Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: The Incredible Shrinking Man

In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the classic 1957 miniaturization film “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” which manages to deliver ground-breaking special effects action and philosophical depth in equal measure. Plus, it features an amazing house cat attack! (originally published 03/24/23)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
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

(00:27):
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.

(00:48):
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

(01:08):
ferocity of cats toward smaller creatures. So let's dive right in.

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:28):
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.

(01:50):
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

(02:13):
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

(02:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
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

(03:07):
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

(03:29):
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

(03:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
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

(04:42):
its work on you, yeah, everything holds up really well.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
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

(05:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:22):
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?

(05:43):
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

(06:04):
elevator pitch would be what if the male characters in
mad Men physically trunk and were attacked by their own
cats and household pests?

Speaker 2 (06:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:47):
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
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?

Speaker 1 (07:02):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (07:18):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:56):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (08:14):
You got me.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
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,

(08:41):
a world or a friendly house cat. He's a predatory monster.

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

Speaker 1 (08:56):
He gets smaller and smaller.

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

Speaker 1 (09:15):
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

(09:38):
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

(10:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
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

(11:15):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (11:32):
This year.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
She has made it known.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
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

(12:10):
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

(12:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
Oh, Barton Fink. Barton Fink.

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

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

Speaker 1 (13:28):
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

(13:50):
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

(14:11):
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

(14:33):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (14:42):
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

(15:03):
from the Black Ligo Ah.

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

Speaker 1 (15:12):
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,

(15:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
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

(16:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
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

(16:42):
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

(17:04):
of the sheer popularity of the creature itself from Creature
from the Black Lagoon, this one is kind of his
career defining film.

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

Speaker 1 (17:19):
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

(17:41):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (18:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:39):
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

(19:05):
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

(19:28):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (19:55):
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

(20:16):
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,

(20:39):
I think a great job, and it's very tremendous, a
very sort of isolated, self reflective kind of performance.

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

Speaker 1 (20:54):
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?

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:01):
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

(21:22):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (21:41):
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

(22:05):
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,

(22:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
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

(23:16):
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

(23:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:02):
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,

(24:23):
which I've heard great things about that. One might be
one to look at in the future. This guy is
your square job.

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

Speaker 1 (24:36):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (24:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
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

(25:53):
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

(26:14):
two time winner of the Patsy Award that's Picture Animal
Top Star of the Year, which the American Humane Association
put on.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:30):
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,

(26:51):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (27:08):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (27:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Amazing.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Vincent Price? Right?

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

Speaker 1 (28:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
But he was Orange.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
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

(28:56):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (29:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
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

(30:01):
best remembered for playing mister Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbill.
He's from nineteen sixty through nineteen seventy one.

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (30:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
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?

Speaker 1 (30:51):
Yes, I believe so.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
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,

(31:16):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:03):
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

(32:23):
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.

Speaker 4 (32:39):
Yeah.

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

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

Speaker 2 (32:50):
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.

Speaker 4 (33:07):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
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.

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

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

Speaker 2 (33:31):
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

(33:53):
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

(34:13):
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

(34:37):
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

(34:59):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
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.

(35:45):
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

(36:06):
his own beer.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
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

(36:28):
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

(36:48):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (37:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
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

(37:41):
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.

(38:03):
You just have no idea what this is.

Speaker 1 (38:06):
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

(38:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (39:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
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

(40:19):
cat does something cute, but it's photographed in a way
that could be interpreted as a little bit unnerving.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
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.

(40:47):
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?

(41:07):
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

(41:28):
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

(41:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
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

(42:33):
as an injury to his sense of manhood.

Speaker 1 (42:35):
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

(42:57):
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?

Speaker 2 (43:08):
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

(43:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
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

(44:47):
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,

(45:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
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

(46:04):
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

(46:25):
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

(46:46):
feet tall here.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
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.

(47:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
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,

(47:44):
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

(48:05):
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

(48:27):
he can't go out to the workplace and be seen
like this.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
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,

(48:52):
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?

Speaker 2 (49:14):
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

(49:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
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

(50:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
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.

(50:42):
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

(51:02):
does feel remorse about this.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
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

(51:25):
handling his condition, and the way he's taking it out
on her.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
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

(52:20):
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

(52:42):
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

(53:07):
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

(53:27):
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

(53:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
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,

(54:30):
But it really works here. It feels like it is
basically we're getting to kind of like the soul of
the picture.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
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

(55:00):
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.

(55:21):
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

(55:42):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (55:59):
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.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
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

(56:31):
the treatment he's been given by the doctors is no
longer stalling the progression of his condition.

Speaker 1 (56:37):
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

(57:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:32):
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,

(57:55):
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

(58:18):
into reality that like fear and a sense of vulnerability
creates anger and resentment and a desire to control other people.

Speaker 1 (58:28):
Yeah. Absolutely so.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
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

(59:04):
the house and has been left alone in the house
while she is at the store.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
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

(59:33):
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

(59:54):
recognizes Scott as human. He's just a small, prey animal
like any other.

Speaker 1 (59:58):
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,

(01:00:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):
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

(01:00:56):
manages to get it to tip over off of the
side table and fall down. Frightens the cat away.

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
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

(01:01:23):
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

(01:01:46):
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

(01:02:07):
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

(01:02:28):
be doomed.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
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

(01:02:53):
much smaller than it, and it was a cat. It
was a cat hissing at a huge black spider.

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

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
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

(01:03:25):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
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

(01:04:13):
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

(01:04:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:43):
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

(01:05:05):
these sequences. I thought it's just excellent. It's almost it's
almost like German expressionism or something.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
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

(01:05:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
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

(01:06:23):
it does have cheese on it. But it's a mouse trap.

Speaker 1 (01:06:27):
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

(01:06:48):
cried out a few times as he's like fumbling with
the cheese and nearly making the trap go off. It's great.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
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

(01:07:18):
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

(01:07:41):
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

(01:08:04):
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

(01:08:26):
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

(01:08:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:09:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:09:19):
Hmm.

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

Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
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

(01:09:45):
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

(01:10:08):
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

(01:10:29):
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

(01:10:52):
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,

(01:11:15):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:11:38):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:11:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
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.

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
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

(01:12:54):
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

(01:13:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:13:29):
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

(01:13:50):
the director of Tarantula.

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

Speaker 1 (01:13:58):
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

(01:14:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:14:34):
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,

(01:14:54):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:15:10):
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

(01:15:33):
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

(01:15:54):
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

(01:16:16):
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

(01:16:37):
whatever new terms come to him, If that makes any sense.

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:16:59):
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

(01:17:22):
shrinking down forever and ever and becoming ever smaller, he's
also somehow becoming infinite.

Speaker 1 (01:17:28):
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,

(01:17:50):
which again ties me to this idea that he has
become so small that he has become infinite or is
becoming infinite.

Speaker 2 (01:17:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:18:10):
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

(01:18:31):
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

(01:18:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:19:04):
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,

(01:19:29):
like I feel like it could have been the narration
could have been a little more subtle. But the writing
is excellent.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:19:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:20:06):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (01:20:34):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (01:21:02):
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

(01:21:23):
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

(01:21:43):
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

(01:22:05):
this sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:22:06):
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.

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

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