The Amazing Colossal Man (

1957

) ½

Mid-century sci-fi films are often entertaining for all the wrong reasons. The performances are wooden, the sets are often made of cardboard and painted canvas, the special effects are absurd, and the monster suits so comical that some can bring a smile to my lips with their mere memory alone. They were often made by filmmakers whose vision outstripped their budget by a couple of orders of magnitude, and the resulting films have a charming amateurishness to them, not unlike the rickety tree fort your father built you as a kid. The filmmakers may not have known much about science, but they weren't about to let that get in their way. So films from the period are littered with minor absurdities and “scientific explanations” that raise more questions than they answer. Indeed even a lifelong B student like myself can point out most of their glaring mistakes. At the same time though, there were more than a few films from this era that, at least to modern audiences, come across as unusually thoughtful and even profound on occasion. Sci-fi, after all, was a chance for filmmakers to explore ideas and themes that would have otherwise been rendered taboo. Just look at movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and Red Planet Mars (1952) for exemplars of the era's surprisingly insightful movies. In an era of good feelings, where people regularly worried about the imminent apocalypse sci-fi provided a vital outlet. The films resonated with their audiences because they were about everyday people trapped in impossible situations. They felt like Scott Carey in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) who after an accident discovers that he is steadily shrinking until his biggest worry is fear of being eaten by the cat. Mainstream Hollywood movies, for the most part, could not dress up their messages in deft allegories the way sci-fi films could and thus stories of spaceships and monsters carved out a nitch in the American psyche.

Now, for the most part, the goofy, poorly-made films with all the thigh-slapping scientific errors were not the same movies as the ones that used sci-fi to delve into the repressed anxieties of postwar America. They had smaller budgets, were made by less talented filmmakers, and generally only entertained children from the 50s, and weirdos like myself. However, there are exceptions to this rule like today's film, which embodies both sets of attributes that I find most endearing about 50s sci-fi. Like The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), whose name I'm convinced it steals as it seems virtually every movie from Bert I. Gordon must steal the name of a more successful sci-fi movie (Earth vs. the Spider (1958), and Attack of the Puppet People (1958)), it's a fantastical story with a surprisingly solid moral core. It's the story of a man who after a fantastic accident is condemned to inevitable madness and death, and can only watch helplessly as the world he knows gradually warps and twists around him. Despite that though, it's also a film that insists that the human heart is unicellular (more on that later), and has an especially shoddy example of Gordon's process shot gigantism at its climax. Sure, it is neither as deep at Red Planet Mars (1952) nor as absurd as Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), but The Amazing Colossal Man has the unique virtue of scratching both itches simultaneously.

Right off the bat the film hits us with a real wall-banger and shows us that neither Bert I. Gordon nor screenwriter Mark Hanna gives a shit about research or fact-checking, by telling us that for the first time the US military is detonating a plutonium bomb. While uranium is the more common fissionable material used in atomic weapons, bombs that make use of plutonium were hardly unheard of in 1957. Hell, Fat Man, the second (and god willing last) atomic weapon used outside of a testing ground, was a plutonium bomb. I say all this because, for those with a grasp on the subject at least, the amount of time the script devotes to mentioning the strange and unpredictable effects of a plutonium detonation are absolutely hilarious. It wouldn't even have been a difficult change to make the script to fix this error either, just swap out every mention of plutonium with some other rare earth element (say Neptunium), and you would be all set. Most people don't have a working knowledge of every fissionable isotope, and if they wanted to be doubly safe they could just invent a new element altogether.

Anyway, due to a freak accident, Colonel Glenn Manning is caught right in the middle of the plutonium blast and nearly incinerated (though why his men, crouched maybe fifty feet away in an exposed trench, are perfectly fine is beyond me). He's rushed to the hospital, where doctors Linstrom and Coulter are less than optimistic about his chances for survival. Indeed, by all rights, he should already be dead. They have a tough time explaining the situation to Glenn's fiance, Carol Forrest, who rushed to the hospital as soon as she heard about the accident. But then, something amazing happens. When the doctors go to check Glenn the next day they find that he has not only completely stabilized but that his body has completely healed. Indeed, his recovery is so complete that he's left without a single scar or burn.

Clearly, the plutonium detonation has had some unexpected side-effects, or at least that's what every sane individual in the movie agrees on. The creator of the plutonium bomb, a scientist named Kingman, turns up for a very humorous scene where he incredulously demands to know what all the hubbub is about. It seriously has to be explained to this bozo that healing third-degree burns over the course of a single evening is not normal, at least unless Christ has risen and paid the hospital a secret visit. Even after he acknowledges the oddness of the situation, it takes a good deal of prodding before Kingman will concede that maybe it's possible that this miraculous recovery could be an effect of the experimental bomb that Manning was exposed to. To be fair, I understand where Kingman is coming from. He's probably just spent the last few years of his life building a weapon to kill people, and probably takes a good deal of pride in his work in the destructive sciences. Under such circumstances, I suppose I wouldn't appreciate being told that I had failed so spectacularly that I'd accidentally developed a universal panacea.

Now, the government being the usual bunch of incompetent goons they always are, immediately move Manning to a new secret hospital without informing his fiance. They are quite insistent that she not be allowed to know where her husband is or what is happening to him, but are just too gosh-darn polite to stop her. So, when Carol shows up at the secret medical facility they've relocated Glenn to and insists on being let in, the soldiers patrolling the perimeter accommodate her with little more than a smile and a “yes ma'am”. This is the sort of thing that will seem galling to modern audiences, myself included, steeped as we are in stories of governmental conspiracies and jack-booted G-men. The people of the 1950s, by contrast, actually viewed their government as an institution designed to help them, not just one that polices them and extorts funds from them. They might admit that the government keeps secrets from them, but most assumed that these secrets were matters of national security that would endanger American lives were the Soviets to find out, not things that the government wishes to keep under wraps solely as a matter of public relations. I find it a hopelessly naive viewpoint, but one that I cannot help but envy in a way.

The reason why the feds have been so anxious to conceal Colonel Glenn Manning is because, in addition to his miraculous recovery, there has been another unexpected side effect of his exposure to the plutonium bomb, he's growing at a steady pace. Already he's a veritable giant, and unless the doctors attending him can find a cure he's going to get a lot bigger. Now the logistics of feeding and housing a titan is daunting enough, but the military has a more pressing concern. You see, Glenn is not all growing at the same pace, his heart is growing considerably slower than the rest of him. The reason we're given for this odd development is that its an unexpected side-effect of the heart being only a single cell. Now, hopefully, my readers got enough biology in high school to know this is absolute nonsense. The heart, like all the other organs in the body, is composed of billions of cells. Now, heart cells are unusually good at coordinating their actions with each other, but this is the first time I've ever heard anyone describe the human heart as “unicellular.” Also, for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, Glenn's defective heart will cause him to go stark raving mad before it kills him outright.

Saying that Glenn responds poorly to this development, would be an understatement. Sure, Glenn has faced death before, as we learn in a flashback to his time in Korea (incidentally, this is one of the only movies from the 1950s I've seen that features any depiction of the Korean War whatsoever, The Forgotten War indeed). However, he's a man-of-action, the kind of guy who would prefer to die on his feet while taking a swing at whatever is killing him; waiting around for his inevitable demise does not become him. He doesn't even have any means of distracting himself from the gloomy thoughts, as soon he's too large to read any books (the print being too small for his gigantic eyes). His mental state is only worsened by the fact that soon he has outgrown the hospital and is moved to a circus tent outside, such living conditions can't help but remind Manning of his freakish state. Left to stew in bitterness, his mental state quickly devolves until he's lashing out at everyone from Carol to the guy who brings him his dinner. After one particularly bitter argument with Carol, Glenn high-tails it into the desert. As it turns out this was a case of singularly bad timing; the doctors have just come up with a miraculous cure that will not only stop his growth but even reverse it. Great news, now they just have to find him and administer a drug from a comically over-sized syringe. Unfortunately, Glenn is on a collision course with the city of Las Vegas, and the army has decided that if the giant tries any funny business they'll shoot him down where he stands. That's not even mentioning the trigger happy Las Vegas police, who act downright offended that some punk giant thinks he can stomp all over their town.

At its core, The Amazing Colossal Man is a tragic story, and it never loses sight of that fact. Take for instance the scene where a nameless orderly brings Glenn his food, here the film pauses and takes a moment to show us just how much Glenn is suffering in his present state and just how much the duress of the situation has impacted his sanity. This could have easily been a throw-away scene, but instead, its an opportunity not just to show off the movie's dodgy special effects but also the plight of its hero. We pity Glenn, trapped as he is by forces beyond his comprehension or control, and long for him to have a happy ending even though we all know that one isn't coming. Indeed, its a testament to Gordon's artistry that he allows the movie to have the tragic conclusion it deserves in an age of banal happy endings. Much about The Amazing Colossal Man is half-baked; the science behind the transformation and the special effects used to depict it onscreen are both laughable. But throughout the film, the emotional core remains solid.