COLOSSAL PROBLEM

Arrrgh! It's so frustrating that there's no big and tall men's clothing shop in this town!

Film historians and sociologists alike claim mid-century sci-fi films were largely about Cold War anxiety and fear of nuclear annihilation. Well, probably. There was also an interest in using improved special effects in order to advance storytelling possibilities. Hollywood made about five hundred sci-fi movies between 1948 and 1962, and the sci-fi story form, even before the Cold War, often involved invasion or technological disaster.

But many post-nuclear movies actually were about nuclear fear. Godzilla, for example. And the U.S. film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, about two nuclear tests pushing the planet toward the Sun. Susan Sontag once wrote that, “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films, lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence.” So we’ll buy it.

That brings us to Bert I. Gordon’s schlock sci-fi classic The Amazing Colossal Man, which is about an army colonel played by Glenn Langan who’s accidentally exposed to the pulse of a plutonium bomb, after which he grows to sixty feet in height and eighteen-thousand pounds. Thankfully the army is good at “expandable sarongs,” as the movie puts it, though there’s no word on whether they also built enormous toilets.

Standing by Langan’s side through thick and thicker is loyal fiancée Cathy Downs, trying to be supportive as he slowly loses his marbles. Army eggheads eventually find a cure, but not before Langan runs away into the Nevada desert, headed for Las Vegas. They chase him down in order to inject him using a humongous syringe containing the first dose of a two-stage cure, but things aren’t as easy in practice as they are on paper.

And the same could be said about filmmaking, but even if this one will induce occasional smirks among viewers, it must be noted that it was a box office success, pulling in four times its production budget. That budget? $138,000. Pretty low, and it shows. The projection effects required to make Langan sixty feet tall worked, more or less, but everything else screams shoestring.

In a sign of the film’s relative quality, it was skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000, with a better result than the original. But the movie fits Sontag’s thesis perfectly. As she noted, “Science fiction films may also be described as a popular mythology for the contemporary negative imagination about the impersonal.” The Amazing Colossal Man is negative in the extreme, and it exudes terror of the impersonal. It premiered today in 1957.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1921—Einstein Wins Nobel

German theoretical physicist Albert Einstein is awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon in which electrons are emitted from matter as a consequence of their absorption of energy from electromagnetic radiation. In practical terms, the phenomenon makes possible such devices as electroscopes, solar cells, and night vision goggles.

1938—Kristallnacht Begins

Nazi Germany’s first large scale act of anti-Jewish violence begins after the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan. The event becomes known as Kristallnacht, and in total the violent rampage destroys more than 250 synagogues, causes the deaths of nearly a hundred Jews, and results in 25,000 to 30,000 more being arrested and sent to concentration camps.

1923—Hitler Stages Revolt

In Munich, Germany, Adolf Hitler leads the Nazis in the Beer Hall Putsch, an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the German government. Also known as the Hitlerputsch or the Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch, the attempted coup was inspired by Benito Mussolini’s successful takeover of the Italian government.

1932—Roosevelt Unveils CWA

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt unveils the Civil Works Administration, an organization designed to create temporary winter jobs for more than 4 million of the unemployed.

1935—Parker Brothers Buys Monopoly

The board game company Parker Brothers acquires the forerunner patents for Monopoly from Elizabeth Magie, who had designed the game (originally called The Landlord’s Game) to demonstrate the economic ill effects of land monopolism and the use of land value tax as a remedy for them. Parker Brothers quickly turns Monopoly into the biggest selling board game in America.

1991—Gene Tierney Passes Away

American actress Gene Tierney, one of the great beauties in Hollywood history and star of the seminal film noir Laura, dies in Houston, Texas of emphysema. Tierney had begun smoking while young as a way to help lower her high voice, and was hooked on cigarettes the rest of her life.

A collection of red paperback covers from Dutch publisher De Vrije Pers.
Uncredited art for Hans Lugar's Line-Up! for Scion American publishing.
Uncredited cover art for Lesbian Gym by Peggy Swenson, who was in reality Richard Geis.

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