Weirdhouse Cinema: The Incredible Shrinking Man

In this 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob
Lamp and this is Joe McCormick. And today's movie on
Weird House Cinema is the nineteen fifty seven introspective science

(00:24):
fiction adventure The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold
and based on a screenplay by Richard Matheson. And man,
I've got to say this one totally surprised me. This
is not what I was expecting at all for a
late fifties shrink movie from the director of Tarantula. I

(00:46):
was expecting something much sillier and much campier, and instead
what we got here is in many ways a rather
thoughtful and fascinating science fiction tale about the search for
meaning and dignity in the face of absurdity and doom.

(01:06):
And I suspect that a lot of the intelligence and
the soul of this movie is sort of there on
the page, like it comes from the story by Matheson.
But also the special effects are excellent for the time,
and most of the performances in this movie are very
kind of a nuanced and warmly human This was a

(01:28):
shockingly great film and not at all what I thought
we were going to get based on the title and
the premise. 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 tiny man has been reduced to the size
of a doll is hunted by his own housecat in
his living room, and I believe I saw it in

(01:50):
and it came from Hollywood, that older picture that had
a lot of trailers and clips and a lot of
joking and riffing of the material there. M 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

(02:12):
were actually, I think we're going to watch the amazing
Colossal Man, right. I went to Video Drum to rent
it and it's not available on disc anywhere, and which
is yeah, 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.

(02:34):
So I was like, well, I didn't think this was
the type of film that really merited that sort of treatment.
But it looks looks interesting. I love that one sequence.
Let's check it out, and here we are. Well. This
is another way I was surprised because I having so,
I had also seen the cat attack part of the
movie in isolation, in which it seemed quite funny to me,

(02:55):
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. Absolutely, yeah. I mean,
the effects and this are are great for the day.
They were ambitious for the day. And you know, you

(03:15):
can't you can't look back in a film like this
without seeing a few scenes in the 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 to do its work
on you, yeah, everything holds up really well. Another way
in which I think we have to take it as
from its time is I did say the film is

(03:36):
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 uh stentorian narration. You know,
it's like the voiceover narration that like tells you all
of the main character's inner thoughts about his own search

(03:58):
for meaning is maybe a bit blustery, and its delivery,
but nevertheless, like the sentiments expressed in the writing in
those sections I think are really good. 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 that masculinity of the time period

(04:21):
prominently featured. But usually it's not self reflective. Usually it's
not at all analyzing what this is that? What is this? Uh?
What are these ideas? These fears and expectations that everyone's
trapped with them? Right? Instead, it's usually just like, here
is your your jaw line, who's ready to punch the

(04:41):
alien that stands in for a communist? Yeah? It. As
I was watching it, I kept thinking a little bit
about the television series mad Men, and in fact, my
elevator pitch would be what if the male characters and
Madmen physically shrunk and were attacked by their own cats
and household pests. I mean that nails it. The main
character in this movie is literally an advertising I don't

(05:03):
know if he's an executive, but he's he works in advertising.
He's an adolist. Right, three interesting stats just for weird
house cinema here. This is our second Jack Arnold picture.
This is our second Richard Mathison screenplay, and it's actually
our second miniaturization film. We'd previously discussed nineteen forties Doctor Cyclops,
which Doctor Cyclops also had really excellent special effects for

(05:28):
the time. That was a great looking movie, though, I
think this one is a lot more interesting in terms
of the characters. Yeah, definitely. The other Jack Arnold movie
was Tarantula, which was not nearly as good as this,
but was a lot of fun in that camp here direction.
I was expecting this time. What was the other Mathison movie?

(05:49):
The other Mathison picture was The Devil Rides Out. It
was he was adapting someone else's novel, a Wheatly novel. Okay,
in this picture he adapts his own awful simon I'd
rather see you dead than dabbling with shrink missed. 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

(06:11):
love how this one begins with the incredible shrinking man shrinking.

(06:43):
You 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.
Some awful things might happen. So long as you got
this wedding ring on, you got me. This is awesome.

(07:08):
Well speaking, I have forty five seconds to tell you
about something I think you will remember the longest day
you live. It's about a man named Scott Kerrey. A
few months ago, he was six feet two inches tall
and weigh one hundred and ninety pounds. Today he's two
inches tall and you can hold him in the palm
of your hand. Now he lives in a world where
he must stride for his life, a world or a

(07:29):
friendly housecat is a predatory monster. Incredible because it's almost
beyond a Magini. Incredible because every hour he gets smaller
and smallow. Incredible because every month the paramounts. A note

(08:02):
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 Videodrome. It's also available for digital
rental on most platforms. All right, well, let's start talking

(08:25):
a little bit about the people involved here. Some of
these are people we've covered before, in which case I'm
gonna try and cover them in just a little a
little differently than before. But yeah, at the top of
the picture we have Jack Arnold, the director. He lived
nineteen twelve through nineteen ninety two. Again, this is our
second Jack Arnold film, following nineteen fifty fives Tarantula. He
learned cinematography and filmmaking under Robert J. Flaherty while serving

(08:48):
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 Chicken Off Tomorrow.
This one is riffed on Mystery Sense three thousands. So
I'd seen this one many times, but I did not
know until this week. But it was a Jack Arnold production.
I have never seen this in full, and I haven't

(09:09):
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 se the animated map
segments reminded me of the World War Two propaganda films
that Walt Disney made, like Victory through Air Power. Yeah,
I mean it did. It makes sense given where he
came out off where he learned his craft, and in

(09:29):
nineteen fifty he directed the International Ladies Garment Workers Union
documentary With These Hands, which was nominated for an Oscar.
This immediately caught my eye because, okay, so this is
an independent promotional film for the i LGWU, But the
International Ladies Garment Workers Union is also the subject of

(09:52):
my long time favorite commercial that appears on many tapes
of the Star Wars Holiday Special where they sing the
union song you know, you know the one I'm talking about,
the one? Yeah, yeah, uh, it's it's great. It's tied
from my favorite with Tobar. Of course, you know, our

(10:13):
co worker Annie Reese really wants to come on the
show and discuss about the Star Wars holiday special this year.
He has made it known. Oh Annie and I have
discussed the the International Ladies Garment Workers Union commercial and
Tobar 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. Sounds good.

(10:37):
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 as one of their directors.
So I mentioned there's a great there's some great extras
on that Criterion collection disc and there's a great about
an hour long bio about Arnold's career. And one of
the things that they stress in it is that when

(10:58):
you got hired by a major film studio as a
director during this period, you were expected to deliver on
whatever they needed. So a studio like Universal, they had
to bust out the full menu of films. You know,
it wasn't just the pricey specials. They also had had appetizers.
You know, they had to have the crowd pleasers, so
you know, they had their prestige titles all the way

(11:19):
down to the genre dregs, and certainly in this time
that's where you would find your science fiction. So if
you are a studio employeed director like Jack Arnold at
this time, you're probably not doing a lot of what
many people probably imagine director is 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

(11:39):
that and putting together a production. It's a lot more
kind of like work for hire, like studio says, here's
the movie you're making. Yeah. Yeah, they might assigned you
a western, and a horror, a sci fi film, you
name it, and it was up to you to make
it work and deliver. I guess this was reference to
a good bit in the Collen Brothers film the titles
alluding me at the moment wrestling pictures. Oh, Barton Fink.

(12:03):
Barton Fink. Yes, he was a writer, but he was
very much in the in the studio system and was
expected to deliver what they needed. He was going to
write for Wallace Beery or something. Yeah. So Arnold comes
aboard their universal and the first thing they give him
his nineteen fifty threes Girls in the Night. This is
a troubled youth picture with with fittingly aged youths, you

(12:26):
know that are clearly like in their their thirties or something.
But he apparently did well with it and he was
handed it came from Outer Space, which ultimately came out
the same year. Now I haven't seen it came from
outer Space, but the way they were discussing it in
this extra made it sound like something we might want
to check out sometime, because it was based on a
story treatment from Ray Bradberry, and it was pretty ambitious

(12:49):
and ahead of its time in many ways. So it's
one of these films where the aliens are not villainous
but merely just difficult to understand. And also this is
pretty crazy too. You were actually never meant to see
the aliens. And this is the way they initially shot
the picture and approached the picture. It wasn't until the
studio basically had some time to think about this and

(13:11):
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 darnett. So they ended up
having to compromise and actually came up with like a
pretty interesting looking creature to fit in there. And still
that even though they had to compromise, the results were
supposed to be pretty good. Oh, I would be absolutely
game to talk about this one. So that film was
a hit, and for a long stretch it kind of

(13:32):
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 in fifties Hollywood. 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 four's Creature from the Black Lagoon,
the Creature from which, of course becomes one of the

(13:55):
pantheon of universal monsters, the big ones you know about,
yeah yeah, and 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

(14:16):
assume is going to happen. If there's not a sequel,
then I guess the first one wasn't successful, but it
wasn't a given back in the day, so he ended
up doing the sequel, which is not as good or
I don't know. It's hard to really judge the Creature
films because the first one is it's both mostly about
just how good that creature suit looks. Yeah, the first

(14:38):
one I think of as wonderfully atmospheric and having that
great monster in it. But I've seen it several times
and I really couldn't tell you anything about the human characters.
I don't recall at all. Yeah, yeah, I just remember
the humans come off as jerks, like they come to
where the creature lives and they start shooting at him

(14:58):
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. 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

(15:22):
about with the third one, but also it's just it's
not as fun. It's the first one by any stretch.
So anyway, it was a huge hit. Arnold comes back
with Tarantula, which we've talked about on the show, and
then in nineteen fifty seven he pulls off easily as
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

(15:43):
the genre, with a great, intelligent script built on solid performances.
This wouldn't be his last sci fi film, but outside
of the sheer popularity of the creature itself from Creature
from the Black Lagoon, this one is kind of his
career defining film. Okay, Now, we also talked about how
this film benefits from some excellent writing by Richard Matheson.

(16:06):
That's right. Richard Mathison 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,
haven't read it in many years, but I read it

(16:26):
a couple of times and loved it. But of course
it became the basis for I think three different film
adaptation sixty four is The Last Man on Earth starring
Vincent Price, nineteen seventy ones, The Omega Man starring Chuck Heston,
and then two thousand and sevens I Am Legend starring
Will Smith, each one a very distinct, very said in
its time adaptation of the source material. I got an idea,

(16:49):
someday we should do three weeks in a row where
we do all three of these movies. It could be fun,
it could be we could learn a lot about ourselves.
I think, yeah. But it was 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

(17:11):
other books he had to adapted included What Dreams May
Come and A Stir of Echoes. So in this case,
he wrote a screenplay for this movie based on the
novel he had published just the previous year. I think, right, yeah,
it was still hot. It's still hot. Yeah. He also
wrote a lot of TV, including sixteen episodes the original
Twilight Zone, including such episodes as Nightmare at twenty thousand Feet.

(17:34):
He also wrote for such shows as Night Gallery, The
Original Star Trek, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and Thriller. So
as as we've been discussing an Incredible Shrinking Man based
on The Shrinking Man the novel, and yeah, it's you know,

(17:58):
it's not just about the fantas pastic scenario of gradual miniaturization,
but it is this kind of analysis and rumination on
masculine ideals in middle class America of the time. The
book and this movie would also serve as inspiration for
The Incredible Shrinking Woman in nineteen eighty one that was
scripted by Jane Wagner, and I believe that was directed

(18:19):
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. Oh, I just
looked up. Is Lily Tomlin this character? She's our shrinker, Yeah,

(18:44):
our shrunken man in this film, however, playing the character
Scott Carey is the actor Grant Williams, who of nineteen
thirty one through nineteen eighty five. Williams was a versatile
American actor of stage, TV, and screen. It noted in
the Criterion Collection edition that his casting in this film
was very much that of an ascendant talent who could

(19:07):
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, you know, square
jawed 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, Grant Williams does a really,
I think a great job and it's very tremendous, a

(19:28):
very sort of isolated, self reflective kind of performance. This
guy had a little bit less of the stink of
Westerns than a lot of fifties sci fi movie protagonists do. Yeah,
I know exactly what you mean. Like you, you look
at him and you don't instantly think wins. This guy
gonna punch somebody. Yeah. So Williams had had smaller roles

(19:50):
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. It's I think he's like a gas station
attendant in it or something. Not a very big part,
but it made an impact. And Yeah, the incredible Shrinking
Man is a great showcase for his acting talents and

(20:11):
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,
though I have not seen it. Yeah, I've eyed Monolith
Monsters for Weird House before. Yeah, because that one, Like
the basic idea is, let's do you know a fifties

(20:34):
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, or it sounds
like an idea the studio might have stumbled over. Yeah. Anyway,
Williams found some success here. Then he moved from Universal
to Warner Brothers in fifty nine. He did various TV

(20:55):
and film roles after that. Some of the standouts include
nineteen sixties The Leech One. This is one that was
also featured on A 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. It
was not supposed to be romantic exactly, but anyway. He

(21:17):
was also in sixty three s p. Two one oh nine,
nineteen seventy one's Brain of Blood in nineteen seventy six
is 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 Munsters.
Oh is he a boyfriend that Marilyn Munster brings home?

(21:37):
And then he gets scared and runs away, and they said, oh,
you did it again one of sims. 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 Carry his
wife played by Randy Stewart who of nineteen twenty four
through nineteen ninety six, she was an actor in numerous

(21:58):
popular movies of the forties and fifties like Late Forties
and the Fifties, and later a frequent TV player. She
was a supporting player in Howard Hawks. I was a
male war bride from nineteen forty nine, All about Eve
from nineteen fifty and she did a lot of TV
and westerns leading into The Incredible Shrinking Man, and afterwards
it was mostly TV westerns and police shows until the

(22:19):
mid nineteen seventies. Now, there's another female character in this
that we'll discuss when we get more into the plot.
This is a character named Clarisse, 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

(22:40):
burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose League, who lived nineteen eleven through
nineteen seventy. She's only in a couple of scenes, but
she's very good. She's kind of the soul of the
movie in a way. Yeah, Yeah, you're right, Okay. The
Shrinking Man also has a brother named Charlie. Charlie is
played by Paul Lankton, who lived nineteen thirteen through nineteen
eighty TV and film actor who appeared on a couple

(23:01):
episodes of the Twilight Zones, a nineteen fifty four Yetti
movie called The Snow Creature, and nineteen fifty eight it
The Terror from Beyond Space, which I've I've heard great
things about that one might be wanted to look at
in the future. This guy is your square job. Yeah, yeah,
he plays just kind of like he's like a business executive.
I don't remember him being super notable. No, but you

(23:24):
know who is notable. Oh my god, a feline actor.
We don't get to talk about feline actors. I'm weird
health cinema. But the cat plays Butch the cat rng
not super creative name, Butch also kind of a strange
name for a cat, it seems to me, I don't
know why. I don't know. I think Butch could work
for a rough and tumble tom cat, you know, maybe

(23:46):
an indoor outdoor cat that shows up bleeding from a
lot of fights, that sort of thing. But RNG Orang
is very much the sort of name that, hey, that
a toddler gives a stuffed cat. Yeah. But Orange, Wow,
what a presence in this film, and not just in

(24:07):
the attack scene. There are there's some interesting moments from
before that that that sort of ride the line between
cute and ominous, especially because you sort of sense what
may be coming. They're basically two ways of looking at
Orange 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 it's

(24:29):
a better story that way. But it's also possible that
this was more than one cat that was marketed as
Orange to Hollywood. So I'm probably gonna lean more into
the idea of this being an individual cat that lived
nineteen fifty through nineteen sixty seven because Orange had star power.
Orange was a rare male Marmalade tabby cat owned and
trained by the famous Hollywood animal handler Franked in Ends.

(24:52):
Other animals included the dogs of the Binge franchise WHOA Yeah.
And Orange is a true Hollywood legend and the only
two time winner of the Patsy Award that's Picture Animal
Top Star of the Year, which the American Humane Association
put off. What do you think Orange's a reward was
when he won this prize? You get like three whole

(25:13):
cans of tuna to himself, just faced down in the can,
I would hope. So, so, what pictures was Orange in Well,
between nineteen fifty one and nineteen sixty five, Orange was
in Rhubard, which I think is about a capinos, a
baseball team or something. This Island Earth, Oh, The Incredible
Shrinking Man, Obviously, The Matchmaker, The Diary of Anne Frank,

(25:38):
plays a cat that almost gives up Anne Frank's family
to the Nazis. Oh, No, Visit to a Small Planet,
Breakfast at Tiffany's Okay, Gidget, The Comedy of Terrors, and
the Village of the Giants. Oh that's a mister big movie. Yeah.
On the small screen, he acted in such shows as

(25:59):
Alfred Presents, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Beverly Hillbillies,
My Favorite Martian, Mission Impossible, and the old Batman TV series.
Was he a villain on Batman called Orange? I 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

(26:20):
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 amazing. Yeah,
you know, all of these actors petted this cat. There's
there's scenes of like Vincent Price holding Orange, There's a

(26:43):
there's a you can see screenshots of like Boris Karloff
pretending to be dead while Orange is on his chest.
So sometimes he's right up in there. Of all those actors,
who do you think gives the best pets? M Vincent
Price right, oh yeah, the Vincent Price belly rubs are superb. Now,
Orange was apparently not the nicest cat. As is sometimes

(27:07):
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. But he was all Orange. Yeah,
you know, I can imagine Orangey only communicating with the

(27:27):
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 end
for his animals. And one of the things about Orangey
is that Orange was not as prone to watering off
the set cats as many filmmakers have testified too over
the years are harder to work with than dogs. It's

(27:49):
harder to convince them to do what you need them
to do for a given shot or sequence. Orange was
Marlon Brando filming The Island of Doctor Moreau just basically yeah.
I remember seeing some extras where the Coen Brothers were
talking about filming with a cat on what was it,
the Lowen davi the Lewen Davis movie, the Folksinger movie. Yeah. Yeah,

(28:12):
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. Will never make a film with a
cat again. Oh that makes sense, But 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. I think, yeah, yeah, all right. Some
other bit players in this um So Raymond Bailey, who

(28:33):
live nineteen oh fourth through nineteen eighty plays one of
two doctors that our hero goes to, our main character
goes to. Um We've talked about him before because he
was in Tarantula. He played a character with a him
of Townsend, and he's probably best remembered for playing mister
Drysdale on the Beverly Hill Bill. He's from nineteen sixty
through nineteen seventy one. Oh is this the first doctor

(28:56):
that the dude goes to? This is the This is
not the any doctor, This is the other doctor. So
this might be the later doctor. Oh yeah, okay, yeah,
mister Drysdale, Okay, yeah, later doctor. I seemed Tarantula. I
don't remember who Townsend was. It's 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

(29:18):
um our scientist Leo G. Carroll with a mutated face. Yes, right,
they're multiple memorable characters, but Raymond Bailey's not one of them. 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? Yes, I believe so. Yeah. Now

(29:40):
the other doctor in this is played by William Shallert,
who lived nineteen twenty two through two thousand and sixteen,
American actor with a very long career stretching from nineteen
forty seven through twenty fourteen. That's eight decades and three
hundred and eighty eight TV and film credits on IMDb.
One time president of the Screen Actors Guild, he also
played a doct in Joe Dante's Innerspace from nineteen eighty seven,

(30:03):
which is fun because it's another miniaturization film. Yeah, 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 Forbin Project, Mighty Joe Young, the Man from Planet X,
The Monolith Monsters, Gog and tobor The Great Oh which

(30:27):
we covered just just a few months ago. Yeah. 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 would 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.

(30:48):
That that can't be an accident. Oh no, there are
no accidents with casting like that from 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
I did you know? Score composed by the credit the
main trumpet player, but they are like four uncredited names

(31:08):
on the studio soundtrack when you look it up in
the databases. Suffice to say that it's a very traditional
and mel dramatic 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. Yeah. I
thought there were parts here were the musical score was

(31:30):
more distinctive than most movies of this time. Oh yeah, yeah,
and so certainly towards the end. 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 Gershwin,
Like it kind of sounds like the It had this
blooming trumpet motif that reminded me of Rhapsody in Blue. Oh. Interesting.

(31:55):
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. All right,
well you're ready to discuss the plot. Oh, let's get

(32:17):
into it. 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 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

(32:40):
background in a white shape, and you're thinking, what is it?
Is this some kind of like cloud maybe, or is
it a large 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

(33:00):
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, a 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

(33:24):
with the narration saying, the strange, almost unbelievable story of
Robert Scott Carey began on a very ordinary summer day.
I know this story better than anyone because I am
Robert Scott Carey. 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

(33:46):
with a twist 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. Yeah, I mean I Hermann
Melvil does it right off the bat, right, Yeah, but
I know what you mean. 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

(34:08):
original novel. Yeah, maybe it's better on the page, that
sort of thing. So yeah, it's it's it's a great script,
but this is not a good opener that 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 we find out this is his wife, Louise,
and they're lounging side by side in the sun on

(34:30):
the bow of boat. And the situation is they revealed
they've been married for six years. They are on vacation.
The boat belongs to Robert Scott Carey's brother. Robert Scott
carry needs to get beer in him and he yearns
for Louise to retrieve the beer on his behalf, and
Louise desireth not to bring him the beer and tells

(34:52):
him he should fetch his own beer. This was 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,
And this took me a little bit to break down

(35:12):
about this scene. But Okay, these two characters are wearing
bathing suits, you know, nineteen fifties bathing suits that are distinct.
They would look a little fashioned today, but they're not
that different from what a couple might wear on a
boat today. And I, for some reason I thought this
may this made them feel a little more relatable in
this scene to modern audiences. Because unlike many other scenes

(35:35):
in the in the movie, they're not wearing those nineteen
fifties domestic uniforms. You know, the sort of standard dress
of a you know, a merried, middle class couple in
nineteen fifties America that you see in every other film. Right,
leave it to Beaver wearing a coat and tie while
sitting on the couch at home. Yeah, and they're again,
they're also being very human and relatable in the scene.

(35:56):
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 kept in bathing suits.
And these characters are being real. Yeah, they're being playful,
and the 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

(36:16):
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 Kerry here witnesses a bizarre site there is
an ominous white cloud of vapor billowing rapidly in his
direction over the surface of the water. And this is

(36:39):
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 background that says like a cloud of
vapor escaped from a chemical transport is blah blah blah.
You have just have no idea what this is. Yeah,
and I love how how unexplained it is, because it
could it almost takes on the feeling of vision or

(37:00):
se though of course, 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 viewing
him back turned to the camera, the cloud in the
distance moving ever closer. It ends up taking on a

(37:22):
kind of temporal quality to it, you know, like the
thing that is approaching is not only like an actual
physical sci fi threat in the scene, but it also
represents like the uncertainty of the future, the known and
unknown challenges of the future. 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

(37:44):
has time to understand what's happening, the cloud of vapor
overtakes the boat and it envelops him and then it
just blows on by, and so it's it's gone before
Louise even emerges from down below, but it leaves Scott
here covered in what looks like glitter. This is probably
a good time to mention for anyone who's purely listening
to this and hasn't seen this is a black and

(38:05):
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. 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 Orangey or Butch

(38:27):
in the movie. And as soon as I saw this,
I was like, oh, yeah, everybody here is going to
recognize a Chekhov's cat in a shrink movie when they
see it. Yeah, And I think the cat prominently featured
in promotional material, so I think a lot of the
original audience saw this coming as well, and actually I
think the movie in a smart way plays into that

(38:47):
because instead of trying to keep it secret, like, oh,
you know, there's going to 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's starts shrinking, having these little moments where like,
the cat does something cute, but it's photographed in a

(39:09):
way that could be interpreted as a little bit unnerving. Yeah. 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

(39:30):
have picked up the wrong bag at the dry cleaners.
And he's eating less than he used to. He has
one egg for breakfast instead of two. So he goes
to the doctor to get this checked out, and the
doctor confirms that he is not only ten pounds lighter
than he used to be. He measures Scott's height and
Scott's like, that doesn't make sense. That's several inches shorter

(39:51):
than I used to be. How's that supposed to happen?
But this scene was good because the doctor has very
reasonable things to say, so he attribute it's the weight
loss distress, 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

(40:13):
a couple of sources for that. That was a couple
of physicals over the last many years. Those might have
been early in the morning when we're actually a bit
taller than we are later in the day, which is
true due to compression of the spine from being upright
throughout the day, generally you lose, you know, some small
but real amount of height and h and maybe there

(40:34):
was just errors on top of that, so that seems possible.
And back home, Scott seems preoccupied after this doctor visit.
Louise asks him, Hey, what did Charlie, that's referring to
his brother, What did Charlie, think about your idea for
a newspaper ad. So Scott, we learn is an ad man.
What is that? It's not a wheel, it's a carousel

(40:55):
of shrinking down to the size of an atom. I
don't know. We'll keep that in mind as we go on.
But they start putting several lines of evidence together. So
it's undeniable that he's getting smaller every day because Louise
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

(41:19):
comes as an injury to his sense of manhood. Yeah,
and also that it's he'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 as sci fi miniaturization gimmick. But

(41:41):
they're always playing at least a little bit with the
metaphorical nature of this, like 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? 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.

(42:02):
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 brazilion, different kinds of tests. Sharn in what I
thought was a very effective montage. It almost reminded me
of the freaky, alienating montage of medical tests and the Exorcist. Yeah. Yeah,

(42:27):
they're doing a number of things. He's describing some of
them in the narration, but yeah, they were seeing they're
looking all inside him, They're they're looking at all these
test results, just trying, mostly in vain, to understand like
what's happening and what can we do to treat it.
Eventually they come up with a diagnosis. They figure out
what's going on. They say, quote, it's a rearrangement of
the molecular structure of the cells in your body. And

(42:52):
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 site. Heck babble, yeah, yeah. In
the scene, you you believe it. In more to the point,
you can tell that our main character believes and 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. Yeah, And

(43:14):
they even put together, like what was probably the cause?
They they think that it was sort of a two
stage chain of causes. One was that he was recently
exposed to an insecticide, which he remembers a case of
like being around past control people spraying. But then before

(43:35):
that they were like, have you ever been exposed to
any radioactivity? Because that, in combination with the insecticide did something.
And then he remembers finally the boat, the mist, the mist,
and they determine 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

(43:55):
quite fatalistic about it. You know, this may kill him
or make him longer than 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. Yeah, that may

(44:17):
be all over the time, 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 overtly dramatic
and you can you can laugh at but your laughter
doesn't doesn't really take you out, you know. 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,

(44:38):
and you see Charlie and Louise in like a living
room together and Charlie's just kind of like talking into
a chair that appears to be empty, and he's saying,
you know, his business has turned. Things have gone bad
at the plant. His income has gone so he's running
out of ways to help support uh, Louise and Scott.

(44:59):
But he does know of another way to bring in money,
which is that reporters are offering to pay for the story.
They've heard the rumors about the rumors of the incredible
Shrinking Man. So Charlie's like, Hey, what if we just
take the money and we you know, let you become
an object of media fixation. And then there's a reveal.
There's a reverse shot and we see that Charlie has

(45:20):
been speaking into this chair the whole time, and we
finally see Scott in the chair. But now he is
shrunken to the size where like he doesn't you know,
his head doesn't reach above the cushion and his feet
don't dangle below the cushions. It seems like he's about
three feet tall here. 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 others, other

(45:43):
effects methods in order to make it look like he's smaller,
you know, in this case, it's like a giant chair.
But but this reveal is also quite funny. It's something
about the really dramatic music that hits when we see
him there. Yeah, I mean, I don't know to what
extent it was to be funny, but like I'm saying,
you can you can laugh at moments like that in

(46:03):
the film and it doesn't really detach you from the
serious nature of the film as well. 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

(46:25):
lot of what's interesting about it is unspoken but implied.
The thing is that, you know, Scott doesn't have a
job anymore, so he's he's having to get support from
his brother and ultimately support from these you know, these
media vultures who 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,

(46:48):
like his shrinking would not interfere with his ability to
come up with ideas for advertisements, Like he could still
pitch ideas for you know, magazine spreads about how cigarettes
are good for you. But I guess maybe it's implying
that he lost his job because it's something about like
like embarrassment or fear of how he'd be perceived or

(47:11):
the way people would treat him. Just the idea that
like he can't go out to the workplace and be
seen like this. 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 you know, for not fitting the sort
of template for uh, for what it meant to be
a man anymore. In that time, because he's he's physically reduced,

(47:35):
he's literally reduced. On the other hand, I don't know,
it's like you, I don't know exactly what his job
consisted of, but I instantly come back to Madmen, 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 with with

(47:58):
other businessmen at lunch if he's now three k tall? 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

(48:18):
special effects really start to be revealed here, Like Scott
is shown in an extremely convincing set of the home
living room where the couch cushions are taller than him
and the cat comes up to his waist and so forth,
and it looks great. Yeah, 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,

(48:41):
he may have a different take on all this. I
know that I'm a full sized human being and my
cat attacks my feet on an almost daily daily level.
It's like daily assaults, daily, unhunted 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

(49:03):
worse treatment by my own cat. 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,

(49:24):
obviously somebody who was going through a medical situation like
this would be afraid. But Scott is also an important
aspect of how this works. Is that he's humiliated. He
feels humiliated by how people see him. Of course, he's
afraid of what he'll become, and he turns this into anger,

(49:45):
like he lashes out in anger at Louise for no
good reason that he does feel remorse about this. 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 but at this point, like

(50:05):
they're they're you know, their relationship is a little more
out of more than a little bit out of whack
due to his condition, the way he's handling his condition,
and the way he's taking it out on her. We
also learn 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,

(50:27):
I think, Yeah, and this is where we got it.
We get you know, all of this um 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 visibility. Yeah, and
through this narration we learned that Scott just wants he

(50:48):
wants to hide, He wants to get away to somewhere
where nobody can find him, nobody can know about him. Now,
the doctors eventually do come up with something. They come
up with a treatment that they think will have about
a fifty percent chance of curing him, and they do

(51:10):
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 stalled at thirty
six inches fifty two pounds. And again here there are
scenes that are what I was talking about earlier with

(51:32):
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 balanced between cute and kind of ominous. Now, ultimately,
in his search for relief from his hopelessness and his emasculation.

(51:57):
Scott leaves the house one night. He just like leaves.
He goes out walking, and of course people stare at
him as he walks by in the sidewalk, but he
makes his way to a carnival in town where there
is a there's a barker advertising the Freak Show, which
has all the usual performers, and there is like so
the barker is announcing a dwarf actress named Tiny Tina.

(52:20):
And watching all of this, it's it's very interesting, like
Scott has. It's much of it is unspoken, but you
can tell Scott is having this mix of I think
self pity and remorse. So he has the self pity
of realizing that people now would look at him with
the same dehumanizing lens through which they see the people
in the Freak Show. But I think it's also implied

(52:41):
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 in
human curiosities. 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

(53:05):
in another film about somebody going through some sort of
a change. In fact, I think I think it has
essentially been such filler in films, but perhaps inspired by
this sequence, but it really works here. It feels like
it is you know, basically, we're getting to kind of
like the soul of the picture. And speaking of this
is where we're about to meet the character Clarice. So

(53:26):
he goes into a nearby cafe across the street from
the carnival, and he orders a coffee and sits by himself,
and he is joined at his table by a woman
named Clarice, who is also a dwarf performer, and they
have an interesting conversation. She's very very kind and very wise,
and they talk about what's going on. She realizes who

(53:48):
he is because his name has been in the news,
so she understands his situation, and he starts sharing his
fears and his angst about living the way he is,
and Clarice advises him to, you know, maybe just start
by to try to find a way forward just by
thinking about the future. And there's a part where Scott says,

(54:09):
what future in a world of giants, and Clarice says
I've lived with them all my life, and I thought
this was also a very interesting scene, like seeing people
of a typical size as as giants, and like the
turning of the tables this way was interesting because like
the perspective is the perspective that the only thing potentially

(54:30):
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. Yeah,
like they're they're outsized as opposed to just me being downsized.
And she tells him, you know, the world can still
be a wonderful place. The sky is as blue as

(54:50):
it is for the giants, the friends are as warm. Yeah.
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. Uh.
And that lasts for a while until we get to
a terrible realization, which is he realizes, upon a meeting

(55:14):
with Clarice that he is actually shrinking once again, that
the treatment he's been given by the doctors is no longer,
stalling the progression of his condition. Yeah, this is interesting because, yeah,
because in that first sequence, it is noticeable that he's
a little bit taller than herd 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

(55:35):
like his his um the remnants of that that masco
and ego that like he's able to like build some
of it up because it's kind of like on some level, Oh,
finally a woman that I'm I'm taller than so I
can I can fall into some of that that older
thinking about mascow and roles in society, and now that's gone.
Now he's clearly shorter. But then also you can you

(55:56):
can take it at face value, you can you can
take it in any additional direction of character, depth or
metaphor as well. 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. Oh yeah, this is a great sequence
because they're in separate parts of the house. And at

(56:17):
first you don't know that he's gotten that small, 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

(56:39):
also reads the other way too, Yes, and he's so
he reflects upon himself, Like he said, he essentially explains
that the smaller 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 is showing this kind of you know,

(57:01):
to to generalize this weird sci fi scenario into reality
that like fear and a sense of vulnerability creates anger
and resentment and a desire to control other people. Yeah. Absolutely,
So it's because like he's so dependent on Louise now,
he's like he's really controlling of her movements and stuff,

(57:23):
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. 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 stuck away

(57:44):
in a room. I don't know how they haven't worked out,
but he's kept at a safe distance from the cat.
But the cat has snuck back into the house and
has been left alone in the house while she is
at the store. Yeah, and so here's the famous scene
that we alluded to earlier, the cat attacks scene. I
think within the context to the rest of the story,
the scene is really frightening. The effects are very good,

(58:06):
and the horror plays directly on the themes because the
attack is not coming from something that was ever originally
threatening to Scott. The attack is from something that was
previously harmless but has become threatening because the relationship between
them has changed. And it kind of reminds me of

(58:28):
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 a reasoned with. It just
no longer even recognizes Scott as human. He's just a small,
prey animal like any other. Yeah, like the relationship has
shifted that far that. Yeah, it's just you're not who

(58:49):
or what you were before. Now you are merely prey.
And this, of course, this is exactly how it would
go down with a cat. I think we all realize this,
even those of us who own cats and love cats.
If you were this small, your cat would destroy you.
There's just no way around it. It's like, that's what
your cat is programmed to do. That's what your cat

(59:11):
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. 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.

(59:32):
So when the cat is attacking him, he really has
no method of self defense, but he comes up with
something clever. He pulls down on the cord of a
lamp that's on a table above and manages to get
it to tip over off the side table and fall down,
which frightens the cat away. Yeah, and he basically just
runs for it. Now, the sequence is frightening. I love

(59:53):
the image where the cat is creeping up on the
dollhouse originally and then reaches its path through and does
the bat bat thing with the claw. Um. Now, I
don't want to criticize Orange's performance and the way that
Orangey chose to perform this role, and you know, the
way that Jack Arnold directed it and the way Matheson
wrote it. But I did find that the cat is

(01:00:14):
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 going to have more of that. There's gonna be
that kind of butt wiggling thing they do where they're

(01:00:35):
getting ready to spring, and we don't see any of
that from this performance by Orangey. Uh. It's still doesn't
take away from the sequences at all. But I was
thinking about Azow's watching it, like, okay, it really would
go like this, And also he takes a couple of
swipes from from Butch the cat in the sequence like
Butch like bloodies him up a good bit. In reality,

(01:00:59):
I think if you're that's well, I don't think you
would have survived this encounter at all. Yeah, No matter
how clever you were, there's just no denying just how
brutal a cat that size relative of your own body
would be. You would just be torn apart. You might
be played with a little bit, but you would be doomed.
I totally agree. Yeah, the predator prey relationship I think

(01:01:20):
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. Well, I can
think of one memory I have of a cat just
hissing at something much smaller than it, and it was

(01:01:42):
a cat. It was a cat hissing at a huge
black spider. M okay, all right, well, maybe maybe it
does work. I mean cats cats are weird. 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

(01:02:05):
goes down through the basement door and ends up falling
a long way into a laundry hamper. And then Louise
gets home. She finds Butch the cat with like a
torn piece of Scott's clothing that has blood on it
and licking blood from his paws, and so she assumes
that Butch the cat has eaten her husband. Yeah, there's

(01:02:27):
only one way to interpret the evidence. So now Scott
is trapped in the basement and Louise doesn't know he's there.
She thinks he's dead, and he has to try to
find his way out of the laundry hamper. He has

(01:02:49):
to navigate the landscape of giant objects. He has to
try to find a way to contact Louise and make
her realize he's still alive, but he can't make it
up the stairs and she can't hear him call out um.
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

(01:03:11):
sets are marvelous. They're excellent at making you feel the
change in scale as genuine horror and a horror that
has great, various similitude. I have this sense like this
is what it would be like to be several inches
to all trapped in the basement of mid century American house. Yeah. Yeah, again,
the prop work, the sets are just amazing in this,

(01:03:34):
in this whole sequence, and also to black and white.
The black and white. The film's you know, nicely shot throughout,
but these basement sequences especially, they end up taking on
this just like rich uh. You know, the blacks are
just so much darker and deeper in these sequences. I thought,
it's just excellent. It's almost it's almost like German expressionism

(01:03:57):
or something. Yeah. In the narration, he says, the sellers
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. Yeah yeah, but it's like he's and this

(01:04:18):
works in so many levels. You know, he's fallen into
the underworld. He's fallen into the place you 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 inner as
I read that Matheson wrote the novel in large part
in a seller in a basement and would comment that,

(01:04:39):
you know, like he as he was writing it, he
would just look up and look around him to sort
of take in the scene as he was writing it,
and that he thought that the movie matched it perfectly.
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

(01:05:03):
search for food, and there he looks across and he
sees something. He realizes it is a mousetrap, and it
does have cheese on it, but it's a mouse trap.
Oh my god, And you know exactly what's gonna happen.
He's gonna try and rob that mouse trap, and he's
problem solving at the mousetrap, but he's also really hungry
and desperate, and it's the same sort of gimmick like

(01:05:24):
this is probably played out more or less than so
many cartoons over the days. Like I felt like this
is a basic Tom and Jerry kind of a bit,
but it really is scary to watch, Like I actually
cried out a few times as he's like fumbling with
the cheese and nearly making the trap go off. It's
it's great. So eventually Scott realizes that there is some

(01:05:47):
cake that Louise left on a plate on a shelf
and if he could just get to that, he could
eat that. But it's way way high up, so it's
like a mountain climb basically to get to it, and
we see all kinds of things happen. I don't want
to spoil every little detail, but there are you know,
there's discovery of a sewing kit and a pincushion and

(01:06:07):
some pins that can be manipulated to form weapons, and
a kind of grappling hook. There is there is a
sequence where you has to cross a gap in a
wooden crate, jumping from from one thing to another. Oh yeah,
and I did want to do one okay, brief monster
science digression that will be familiar to people who have

(01:06:30):
been listening to Weirdhouse 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

(01:06:51):
I think the reality is if you were only a
couple of inches tall, falling a great distance would be
far less of a concern to you, way less of
a threatening prospect than it is to people with bodies
of our absolute size. And this is something that is
discussed in the magnificent JBS Haldane essay from nineteen twenty

(01:07:12):
six called on Being the Right Size, And this is
the essay that explains how essentially there are different regimes
of physical forces that present threats and problems to an
organism depending on what its absolute size is. So for
tiny animals, there actually is not that much of a

(01:07:34):
threat due to gravity. Like you know, falling a great
distance is not going to harm a very small animal
very much. But there is a much greater threat to
small animals from the surface tension of water, which is
a theme that I would like to see explored to
more horrific ends and shrink movies. I seem to call

(01:07:55):
it's been a long time since I watched Tony I
shrunk 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 like like bombs. Yeah, So to a certain extent
that it gets into this topic well to explain, okay,
So Haldane gives this you know, whole thing. The famous

(01:08:17):
line is he's talking about animals falling down a thousand
yard mine shaft. He says, you know, a tiny mouse
drops down a thousand yard mine shaft, and it might
get a shock when it's the bottom, but if the
if the bottom is relatively soft, it will probably be okay.
But then he says, a rat is killed, a man
is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to

(01:08:39):
movement by the air is proportional to the surface of
the moving object. Divide in animal's length, breadth, and height
each by ten. Its weight is reduced to a thousandth
but its surface only a hundredth. So the resistance to
falling in the case of a small animal is relatively
ten times greater than the driving force. So that's why

(01:09:00):
small falling is less of a big deal. But he
goes on. An insect therefore is not afraid of gravity.
It can fall without danger, and can cling to the
ceiling with remarkably little trouble. It can go in for
elegant and fantastic forms of support, like that of the
daddy long legs. But there is a force which is
as formidable to an insect as gravitation to a mammal.

(01:09:23):
This is surface tension. A man coming out of a
bath carries with him a film of water about one
fiftieth of an inch in thickness. This weighs roughly a pound.
A wet mouse has to carry about its own weight
of water. A wet fly has to lift many times
its own weight, And as everyone knows, a fly, once

(01:09:44):
wetted by water or any other liquid, is in a
very serious position. Indeed, an insect going for a drink
is in a great danger as a man leaning out
over a precipice in search of food. If it once
falls into the grip of the surface tension of the water,
that is to say, gets wet, it is likely to
remain so until it drowns. A few insects, such as

(01:10:07):
water beetles, contrived to be unwettable, the majority keep well
away from their drink by means of a long probosis,
and so this made me think more about it possibly
more horrifying take on the water heater scene that will
follow in the movie. Now. I believe this came up
in our episode on robot Jocks because we were talking

(01:10:29):
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. Yeah, and the idea of having a
bipedal one is just even crazier because it just makes
it more susceptible falls. So if you're out there thinking
about making your own shrink movie, I want to see

(01:10:49):
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.
It's yeah. I 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 recentably gotten more down

(01:11:09):
to like quantum stuff where you're not even and they
just turn it into like alien worlds and so forth. Okay, yeah,
I've never seen any of those. The first one was fine.
I remember the first one 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

(01:11:31):
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 event great and looks
out through it to see a bird out in the yard, which,
of course, to him at this point would be like
a dinosaur, like a giant t rex. And he looks
out at the world outside and he becomes sort of
like he starts laughing, but he's also angry, and he says,

(01:11:55):
in narration my prison almost as far as I could see,
a gray, friendless area of space and time, and I
resolved that as men 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 matchbox. Oh,
and he has to retreat to it in a in
a terrifying spider attack Yeah, the spider that lives in

(01:12:18):
the web at the top MIxS of the cake is
clearly played by a tarantula, which of course would not
be living in that that web, or I'm not even
sure it would be in this basement. Who knows how
it's supposedly got there. At any rate, it still looks great,
great use of a tarantula, a live tarantula and this
uh and of course it fits because it's the director
of Tarantula. Do you think he used the same tarantula

(01:12:41):
guy from whoever provided tarantulas for Tarantula? I don't know, maybe,
but I think he did play on some of his
experience shooting tarantulas because they had certain there are certain
things they learned about, like you know, what's what variety
of tarantula you need? You like, you need an animal
that's big enough and moves appropriately that you can and
create the special effects around it. There are a lot

(01:13:03):
of uh, kind of hokey scenes out there and send
them out where someone uh 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. Yeah,
and so there are some major struggles. In the final

(01:13:24):
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 um and and in the scene, Louise and
Charlie they finally do come down to the cellar, which
is what he'd been waiting on. He was like, Okay,
when they're here, I can call out to them and

(01:13:44):
they'll and they'll get me. But he's too He's too
small for them to hear or to see. Yeah, it's
like he's really passed out of their lives and he
has to realize it at this point, and there's a
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 on a drain, which is a

(01:14:06):
horrifying prospect. But after surviving the flood, there's a change
where Scott seems to gain a new kind of clarity
and strength. He says, quote, a strange calm possessed me.
I thought more clearly than I ever had before, as
if my mind were bathed in a brilliant light, I
recognized that part of my illness was rooted in hunger,

(01:14:26):
and I remembered the food on the shelf, the cake
threaded with spider web. I no longer felt hatred for
the spider. Like myself, it struggled blindly for the means
to survive. And so there is ultimately a confrontation with
the spider that involves some clever use of tools, again
at the alien scale, and then there is in the

(01:14:50):
end a kind of soliloquy. He comes to realize that
he somehow in like in passing beyond the realm where
humans can even recognize him and help him anymore, like
the fact that Louise couldn't even hear him calling out.
It seems that somehow gives him a new sense of

(01:15:10):
meaning in that like by being definitely wholly denied any
prospect of salvation from the world he knew. It's like
he can now fully commit to existence on whatever new
terms come to him, if that makes any sense. Now, yeah, absolutely,
like he has completely passed out of their world now,

(01:15:31):
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 it's not a different scale,
it's a different world, but with different possibilities. I'm not
going 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?

(01:15:55):
What was I still a human being? Or was I
the man of the future? He says, the unbelievably small
and unbelievably vast eventually meet like the closing of a
gigantic circle. And so he comes to feel that by
shrinking down forever and ever and becoming ever smaller, he's
also somehow becoming infinite. Yeah. I was not expecting such

(01:16:17):
a transcendent and kind of psychedelic ending to this picture,
but it really almost brought to mind Phase four, which
has the more overtly psychedelic ending and futuristic far seeing ending.
And this is a little different, but but also feels
that Grand feels that expansive, which again ties me this

(01:16:37):
idea that he has become so small that he has
become infinite or is becoming infinite. It has this in
common with 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. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh. One of

(01:17:00):
the extras on the Criterion collection disc they pointed out
that in the novel, he basically it's a little more
of a downer and maybe it's something that works better
on the page where he's basically like he becomes nothing,
I have become nothing at the end, and they wanted
to do something more upbeat for the movie. The studio
of course submitted an idea. They said, what if it

(01:17:23):
gets bigger again and is reunited with his wife and
of course Jacks conquers all. Yeah. Of course Jack Arnold
was like, no, we're not doing that. So apparently this
ending is like the whole you know, the small meats

(01:17:43):
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. 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

(01:18:05):
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 speeching
like I feel like it could have been the narration
could have been a little more subtle. But the writing
is excellent. Yeah, and we do see some visualszeg and
like the arms of the spiral galaxy and so forth,

(01:18:27):
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 you see what you mean. 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 in makes him look like a prophet, you know,

(01:18:48):
he looks like a like John the Baptist from one
of the Bible movies or something. Yeah, and he's just
just going out there into the unknown, into the into
a wild and ultimately a world beyond humans because he
is 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

(01:19:09):
back on it and being like, wow that that film
was really a great ride. Yeah, yeah, exactly agree. So
the Incredible Shrinking Man U two thumbs up both from me,
both hands thumbs 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

(01:19:31):
another incredible shrinking movie for next week. Yeah, one that
will hopefully be still as is intellectually stimulating. Is this picture.
Next week, we're planning on doing another shrink movie that is,
from what I understand, a direct rip off of this one. Yeah,
but it looks like it'll be a lot of fun. Okay,

(01:19:52):
all right, we're gonna go ahead and close this one out.
But first of all, reminds you that, yeah, we're primarily
a science podcast, with our core episodes of Stuff to
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
listenermail on Mondays, and on Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film here

(01:20:12):
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 a letterbox dot com
that's l E T T R B O x D.
We have a user profile on there, it's called weird
House and we have a list there of all the

(01:20:32):
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 however you want to want to do it.
And the website, of course, is also a lot of fun.
I also blog about these episodes at sammutomusic dot com.
That's just my personal block for this sort of thing.

(01:20:53):
Huge thanks to our audio producer J J. Pauseway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or 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. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.

(01:21:17):
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