The Fly (1958) - film review

One evening, François Delambre receives a telephone call from his sister-in-law, Hélène, who confesses to having just killed her husband, André.  This is immediately confirmed by a night watchman, who has just discovered André’s dead body at his factory, his head squashed to pulp by a hydraulic press.  At first, Hélène refuses to talk about the killing, and her erratic behaviour convinces Inspector Charas that she is deranged.  Finally, François manages to gain Hélène’s confidence, but he is hardly prepared for the story she has to tell.  A month ago, André was developing a piece of scientific apparatus that could transmit solid objects across short distances in space.  His initial experiments a success, he began experimenting with live animals, and found that this too worked.  But when he subjected himself to the same matter transmission process, disaster struck.  A housefly managed to get into the equipment at the crucial moment and André emerged with the head of the fly.  His only hope was to repeat the process in reverse, but for this Hélène must find the fly that has acquired his head...

One of the weirder science-fiction films to be made in the 1950s, The Fly has a blackly comedic off-the-wall charm that has helped to maintain its popularity and made it something of a cult classic.   Indeed, the film stands up today far better than most sci-fi films of its era, partly because it doesn’t try to be too ambitious with its special effects, but mainly because it does not neglect the human aspects of the story and avoids the usual clichés involving mad scientists and rampaging monsters.   It is surprising, given its confined B-movie plot, that the film was made in vibrant CinemaScope, but this adds to its modernity, the garishly strong colours lending it an unsettling dreamlike quality.

The Fly is not perfect and there are one or two niggling flaws.  Clearly no one with any knowledge of basic science came within three hundred miles of the screenplay; Vincent Price is pretty well wasted in what is effectively a bland supporting role; and the plot could have benefited from some pruning to remove some tedious and needless exposition.  The film could have been much darker than it is and some would argue that it hardly qualifies as a horror film at all.  There are one or two shock moments, but these are of the tongue-in-cheek yuk variety, rather than things that will have you leaping behind the sofa and wetting your bed for weeks afterwards.  The Fly is more black comedy than traditional horror, and its main asset is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously.  In any event, it is a much better film than the two sequels it inspired – Return of the Fly (1959) and Curse of the Fly (1965) – and it is somewhat more satisfying than the flashier 1986 remake by David Cronenberg, which starred Jeff Goldblum.

Whilst it doesn’t develop the idea as well as it might, The Fly does offer a salutary warning about the dangers that mankind faces from the rapid pace of scientific progress.  At the time the film was made, one major concern was the impact that science and technology (in particular, man’s increasing dependency on machines) would have on the human race.  As machines became more sophisticated and widely used, might man not ultimately lose his humanity?  The protagonist in The Fly is someone whose insane thirst for scientific knowledge leads him precisely to that end, albeit in the most fantastically grisly way imaginable.  Fifty years on, the film continues to strike a chord, and is perhaps even more relevant today, now that man has the ability not only to destroy the world by ripping atoms apart but also to tamper with the very building blocks of life itself.  A man with a fly’s head?  That could be just the beginning...

© James Travers 2009

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?