One of my favorite Beatle quips was courtesy of one of those weird Christmas flexi discs they used to release through their fan club. Talking about the black-and-white Hard Day’s Night, George Harrison says they’re working on another film, and this time it will be in color. John Lennon doesn’t miss a beat when he chimes in with “Green”.
I thought about this during the opening credits and the first sequence of 1940’s Dr. Cyclops. This sci-fi thriller is in vivid, almost lurid, Technicolor. And those first few minutes are bathed in a gorgeous, strong emerald green. Even better, the lettering of the title card is cut out from a background, with rays of light shooting through the openings from behind. It is very similar to that done over a decade later for The Thing from Another World.
The plot concerns your typical mad scientist (Albert Dekker) who has discovered a wealth of uranium in Peru. The mineral is the key in a process he’s created which can reduce living animals to a fraction of their size. I would have loved to have heard his explanation of what scientific purpose this discovery would serve. Instead, he’s simply batshit crazy.
He is also extremely nearsighted, though he has two such impaired eyes. Not sure why this picture has this title, as it is only worked into the plot through an overreaching metaphor about the moral failings of the scientist. Eventually, his last remaining pair of spectacles will have only one working lens, making the title more literal, for no good reason.
Dekker has summoned a fellow scientist (Charles Halton) from ten thousand miles away just to look through his microscope and see what has gone wrong with an experiment. It’s Dekker’s poor eyes, you see. He’s unable to see the slides, which makes me wonder how he has been able to do much of anything scientific. Heck, we saw him looking through a microscope without complaint in the opening scene, so I wonder what happened to quickly. Also, that had to take Halton a crazy amount of time to get to Dekker, so I was wondering why doc didn’t just rope in a local villager or two and just have them describe in detail what they see.
Halton looks through the microscope, tells Dekker what he has seen and then is instantly dismissed to begin the return voyage. I guess Dekker thinks he can just make Halton do a 20,000 mile round trip each time he needs somebody to describe the results of his latest experiment. Insulted, Halton decides to stay and demand an answer for this behavior. This will get him and his cohorts shrunken to roughly a foot in size.
A small group had travelled with Halton. There’s fellow scientist Janice Logan, greedy miner Victor Kilian (from whom the Americans rent their pack mules), local ethnic stereotype Frank Yaconelli, and a bored layabout (and alleged mineralogist) played by Thomas Coley. Curiously, this is Coley’s only theatrical film.
Of the supporting cast, Logan is given the best part, in a rare opportunity at the time for a female character to be a scientist. She is intelligent, sensible, and actually gets to do some scientific work, instead of simply taking care of “the boys” or being arm candy for one of them. Admittedly, she will eventually be the love interest for Coley, though that is just tacked on as part of the conclusion.
One aspect I found interesting in the predicament our heroes find themselves in is their clothes to do not shrink with them. As Dekker observes of Halton: “Imagine his surprise when he awakens to find he is fully dressed in a pocket handkerchief.” Indeed, each cast member starts out in white sheets, which they fashioned in different manners. I found it strange Yaconelli styled his like a giant diaper. Even more bizarre is all the actors bar Halton soon change into different colored garments, without explanation. Also, each has styled their new attire in the same manner as before. Guess you have to go with what you know, though that means Yaconelli is simply now in a colored diaper.
But all this is moot, because this is a fantastic adventure, with astonishing special effects. I honestly don’t know how some of these were done, such as a miniaturized horse in a box. Another effect which impressed and bewildered me occurs in the first scene, where Paul Fix is killed by radiation. His face takes on the qualities of a skull, with his eye sockets becoming a deep purple and vertical lines appearing over his closed mouth, as if it has been sewn shut.
But the true wonder for me is the use of whatever the opposites of miniatures would be called. I am going to call these giant props “maximatures”. Such objects as tables, chairs, books, pencils, eyeglasses and crates were rendered so realistically that I honestly forgot at times these weren’t the real thing. Similar items were done as effectively in The Incredible Shrinking Man, though that was 17 years later and in black-and-white. It had to be far more difficult to accomplish this in color, let alone almost two decades earlier.
There is also a fair amount of rear projection used, and that required more suspension of disbelief. But that is augmented in a couple of scenes by maximatures that help to bring together the foregrounds with the flat backgrounds. The moment where Halton is captured, has Dekker in the background as rear projection wielding a butterfly net. Once the net is out of frame in the background, a giant version of it is in the foreground.
Similarly, Dekker is again in rear projection as he watches Halton on his desk, and backs the tiny man into an articulated giant hand. The hand is fairly convincing in a wide shot. It is far less so in close-up, though I still appreciated the effort. Being similar to that which was done for King Kong, it is light years better than what would eventually be used for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (again, almost two decades later).
I also appreciated how the movie was willing to sacrifice some of our heroes. Dekker dispatches of Halton almost immediately via a rag soaked in ether, as if this great scientific mind is nothing more than a butterfly. This murder is all the more chilling for how casually it is done.
With Halton out of the picture, Logan really becomes the leader of the group, as the survivors find themselves in situations such as an alligator attacking when they try to launch a boat. It is she who decides “We can’t go on like this, being afraid of everything.” And all the characters in peril handle things rationally, having the reason their way out of situations more than fight their way through them (though there is are still action scenes).
There are what I suspected to be logical flaws, though I didn’t find these distracting. For whatever reason, I couldn’t seem to shake the suspicion something was wrong about a development concerning Yaconelli and his faithful dog. There is a scene where he is not recognized by his dog once he’s in shrunken form. Later, Dekker employs the dog to sniff out his master, and that just didn’t ring true for me. I know it’s moot, but I believe either the dog would recognize Yaconelli or wouldn’t—you can’t have it both ways.
Dr. Cyclops absolutely amazed me, all the more so because of its age. Being able to watch this on blu-ray provides the ability to go through effects scenes frame-by-frame, which only increased my appreciation. Some films such as this are poorly done, others are done well for their time but haven’t aged well. This one was a wonder in 1940 and it still is today.
Dir: Ernest B. Schoedsack
Starring Albert Dekker, Janice Logan, Charles Halton, Thomas Halton
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray