The Fly (1958)

Figure 1: Poster Art ...She changed her mind, you know how women are... ~Philippe Delambre Is it a man? Is it a fly? No it's a 1950 production by Kurt Neumann. The Fly is one of the more dusty editions to the genre of body horror. The film may appear clichd but when it was released, this is the 50's we're talking about, one could imagine it being terrifying! The writing is commendable having the majority of the film as a flash back and finally catching up with it's beginning and continuing thus forth. The film gives us a wonderful example of the dangers of playing God. The horrors that await the characters are produced in the manner of a short story that consists of a scientist by the name of Andre Delambre who in a mad rush for fame and fortune ran faster than his guardian angel could fly and took his teleportation experiments to the next level from just porting static, non organic constructs across his lab to start the shift of organic organisms. Now the film would not be interesting if that was all that happened. Andre, as told by his wife Helene through out the first half of the plot, spliced himself a fly that just by chance was in the lab at the time and had flown into the pod. The presence of the fly itself was let on from the beginning of the film. This leaves no room for surprise when the events unfold. It could be argued however that considering the subject of the film that it's quite interesting how long you are led to wait before the flyman appears. You could go even further on to argue that a great majority of the plot points and twists along with any points in Figure 2: Film Still

significance to moral or ethical questions are a all unloaded before the fly itself is exposed. ...If chance be the Father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky...~ Steve Turner fig.4 This quote from a poem called Creed and it's foot note Chance. Although the quote was written for a different reason this was added to explain how the scientist knew so little about his work that when he finally came to test it he just left too much to chance and only disaster greeted him and in the end ultimately his demise followed leaving him to fight the duel nature within himself to love his wife. The film is an odd one because though it was created to be a horror title, the film has a very big basis as a love story and could even pass as a romance title. The story could be viewed as an epic love story of love and sacrifice for the one you love. How a wife will go for her husband and gives an excellent definition of what married life is all about about. Now this is one thing that should be brought up because especially in some statistics of divorce rates in the UK. The graph shows a spike in the late 1940's to the early 1950's and that if this was a global event, that this could well be one of the messages that is coming across so strongly. Well that could be the case up until the now bereaved Helene couples up Figure 3: Film Still with the late Andre's Brother.

Biblography Images Figure 1 Web, Film Poster, The Fly, dir. Kurt Neumann, 1958, USA, http://www.wrongsideoftheart.com/wp-content/gallery/posters-f/fly_1958_poster_03.jpg Figure 2 Web, Film Still, The Fly, Kurt Neumann, 1958, USA, http://mutantville.com/blog/wpcontent/uploads/2011/08/the_fly_1958-779691.jpg Figure 3 Web, Film Still, The Fly, Kurt Neumann, 1958, USA, http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_oLvQRg7Qc1s/TOq01Yl_GwI/AAAAAAAABY0/zWZpQS4aPMk/s400 /the-fly-1958.jpg Quotes Figure 4 Web, Quote, Poem, Steve Turner, 1981, UK, http://veritasluxmeafreshmao.blogspot.com/2007/08/poems-creed-and-chance.html Figure 5 Film, Quote, The Fly, Philippe Delambre, 1958, USA Figure 6 Web, Statistics, The Guardian, 2011, UK, http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons