One of my wife’s interests is miniatures and, through her, I have come to appreciate the art. I have seen pictures of entire rooms done in the form and did not realize I was seeing something sized at a fraction of the real thing. And some work of this kind is beyond the forms and purposes one would expect, such as the murder dioramas Frances Glessner Lee created which are famously known as The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.
In my review of Dr. Cyclops, I tried to come up with a word for the opposite, the creation of very large versions of objects, and opted to calls these “maximatures”. I hope that term doesn’t annoy you, because I am going to be employing it again for this essay on 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man.
Some such props here include an incredibly realistic looking pencil that has the dimensions of a fairly large tree. But it isn’t just the size of the object that is impressive, it is how it looks worn. That is the aspect of this type of prop I imagine is difficult to get right. There’s a similarly enormous pair of scissors that have marks on them that seem to be fingerprints. Also, although you know this prop is likely hollow inside, the thing looks to have some heft.
It is into his bizarre world Grant Williams finds himself as he gradually, but steadily, reduces in size following a chance encounter with a curious mist while boating. I doubt I would believe any theory on why he starts shrinking, but the one the film presents as the most likely is a combination of a radiation cloud and the man’s earlier exposure to insecticide. As for myself, I chose to not have any ideas as to what the mist might have been. I would prefer it remain mysterious (misterious?).
Grant’s frustration over his predicament is compounded by how little everybody seems concerned when he first notices changes such as his clothes becoming too big and his wife no longer having to stand on her toes to kiss him. She seems to think he’s making too big a deal of things. That is, until she says she’ll love him as long as he’s wearing his wedding band and, of course, it falls right off his finger at that moment. Then there’s the doctor who dismisses concerns about the change in height, saying gravity causes people to lose height over the course of each day, as if that would reduce a person by inches.
The diminishing of our protagonist makes for a good metaphor for the general confusion American males found themselves in the middle of the twentieth century. Following WWII, many men were uncertain as to their role in a society where expectations for them had changed. It is as if domesticity had made him a literally smaller person. Then there are some Freudian elements concerning the change in size. It isn’t difficult to translate the bit where his finger has become too small to wear his wedding ring as a reduction to another certain part of his anatomy. Akin to a mid-life crisis (even if Grant is too young for one), he will eventually find himself attracted to a circus midget (April Kent, whose proportions betray she was not an actual midget) until she is noticeably taller than him. His humiliation will continue until he is living in a literal doll’s house, which is where his beloved cat tries to capture and kill him. This is another element shared with Dr. Cyclops, where a shrunken Frank Yaconelli is not recognized by his faithful dog.
Seeking shelter from the cat, Grant accidentally finds himself exiled to the basement, unable to scale the steps back to the house proper. From here, the movie adopts a completely different tone for its second half, as our hero has to survive in a surprisingly hostile world. He will get water by drinking from the drops falling from the leaking water heater. His only food will be a slice of cake his wife accidentally left down there earlier. There’s also a piece of cheese he rescues from a mousetrap in a particularly tense scene.
There will be no communication with other people from here on out. Instead, he will be preoccupied with fashioning crude tools to climb with and to fend off a giant spider. He will also nearly get swept down a drain when the underside of leaking water heater finally gives way.
The fight with the spider is a justifiably famous effects sequence, but some other moments left an even greater impression on me and these were bits where I did not stop to consider the effects at all. As I mentioned earlier, the maximatures here consistently stunning, often to the extent I found myself forgetting these were merely props, and I was not really seeing a man of only a couple of inches tall interacting with them.
The Incredible Shrinking Man is fairly faithful to the source novel by Richard Matheson, one of my favorite authors. That book was quite a downer. Surprisingly, for a film made by a major studio at that time, the film is, too. I admire it for sticking to its guns. This is a very well-made film that could have been (should have been?) high camp but ends up being something unexpectedly thought-provoking.
Dir: Jack Arnold
Starring Grant Williams, Randy Stuart
Watched on Criterion Collection blu-ray