and they have an interesting conversation. She's very very kind and very wise, and they talk about what's going on. She realizes who he is because his name's been in the news, so she understands his situation, and he starts sharing his fears and is angst about living the way he is, and Clarice advises him to, you know, maybe just start by uh, to try to find a way forward, just by thinking about the future. And there's a part where Scott says what future in a world of giants and Clarie says, I've lived with them all my life. And I thought this was also a very interesting scene, like seeing people of typical size as giants, and like the turning of the tables. This way was interesting because like thespective, is the perspective that the only thing potentially bothersome about her size would come from the behavior of the giants, and she just doesn't really concern herself with them and how they behave or what they think.

00:55:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, like they're outsized as opposed to just me being downsized.

00:55:59
Speaker 2: And she tells, you know, the world can still be a wonderful place. The sky is as blue as it is for the giants, the friends are as warm.

00:56:07
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:56:07
Speaker 2: And so this meeting with Clarice and her wisdom and her kindness that kind of revives Scott and he he comes out of his out of his depression. He throws himself back into writing. He becomes deeply absorbed in his memoir. And that lasts for a while until we get to a terrible realization, which is he realizes upon a meeting with Clarice that he is actually shrinking once again, that the treatment he's been given by the doctors is no longer stalling the progression of his condition.

00:56:37
Speaker 1: Yeah. This is interesting because, yeah, because in that first sequence it is noticeable that he's a little bit taller than her, and and so on one level, you're you kind of look at that and you think, well, how much of this is kind of like his the remnants of that that mask on ego that like he's able to build some of it up because it's kind of like, on some level, Oh, finally a woman that I'm I'm taller than so I can I can fall into some of that that older thinking about the masculine roles in society. And now that's gone. Now he's clearly shorter. But then also you can you can take it at face value, you can you can take it in any additional direction of character, depth or metaphor as well.

00:57:16
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, once again, a bunch of time passes, and so the next time we meet Scott, he's living in a dollhouse on the floor in the in the home.

00:57:25
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this is a great sequence because they're in separate parts of the house. And at first you don't know that he's gotten that small.

00:57:32
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, yeah, so you don't quite realize. But then they come to speak to one another and Louise just speaking in a normal voice, like her voice hurts his ears. It's too loud, and he's yelling. And at first I didn't realize. I says, he's yelling because he's so small, he has to yell everything in order for her to hear him. But it also reads the other way too, Yes, and he's so he reflects upon himself, Like he said, he essentially explains that the small he got, the more domineering and controlling and angry he became at Louise. You know, he felt he was no longer really himself. And I thought this was really interesting about showing this kind of you know, to to generalize this weird sci fi scenario into reality that like fear and a sense of vulnerability creates anger and resentment and a desire to control other people.

00:58:28
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely so.

00:58:30
Speaker 2: It's because like he's so dependent on Louise now, he's like he's really controlling of her movements and stuff. Like she's, you know, wanting to go out to the store real quickly and he's like, tell me where you're going, you know, when will you be back and that sort of thing.

00:58:44
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And so she goes to the store. But something happens. Yeah, the cat comes in. I guess the cat has been he's they realize he's too small, and the cat lives outside now or is you know, stuck away in a room. I don't know how they have it worked out, but he's kept at a safe distance from the cat, but the cat has snuck back into the house and has been left alone in the house while she is at the store.

00:59:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so here's the famous scene that we alluded to earlier, the cat attack scene. I think, within the context of the rest of the story, the scene is really frightening. The effects are very good, and the horror plays directly on the themes because the attack is not coming from something that was ever originally threatening to Scott. The attack is from something that was previously harmless but has become threatening because the relationship between them has changed. And it kind of reminds me of the other scene where they talk about now seeing other people as giants. But of course, at least like the giants can be spoken to and reasoned with, like the cat cannot be spoken to or reason with. It just no longer even recognizes Scott as human. He's just a small, prey animal like any other.

00:59:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like the relationship shifted that far that, Yeah, you're not who or what you were before. Now you are merely prey. And this, of course, this is exactly how it would go down with a cat. I think we all realize this, even those of us who own cats and love cats. If you were this small, your cat would destroy you. There's just no way around it. It's like, that's what your cat is programmed to do. That's what your cat has evolved to do. And you have, if you are unfortunate enough to magically shrink this small well, you have fallen in line with its central hunting programming.

01:00:34
Speaker 2: In this scene we get really the first hint of something that will take up most of the rest of the movie, which is interesting problem solving relationships between Scott and his environment. So when the cat is attacking him, he really has no method of self defense, but he comes up with something clever. He pulls down on the cord of a lamp that's on a table above and manages to get it to tip over off of the side table and fall down. Frightens the cat away.

01:01:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he basically just runs for it. Now, the sequence is frightening. I love the image where the cat is creeping up on the dollhouse originally and then reaches its paw through and does the bat thing with the claw. Now, I don't want to criticize Orangey's performance and the way that Orangey chose to to perform this role, and you know the way that Jack Arnold directed it and the way Mathison wrote it. But I did find that the cat is is hissing and snarling too much. I think any of us that have been around cats, hunting or pretending to hunt, it's a very It's mostly a silent fair. I mean, sometimes you encounter that that weird chirping they do it, birds outside the window, that sort of thing. But when the hunt is on, there's a silence to the cat. You're gonna have more of that. There's gonna be that kind of butt wiggling thing they do where they're getting ready to spring, and we don't see any of that from this performance by Orangey. It still doesn't take away from the sequences but at all. But I was I was thinking about as I was watching it, like, Okay, it really would go like this. And also he takes a couple of swipes from Butch the cat in the sequence like Butch like blood's him up a good bit. In reality, I think if you're that small, I don't think you would have survived this encounter at all, no matter how clever you were, there's just no denying just how brutal a cat that size relative of your own body would be. You would just be torn apart. You might be played with a little bit, but you would be doomed.

01:02:30
Speaker 2: I totally agree. Yeah, the predator prey relationship I think doesn't play out. Something's weird here, though. You could say maybe the cat's normal hunting instincts are a little bit disrupted because he is somewhat different than I don't know. Maybe I don't know something's going on. I can think of one memory of a cat just hissing at something much smaller than it, and it was a cat. It was a cat hissing at a huge black spider.

01:03:00
Speaker 1: Hmm, okay, all right, well maybe maybe it does work. I mean cats, cats are weird.

01:03:05
Speaker 2: So I mean the cat did not did not hunt the spider. It was clearly threatened by it. I guess that's also going to connect to something in the movie in a minute here. So anyway, Scott escapes to the basement. He goes down through the basement door and ends up falling a long way into a laundry hamper. And then Louise gets home. She finds Butch the cat with like a torn piece of Scott's clothing that has blood on it, and licking blood from his paws, and so she assumes that Butch the cat has eaten her husband.

01:03:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's only one way to interpret the evidence.

01:03:52
Speaker 2: So now Scott is trapped in the basement and Louise doesn't know he's there. She thinks he's dead, and he he has to try to find his way out of the laundry hamper, He has to navigate the landscape of giant objects. He has to try to find a way to contact Louise and make her realize he's still alive, but he can't make it up the stairs and she can't hear him call out. So he's just sort of like stuck here trying to deal with this the landscape of the basement of the house and once again to hear the effects and the sets are marvelous. They're excellent at making you feel the change in scale as genuine horror, and a horror that has great verisimilit to it. I had this sense like, this is what it would be like to be several inches tall trapped in the basement of a mid century American house.

01:04:43
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, again, the prop work the sets are just amazing in this, in this whole sequence and also to black and white. Black and white, the film's you know, nicely shot throughout, but these basement sequences, especially take they end up taking on this just like rich you know, the Blacks are just so much darker and deeper in these sequences. I thought it's just excellent. It's almost it's almost like German expressionism or something.

01:05:12
Speaker 2: Yeah. In the narration, he says, the cellars stretched before me like some vast primeval plane, empty of life, littered with the relics of a vanished race, no desert island, castaway ever faced, so bleak a prospect. But he's in his house.

01:05:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but it's like he's and this works in so many levels. You know, he's fallen into the underworld. He's fallen into the place you've put things that have forgotten about, where where things that you forget about when they're working are found, like the hot water heater and so forth. I also found it interest I read that Matheson wrote the novel in large part in a cellar in a basement and would comment that, you know, like he was he was writing it, he would just look up and look around him to sort of take in the scene as he was right, and that he thought that the movie matched it perfectly.

01:06:03
Speaker 2: And there's brilliant simplicity to a lot of what follows. I mean, for most of the rest of the movie is watching our hero problem solving with ordinary objects at an alien scale. So he's hungry and he has to search for food, and there he looks across and he sees something. He realizes it is a mouse trap, and it does have cheese on it. But it's a mouse trap.

01:06:27
Speaker 1: Oh my god, and you know exactly what's gonna happen. He's going to try and rob that mouse trap, and he's problem solving with the mouse trap, but he's also really hungry and desperate, and it's the same sort of gimmick like this has probably played out more or less than so many cartoons over the days. Like I felt, this is a basic Tom and Jerry kind of a bit, but it really is scary to watch, Like I actually cried out a few times as he's like fumbling with the cheese and nearly making the trap go off. It's great.

01:06:56
Speaker 2: So eventually Scott realizes that there is some cake that Louis left on a plate on a shelf, and if he could just get to that, he could eat that, but it's way way high up, so it's like a mountain climb basically to get to it, and we see all kinds of things happen. I don't want to spoil every little detail, but there are you know, there's discovery of a sewing kit and a pin cushion and some pins that can be manipulated to form weapons, and a kind of grappling hook. There is there is a sequence where he has to cross a gap in a wooden crate, jumping from one thing to another. And I did want to do one, okay, brief monster science digression that will be familiar to people who have been listening to Weird House Cinema for a while, because I talked about the same source in our episode on robot jocks. But pedantic science note, which, by the way, should not take away from your enjoyment of this part of the movie, because if you know, like you shouldn't get hung up on physical implausibility if it works in the story. But I think the reality is if you were only a couple of inches tall, falling a great distance would be far less of a concern to you, way less of a threatening prospect than it is to people with bodies of our absolute size. And this is something that is discussed in the magnificent JBS Haldane essay from nineteen twenty six called on being the Right Size, And this is the essay that explains how essentially there are different regimes of physical forces that present threats and problems to an organism depending on what its absolute size is. So for tiny animals, there actually is not that much of a threat due to gravity. Like you know, falling a great distance is not going to harm a very small animal very much. But there is a much greater threat to small animals from the surface echin of water, which is a theme that I would like to see explored to more horrific ends and shrink movies.

01:09:07
Speaker 1: I seem to recall it's been a long time since I watched Tony I Shruck the Kids, but I think there's a scene in that where there are water droplet's following falling from the from the sky, maybe like a sprinkler system, and they're following light like bombs.

01:09:19
Speaker 3: Hmm.

01:09:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, So to a certain extent that it gets into this topic.

01:09:24
Speaker 2: Well to explain, Okay, so Haldane gives this you know whole thing. The famous line is he's talking about animals falling down a thousand yard mind shaft. He says, you know, a tiny mouse drops down a thousand yard mind shaft, and it might get a shock when it's the bottom, but if the if the bottom is relatively soft, it will probably be okay. But then he says, a rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide in animals length, breadth, and height each by ten. Its weight is reduced to a thousandth but its surface only one hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of a small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force. So that's why being small, falling is less of a big deal. But he goes on. An insect therefore is not afraid of gravity. It can fall without danger, and can cling to the ceiling with remarkably little trouble. It can go in for elegant and fantastic forms of support like that of the daddy long legs. But there is a force which is as formidable to an insect as gravitation to a mammal. This is surface tension. A man coming out of a bath carries with him a film of water about one fiftieth of an inch in thickness. This weighs roughly a pound. A wet mouse has to carry about its own weight of water. A wet fly has to lift many times its own weight, and as everyone knows, a fly, once wetted by water or any other life, is in a very serious position. Indeed, an insect going for a drink is in a great danger as a man leaning out over a precipice in search of food. If it once falls into the grip of the surface tension of the water, that is to say, gets wet, it is likely to remain so until it drowns. A few insects, such as water beetles, contrive to be unwettable. The majority keep well away from their drink by means of a long prebosis. And so this made me think more about a possibly more horrifying take on the water heater scene that will follow in the movie.

01:11:38
Speaker 4: Now.

01:11:39
Speaker 2: I believe this came up in our episode on robot Jocks, because we were talking about how, you know, if you had real hundred foot tall robots actually slugging it out, they would really really need to worry about gravity. I think basically any fall would destroy them.

01:11:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the idea of having a bipedal one is just even crazier because it just makes it more susceptible to falls.

01:11:58
Speaker 2: So if you're out there, think about making your own shrink movie. I want to see the truly horrific take on the surface tension of water. That is that is implied by Haldane's essay here that any drop of water is almost kind of like the blob.

01:12:12
Speaker 1: It's just yeah, I only saw the first of these ant man movies that came out, so I don't know if they ever get into any of that. And it seems like they're at least more recently gotten more down to like quantum stuff where you're not even they just turn it into like alien worlds and so forth.

01:12:29
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, I've never seen any of those.

01:12:32
Speaker 1: The first one was fun, remember the first one.

01:12:34
Speaker 2: Was fun anyway. Sorry, But to come back to the plot of the Incredible Shrinking Man. So Scott finally makes his way up to the cake. He achieves some cake, but it is stale once he gets to it, and it's sitting right in the shadow of a giant spider web and there's a part where he goes up to sort of a vent grate and looks out through it to see a bird out in the yard, which, of course, to him at this point would be like a dinosaur, like a giant t rex. And he looks out at the world outside and he becomes sort of like he starts laughing, but he's also angry, and he says, in narration my prison almost as far as I could see a gray, friendless area of space and time, and I resolved that as man had dominated the world of the sun, so I would dominate my world. So he sets about. He sets up a shelter for himself in a match box. Oh, and he has to retreat to it in a in a terrifying spider attack.

01:13:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, the spider that lives in the web at the top mix of the cake is clearly played by a tarantula, which of course would not be living in that web, or I'm not even sure it would be in this basement. Who knows, I supposedly got there. At any rate, it still looks great, great use of a tarantula, a live tarantula in this and of course it fits because it's the director of Tarantula.

01:13:52
Speaker 2: Do you think he used the same tarantula guy from whoever provided Tarantula's for Tarantula.

01:13:58
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe, but I think he did play on some of his experienced shooting tarantulists because they had certain there's certain things they learned about, like you know what variety of tarantula you need. You know, like you need an animal that's big enough and moves appropriately that you can then create the special effects around it. There are a lot of kind of hokey scenes out there in cinema where someone fights a quote unquote giant animal and force perspective and so forth and split screen. But this one's really good. Like this one, they put a lot of effort into making it look look look great.

01:14:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so there are some major struggles. In the final stretch of the film, he has to do battle with the spider in order to survive. Before that, there's a scene of a great flood that comes when the water heater bursts, and in the scene, you know, Louise and Charlie they finally do come down to the cellar, which is what he'd been waiting on. He was like, Okay, when they're here, I can call out to them and they'll and they'll get me, but he's too He's too small for them to hear or to see.

01:15:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like he's really passed out of their lives and has to realize it at this point.

01:15:10
Speaker 2: And there is a scary scene with the flood. It doesn't quite do the weird scale surface tension thing, but he does almost get washed down a drain, which is a horrifying prospect. But after surviving the flood, there's a change where Scott seems to gain a new kind of clarity and strength. He says, quote, a strange calm possessed me. I thought more clearly than I ever had before, as if my mind were bathed in a brilliant light. I recognize that part of my illness was rooted in hunger, and I remembered the food on the shelf, the cake threaded with spider web. I no longer felt hatred for the spider. Like myself, it struggled blindly for the means to survive. And so there is ultimately a confrontation with the spider that involves some clever use of tools, again at the alien scale, and then there there is in the end a kind of soliloquy like he he comes to realize that he somehow in like in passing beyond the realm where humans can even recognize him and help him anymore, Like the fact that Luis couldn't even hear him calling out. It seems that somehow gives him a new sense of meaning in that, like by being definitely wholly denied any prospect of salvation from the world he knew. It's like he can now fully commit to existence on whatever new terms come to him, If that makes any sense.

01:16:40
Speaker 1: No, Yeah, absolutely, Like he's he has completely passed out of their world now, like he is. They thought him dead, they believed him to be dead, and now he kind of realizes that that that part of his life is over. Yeah, and whatever he is now, it is just it's on a different scale. It's a different world, but with different possibilities.

01:16:59
Speaker 2: I'm not to read the entire thing in full, but yeah. He ends with giving this kind of speech where he says, I was continuing to shrink to become what the infinitesimal? What was I still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? He says, the unbelievably small and unbelievably vast eventually meet like the closing of a gigantic circle, and so he comes to feel that by shrinking down forever and ever and becoming ever smaller, he's also somehow becoming infinite.

01:17:28
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was not expecting such a transcendent and kind of psychedelic ending to this picture, but it really almost brought to mind Phase four, which has a more overtly psychedelic ending and futuristic far seeing ending. And this is a little different, but also feels that grand feels that expansive, which again ties me to this idea that he has become so small that he has become infinite or is becoming infinite.

01:17:55
Speaker 2: It has this in common Phase four, that both are like an ending where the protagonists will survive in a sense, but they are becoming so changed that they can no longer describe their experience in language.

01:18:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. One of the extras on the Criterion collection discs, they pointed out that in the novel, he basically it's a little more of a downer and maybe it's something that works better on the page where he's basically like he becomes nothing. I have become nothing at the end, and they wanted to do something more upbeat for the movie. The studio of course submitted an idea. They said, what if he gets bigger again and is reunited with his wife and of course the Jacks conquers all and yeah, and of course Jack Arma was like, no, we're not doing that. So apparently this ending is like the whole you know, the small meets big and the closing of the circle and the infinite, like this was what Jack Arnold brought to it for the most part, Like this was mostly his idea.

01:19:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it has interesting references to God and stuff like that that I mean that that kind of came out of nowhere because there were previously no religious themes at all in the movie. But it also I feel like, kind of works. The only real downside I would say to the ending, which overall is great, is again the delivery is a little i don't know, a little speechy, like I feel like it could have been the narration could have been a little more subtle. But the writing is excellent.

01:19:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we do see some visuals of the arms of the spiral galaxy and so forth, as we're talking about the infinite. Yeah, so there are some stunning visuals in Black and white to back it up. But but yeah, I see what, I see what you mean.

01:19:48
Speaker 2: Oh, also when in his final when because he has to keep changing clothes because he's continually growing smaller in his final form, when he's giving this final speech, the clothing he's dressed and makes him look like a prophet, you know, he looks like a like John the Baptist from one of the Bible movies or something.

01:20:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's just just going out there into the unknown, into the into a wild and and and ultimately and a world beyond humans because he has he has shrunk beyond their scale. And it's yeah, it's it's pretty tremendous that it ends up on a on a great note and you end up just looking back on it and being like, wow, that that film was really a great ride.

01:20:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly agree. So the Incredible Shrinking Man. Uh, two thumbs up both from me, both hands thumbs.

01:20:34
Speaker 1: Up, the Incredible Shrinking Man. Yes, it's a it's a great one. And you know, I think the current plan is that we are going to do another incredible shrinking movie for next week. Yeah, one that will hopefully be still as as intellectually stimulating as this picture.

01:20:55
Speaker 2: Next week, we're planning on doing another Shrink movie that is, from what I understand, a direct to rip off of this.

01:21:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it looks like it'll be a lot of fun. Okay, all right, we're going to go ahead and close this one out. But first of all, reminds you that we're primarily a science podcast, with our core episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind publishing and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we do an artifact or monster fact short form episode. On Wednesdays, we do listener mail on Mondays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. If you want to see what other films we've covered on Weird House Cinema, there are a few different ways to do it. You can just look back through the podcast feed and do it that way. But also if you go to letterboxed dot com that's l E T T E r bo x D, we have a user profile in there it's called weird House, and we have a list there of all the movies we've covered in order, and I also have some links to where you can listen to them on each individual listing. It's also a great way to sort of visualize what we've done to break it up by decades or genre, or however you want to want to do it. And the website, of course, is also a lot. I also blog about these episodes at s Immuta music dot com. It's just my personal blog for this sort of thing.

01:22:06
Speaker 2: Huge thanks to our audio producer Jjposway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

01:22:27
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.

01:22:30
Speaker 4: For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.