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.
