Film-club discussion: The Incredible Shrinking Man, Bigger than Life, Monkey Business

“I felt ten feet tall.”

“Smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.”

 

My next online film-club discussion is coming up: this is an unusual double bill, with a third film thrown in – all made in the 1950s, from three very different genres, but all dealing in some way with the anxieties or insecurities of the family man. (There is also the broad theme of “transformation”, as should be obvious just from a synopsis.)

1. Bigger Than Life (1956), with James Mason as a middle-aged teacher who gets addicted to the “miracle drug” cortisone and turns into an alpha-male much to the alarm of his wife and young son. Not a success when it came out, but subsequently hailed as one of the most hard-hitting American films of its decade – and a key work in the assessment of director Nicholas Ray as an auteur. (A famous Sight and Sound article “Ray or Ray?” was intended as a rap on the knuckles of those enthusiastic French critics who took Nicholas Ray as seriously as Satyajit Ray!)

2. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) – this was quite a discovery for me, though I had read Richard Matheson’s novel The Shrinking Man a few years ago. Wonderfully compact and focused (and strangely moving) sci-fi film about a man who starts shrinking at a steady rate after being exposed to a strange mist, and soon finds hidden dangers in every corner of the house that was once his castle. It must have been some experience to watch this on the big screen when it first came out – super production design, especially after the protagonist shrinks to insect size.

(Here is a column I wrote, touching on the Shrinking Man novel and its subtexts.)

The “crisis of masculinity” theme apart, it's amusing that both these films have a scene where the protagonist is made to drink Barium while being X-rayed, during a medical investigation. As you can see in the second pic.

And as a lighter counterpoint to the above, a film in a very different genre – the screwball comedy – but also about a mysterious stimulant that causes physical/psychological changes. Howard Hawks's Monkey Business (1952), in which Cary Grant finds the elixir of youth and paints the town red with Marilyn Monroe.

Note: Hawks is one of the great filmmakers, but his work (and his very particular strengths) can be an acquired taste for many contemporary viewers (the ones who didn’t get immersed in old Hollywood at a young age like I did). For instance, the banter between the sexes in his films can often seem too talky, not “cinematic” enough if you haven’t developed a special interest in great star-actors like Grant and Hepburn, or Bogart and Bacall. But give it some time and you’ll find a lot to treasure in his work. Monkey Business starts slowly, but there are some fun scenes between Grant and the young Monroe, who work well together, as well as a Ginger Rogers performance that I appreciated a lot more as a middle-aged viewer than I did as an adolescent.

I’ll schedule the conversation after a week. We can talk about related things: 1950s melodramas about fractured families, social hypocrisies, the generational divide or general unrest among the young and the old (these include films by directors like Douglas Sirk, such as All That Heaven Allows, which I watched again recently). Or science fiction. If anyone wants prints of these films email me (jaiarjun@gmail.com) and I’ll share them through G Drive.