The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958)

For the Vincent Price blogathon, 17th to 19th April.

Sweet genes, Vincent.

I may only (only!  I turned 41 two weeks ago!  Aeeeeiiii!!!) have been born in 1979, but - perhaps strangely - I was very familiar with The Fly by the time the David Cronenberg re-version came out in 1986.  Which I know, because I have quite a strong memory of watching a movie on VHS with my dad, and one of the trailers was for said upcoming Jeff Goldblum Brundlefly vomit-drop flavoured movie.

"Look, Dad - they're doing a new one!"  I cried with glee.  Because I had fond memories of watching the original, that said father had dutifully recorded for me during some late night airing a year or two before: that eerie title sequence intro with a sort of psychedelic honeycomb with a fly (or flies?) emerging through holes.  I'm so glad I didn't suffer from trypophobia - i'd probably have been traumatised instead of spookily intrigued.

I had also, in the interval between seeing the two films, read the original George Langelaan short story upon which the movie was based.  Perhaps those pulpy old paperback Pan and Fontana books of horror and ghost stories edited by Herbert Von Thal weren't the thing for parents to buy five or six year old children - but reader, I loved them, and my parents would pick me up second hand copies if they happened upon them.

(Slightly confusingly, I distinctly recall that another volume of one of those books contained a different story - by a completely different author - also titled The Fly, which obviously meant that this small child was baffled a bit.)

Penned by Langelaan - a fascinating character in of himself, being an ex-spy and acquaintance of infamous occult master of dark magicks Aleister Crowley - The Fly was first published in the June 1967 edition of the Hefmeister's Playboy magazine, back in the pre-Flynt aeons when porn was fancy.  With a screenplay by James Clavell (of King Rat, Shogun and Tai-Pan fame), the film opens in the eerie twilight hours of a dark, dark night in deepest Francophone Canada at a factory belonging to the Delambre Freres corporation where ageing night watchman Gaston (Torben Meyer) finds the fresh mortal remains of his employer Monsieur Andre Delambre crushed beneath a hydraulic press.

The mystery of this tragedy compounded both by his having heard the press operate not once but twice and seeing the newly-widowed Madame Helene Delambre (the delightful Redmayned red-maned Patricia Owens) fleeing the scene, Gaston reports these strange occurrences to the still-extant member of the Delambre brothers Francois (genre legend Vincent Price) - his message coming immediately after Francois receives a call from Helene calmly informing his that she has terminated their brother and sister-in-law relationship in a pretty final manner.  Attending the scene of the crime, Francois and police inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall, not a stranger to the sci-fi/horror genres, having starred in bizarro robots-run-amok shocker Gog for veteran schlock-helmer Herbert L. Strock four years previously) try to fathom what's occurred - Francois maintaining Helene's inability to have possibly worked the lethal equipment whilst the pair are baffled by the evidence of the late Andre's head and left arm being twice-crushed by machinery set to impact zero level with its base to utterly destroy the cranium and limb in question.

Visiting an almost preternaturally calm Helene, who happily admits to killing Andre - but not murdering him - the sleuthing pair find the circumstances growing curiouser and curiouser as Helene informs them how she operated the press and that Andre voluntarily placed himself beneath it while all the time being distracted to the point of obsession by a housefly buzzing around the room, before examining it closely and then suddenly losing all interest. Placing Helene under the watchful care of police nurse Andersone (Betty Lou Gerson - the voice of 101 Dalmatians' Cruella De Vil herself), Charas follows Francois down to the manse's mysterious basement laboratory where Delambre is baffled to find rooms filled with strange and unfamiliar equipment that appears to have been deliberately smashed and sabotaged. "This is the work of a madman!" he expostulates, whilst Nurse Andersone has to deal with a lunacy of her own when she swats at a fly causing Helene to drop her calm and placid demeanour and erupt into uncontrollable hysteria.

The mystery of her fly fixation deepens when young semi-orphaned Philippe (Charles Herbert), who's being looked after by Uncle Francois, asks how long flies live and conveys the information that his mother has been searching for a very particular insect: one with a white head and one white leg.  When Francois goes to Helene with the ruse that he's found and captured the errant bluebottle, she begins to unfold her tale in flashback - wherein we finally meet Andre (an immediately engaging and reliably likeable performance from David Hedison [but you can call him Al, as he was still trading under his first rather than middle name at the time] - still one of only two actors to have played Felix Leiter in the Bond franchise more than once - in a role originally considered for Michael Rennie and turned down by Rick Jason).

"This is not a confession.  Although I killed my husband, I am not a murderess.  I simply carried out his last wish."

The Delambres' happy family life is interrupted the day that Andre excitedly leads Helene down to his lab to show her the fruits of the research that has kept him busy for weeks on end: the end results of the work he has been doing for the Canadian air ministry into faster forms of travel is his patented matter disintegrator-reintegrator - or teleporter to you and I - which he explains to his baffled spouse in the same terms as Willy Wonka explains the concept of television picture transmission to Mike Teevee.  Andre hopes in future to have a network of his machines installed around the globe - nay, where stop there?  The universe - to set up an instantaneous means of travel at the speed of light much like the transporters from Star Trek or the T-Mat system from Doctor Who's 'The Seeds of Death', not just as a method of conveyance for people but a cheap and instant means of moving food and other goods from place to place and perhaps end any future fear of famine or shortages around the world.  This Utopian hope is soon dashed, however, when Helene amusedly points out that the ashtray that he has teleported across the lab as a demonstration now has the 'MADE IN JAPAN' print on its underside reversed - prompting a suddenly despondent Andre to plunge back into his notes.

A further setback occurs when he attempts his first transmission of a living organism in the cuddly shape of the family cat, Dandelo, who vanishes in the disintegration module to never reappear in the reintegration receptacle, existing only as a haunting ethereal miaow ("Into space...a stream of cat atoms.  It'd be funny if life weren't sacred" he laments).  Certain that he's finally perfected the system, Andre celebrates by treating Helene to an evening at the ballet followed by an evening in sipping the finest vintage of chateau d' teleport: a chilled bottle of transmitted bubbly.  Life seeming back on track, after an idyllic summer morning in the garden Andre asks Helene to invite Francois over to show him the machine only for the two of them to later find Andre's lab door locked with a hastily-scrawled 'DO NOT DISTURB' note on the door.  Pinning it down to the doc's usually eccentric way of working, the pair don't listen to young Philippe excitedly telling them that he has caught a strange insect in the garden on his bug hunt: a fly with a strange head and leg, which he is casually - an tragically instructed to take back outside and let go.

When Andre's behaviour grows increasingly odder - remaining unseen and non-speaking whilst passing notes beneath the laboratory door asking for bowls of rum-laced milk and demanding that a white-headed fly be captured safely, and only showing himself to Helene silently and with a towel draped over his head and his arm tucked beneath his coat - Helene's increasing despair, fear and curiosity build up to the iconic scene reminiscent of Mary Philbin's unmaking of Lon Chaney in the classic 1925 Phantom of the Opera as she tears the cloth from him to be confronted by the visage of a monstrous fly, mandibles twitching,the image of her screaming face reflected and refracted in its golden multi-faceted eyes.

Not to attempt to post spoilers for anyone who may not have seen it, but it is a pretty famous plot point that Andre has transmitted himself without realising a housefly was inside the booth at the same time as him - leading to their hybridisation and swapping of noggin and hand.  Convinced that they will never again be able to locate the fly and terrified that his intellect is going, his mind being taken over by the savage impulses of the insect, Andre resins himself to destroying all evidence of his work and the monster he has become by leaving the wrecked lab under the cover of night and taking Helene to the factory - instructing her in how to operate the press to pulp him (especially his insectoid parts), an action that the agonised woman has the repeat after his monstrous limb slips out from 'neat the device first time.  As we return to the present and Helene has finished relating her fantastic tale, the disbelieving duo of Francois and Charas wonder what to make of such a strange story that still seems to fit the known facts - a wonderment brought to an end when Francois discovers the sought-for fly/human hybrid caught in a spider-web in the garden, it's miniature human head screaming "Help me"! Help meee!" as it is consumed by the web's arachnid inhabitant.  Price famously revealed in raconteur style how neither he nor Herbert Marshall dared to make eye contact during this scene as they kept cracking up throughout repeated takes, before the little creature is dispatched via euthenasia by means of brick.

Sumptuously photographed in CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color unlike its two monochrome sequels and sporting fine performances from Price, Hedison and Owens, The Fly stands as a great example of the silver age of science fiction and horror.  A Feast for the senses.  Just don't drink the milk - I think a fly vomited in it.

"He died because of his work.  He was like an explorer in a wild country where no-one had ever been before.  He was searching for the truth - he almost found a great truth - but for one instant he was careless... The search for the truth is the most important thing in the whole world.  And the most dangerous."