Shane’s Random Home Cinema Thoughts: The Fly on FilmFour HD
"It'd be funny if life wasn't so sacred."
FilmFour HD recently launched exclusively on the Virgin HD service (take that Sky subscribers!) and I’ve been recording a few films on the handy V+ hard drive. The quality of Channel 4 HD is very good on Virgin and FilmFour looks to be equally good, and without the distracting channel indent in the corner of the screen, which is nice.
The other night, I curled up with my girlfriend to watch one of these recordings- The Fly, made in 1958, starring Vincent Price and David Hedison. I’m a big fan of David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, but I’d only seen the original once before, many years ago on terrestrial TV. I could have sworn it was in black and white, and I’m sure the channel panned and scanned the film to fit square TV’s (thanks guys, I only wanted to see 51% of the picture!). Surprisingly enough, FilmFour’s CinemaScope Technicolor presentation was quite an improvement. HD is great for brand new films and demo-material documentaries like Planet Earth, but I find there’s something nice about seeing an old film in HD. Notice the detail in Vincent Price’s Brylcreemed 50’s style hair? Spot the wallpaper pretending to be real woodwork on the set! Thrill to the blue-bottle with it’s head painted white! Actually, we had to pause the film for a minute and discuss just HOW they managed to paint the fly’s head white…was the ‘fly-wrangler’ able to hold it in place? Did they hide some paint in a pile of sugar and chuckle as the fly, blissfully unaware, painted it’s own head? Fascinating stuff.
As much fun as spotting extra HD detail is, the main reason The Fly 1958 inspired this article is, it’s very good. Maybe even as good as the remake. I couldn’t help but notice (once I’d marveled at Vincent Price’s hair a couple more times) that the underlying themes of the remake are all present and correct in the original. David Cronenberg, the hack, had half his work done for him. I’m only kidding of course, David Cronenberg is no hack director, but his glorious remake mostly built on the originals ideas.
In the 50’s, a time when you could (so they tell us now) leave your doors unlocked at night, the big fears were nuclear war and scientists ‘gone mad’. Scientists ‘gone mad’ building nuclear weapons? YIKES. A lot of the horror and sci-fi of the day featured giant nuclear bugs (science created this monster!) and alien invasion (look out, the Commies will get you!). The Fly was one of the most popular crazy scientist movies, a huge hit spawning two sequels and (thirty years later) a remake and a sequel to the remake. Today, in this climate of remakes gone mad, there is (of course) talk of another remake. In 3D, probably.
Where was I? A bit scared actually, my mind just wandered to that money-spider hanging from the HiFi Cables office loo ceiling… I’ll get back to those themes, present in the original and remake. Our mad scientist in the original (played by David Hedison, Felix in the Timothy Dalton Bond movies) uses his (patent-pending) DISINTEGRATOR-REINTEGRATOR machine to teleport (a term apparently not-coined in 1958) himself a few metres through space. Tragically, he didn’t notice the housefly hitching a ride, if only the maid had used the anti-bac spray in the kitchen more often. I wonder if anti-bac spray was available in 1958, it would have been a lot easier to invent than a DISINTEGRATOR-REINTEGRATOR, surely, and could have prevented all this horror. Anyway, the teleport promptly flips-out and swaps the scientist’s head with the fly’s head (eeewww!) and, just for good measure, swaps his arm with (look away now kiddies) the fly’s leg. In the remake, this transformation happens much more gradually, the scientist slowly and painfully becomes a human-fly hybrid. This allows Cronenberg to delve a lot deeper into the psychology of a human beginning to think like a fly. In one touching and quite disturbing scene, Jeff Goldblum has a great speech about how he, the human-fly, will become the very first insect politician. It’s tragic stuff, the humanity of the scientist, trying to reason with the insect controlling him. The insect just wants to eat, well, everything and that’s quite anti-social you see. In the original, there’s no suggestion of an insect politician, because his instant fly head renders speech impossible. This forces David Hedison to communicate with his wife via typing (with his good arm), knocking (once for yes, twice for no) and, in the most poignant scene, writing “Need fly. Love you.” on a blackboard while trying to keep his fly arm at bay. Hedison needs the white-headed, white-legged fly to (help meee, help meeeee!) get his head and arm back. Ladies, ever tried catching one particular fly and having your husband’s life depend on it? Didn’t think so. It’s pretty frustrating and adds a great deal of suspense to the film (the remake missed a trick by removing this element). Surprisingly, catching it in his hair did not occur to Vincent Price…
Too many random thoughts, must wrap up this blog. POSSIBLE SPOILERS coming up-
In The Fly, the scientist’s long-suffering wife (original) or girlfriend (remake) is dragged along to the tragic end and must assist in the human-fly’s suicide. The horrible consequences of scientific experimentation ‘gone mad’ leading to only one decision…destroy the monster. The point being, the journey to a new scientific discovery sometimes results in casualties along the way. After both films (aside from the monstrous thrills), I was left considering the lives lost to bring us the numerous technological advances from which we benefit- medicine, electricity, aeroplanes, space shuttles, HDTV. Poor old Vincent Price was left mourning the loss of his scientist brother, caught in a web. Literally.
