Although cheaply made independent monster movies about mutated bugs had already been packing the drive-ins for a couple of summers, it wasn't until 1958 that the major studios stepped in looking for easy pickings. Paramount hired William Alland away from Universal to produce The Space Children and Colossus of New York, and made a killing by distributing Jack H. Harris's chiller The Blob. Independent producer Robert L. Lippert made several science fiction thrillers for 20th Fox release (such as She-Devil) under the Regal Films banner. His box office hit The Fly originated with a 1957 short story by George Langelaan, first published in Playboy. The writer probably found his inspiration the moment he heard an explanation of the workings of television. If images can be broadcast from one location to another, why not objects? Langelaan's disturbing story was an obvious choice for the big screen. Presented in color and stereophonic sound, The Fly was promoted with mysterious ads promising horrors unknown. The genuinely icky concept definitely had legs: Fox followed it up with two cheap sequels. David Cronenberg's remake 28 years later is a minor masterpiece that expands on the original's concept. Although given third billing, the real star on view is Vincent Price. His sincere and committed performance lends credibility to the fantastic story concept.

The Fly nests an imaginative science fiction thriller within a romantic 'woman's picture' format. Audiences were surprised and shocked by the film's horror aspects. Like a technological cousin of Kafka's cockroach freak in Metamorphosis, a man suddenly finds himself possessing the head of a giant insect. As his grim fate is known early on, his wife's hopeful optimism provides a tension of its own.

The setting is a home in Montreal, where a murder confession is played out in flashbacks. Brilliant researcher Andre Delambre (Al "David" Hedison) is found with his head crushed in a machine press, and Inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall) discovers his widow Helene (Patricia Owens) in a state of confused denial. Andre's businessman brother François (Vincent Price) knows that Helene is lying about what really happened, and tricks her into a full explanation. Andre had invented an amazing matter transmitter and was teleporting objects from one booth to another in his basement lab. Then he foolishly tried to teleport himself...

Producer Lippert may have been drawn to the project because of similarities to the English The Quatermass Xperiment, on which he had also served as an uncredited producer. Both films concern sympathetic men transformed against their will into horrible monsters. Andre Delambre emerges from the teleportation booth with the head and claw of a fly, while somewhere in the house buzzes a confused fly with Andre's head and hand. Sympathy for the understandably distraught Helene creates interest for a concept that by all rights should be plain silly, especially when the tiny fly, caught in a spider's web, squeals "Help me!" The moment may be funny, but it can't be forgotten. The nightmarish, agonized face in the web never goes away.

Director Kurt Neumann's straightforward storytelling disguises some of The Fly's lapses of logic. The malfunctioning matter transmitter makes radically inconsistent errors with each use. After the dematerialized cat fails to re-materialize in the second booth, Andre can hear it meeyowing, like a ghost.  ¹ We also wonder how the fly head got bigger and Andre's head was made smaller. It still appears to be Andre's brain in there, at least until he tells Helene that he's losing his will to that of the fly. Andre one point confesses that he's not sure how parts of his own machine function, and doesn't understand why some teleportations are successful and others are not. Yet he's willing to use himself as a human guinea pig?

The Fly updates the creaky concept of the filmic Mad Scientist. Andre is a workaholic but also a loving husband. He works not in an isolated castle but in a tidy industrial space in the basement of his fashionable house, while his brother handles the business end of things. Instead of providing an additional menace, Vincent Price's François encourages Andre to keep working on his "flat television screen" idea. Just the same, the script opts for the easy way out. Instead of sending Andre back to engineering school, it proclaims that he meddled with things Man was not meant to know. François Delambre tells little Phillipe that his father was a lot like Columbus, an explorer in the unknown. Writer Richard Hodgens points out that, "what will be remembered is that Father was like a fly."  ²

Footnotes:

1. The original short story also has Dandelo the cat get lost in limbo, only to make an unwelcome return. When the desperate Andre goes through the transmitter a second time in hopes of un-grafting himself from the fly, he comes out a real mess, with cat features mixed in with the fly characteristics. And the %$@&#! transmitter isn't even on warranty. In the film, Dandelo's atoms might appear at any time. When Andre and Helene teleport a magnum of champagne, one half hopes for Dandelo to show up crammed into the bottle, like a cat in a Warner Bros. cartoon.
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