Albert Dekker is a reclusive mad scientist hiding away in a laboratory in the Peruvian jungle. Boy, are three scientists back in the states surprised to get an invitation from Dekker to join him. The three surprised scientists are Charles Holton, Janice Logan, and Thomas Coley. They make the arduous journey to Peru and are joined by a lowbrow miner, Victor Kilian, for reasons the script doesn't bother to deal with. At Dekker's laboratory they meet Pedro, Frank Yaconelli, a lovable and sometimes comic Peruvian peasant. I knew the minute I saw him that he was a tostada. That's the function of minorities in movies like this. Dekker, in a padded suit and thick spectacles, greets them and asks them to look through his microscope and tell him what they see. "Iron crystals." Thank you -- and good-bye. The visitors are aghast. They made this trip just so that they could spend 30 seconds looking through Dekker's microscope? Well -- yes. The scientists are offended and curious about what's going on. They discover that Dekker has built his lab next to a super-rich vein of radium ore, which he is using in experiments that shrink living organisms. When Dekker discovers that they have discovered the nature of his discovery, he shrinks them too. Alas, he finds that his now-shrunken five human beings are beginning to grow imperceptibly back to their normal size, so he asphyxiates one, blasts another with his shotgun, and pursues the remaining three until, with pluck and ingenuity, they send Dekker tumbling into a bottomless well. They grow back to normal size and return to civilization, vowing not to tell anyone because who would believe them? Who would believe them indeed? The set designer was obviously influenced by Universal's earlier monster movies because Dekker's lab is a crumbling stone affair like Frankenstein's castle. Most of the movie consists of the tiny humans running around, trying to escape. First they are dressed in white, toga-like strips of cloth, except for the Peruvian peasant who wears what appear to be diapers. Later, they appear in designer clothes of various colors, still modeled after the Romans, nicely tailored for Janice Logan, who looks awfully cute prancing around in her little ensemble.
It's too bad she's not much of an actress, but then nobody in the story is particularly magnetic. Dekker huffs and puffs and does everything but cackle like a maniac. Thomas Coley, as the male lead, is a lankylooking galoot, to borrow a phrase, whose performance is actually embarrassing. To be fair, nobody could do much with the dialog. For some reason the main players don't use contractions when they speak, so that "can't" is always "can not", and "I'll" is always "I will." I don't know how important any of that is, though, or whether it was important at all to contemporary audiences. The special effects are the thing. And considering the period, they're not too bad: mattes, rear projection, over-sized sets -- sometimes a combination of effects. Not as good as "King Kong," but still an extravaganza for the 1930s. And it's in Technicolor too. (Supervised by the ubiquitous Natalie Kalmus, who never contributed anything to Technicolor except her name.) Winton Hoch, a real scientist, had a hand in the photography. He was later to win awards with films like John Ford's "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon." The runaways survive all kinds of threats or, in some cases, they don't. They're attacked by cats, alligators, a berserk blind man, and they're threatened by a chicken. Only Pedro's faithful dog plays it straight with them, man's best friend after all.
One wonders if the people who made "The Incredible Shrinking Man" saw this film. It's difficult to believe they didn't. The improvised togas look familiar, and there's that pet cat, Satana, who tries to eat them in a frightening scene.
An amusing diversion.
It's too bad she's not much of an actress, but then nobody in the story is particularly magnetic. Dekker huffs and puffs and does everything but cackle like a maniac. Thomas Coley, as the male lead, is a lankylooking galoot, to borrow a phrase, whose performance is actually embarrassing. To be fair, nobody could do much with the dialog. For some reason the main players don't use contractions when they speak, so that "can't" is always "can not", and "I'll" is always "I will." I don't know how important any of that is, though, or whether it was important at all to contemporary audiences. The special effects are the thing. And considering the period, they're not too bad: mattes, rear projection, over-sized sets -- sometimes a combination of effects. Not as good as "King Kong," but still an extravaganza for the 1930s. And it's in Technicolor too. (Supervised by the ubiquitous Natalie Kalmus, who never contributed anything to Technicolor except her name.) Winton Hoch, a real scientist, had a hand in the photography. He was later to win awards with films like John Ford's "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon." The runaways survive all kinds of threats or, in some cases, they don't. They're attacked by cats, alligators, a berserk blind man, and they're threatened by a chicken. Only Pedro's faithful dog plays it straight with them, man's best friend after all.
One wonders if the people who made "The Incredible Shrinking Man" saw this film. It's difficult to believe they didn't. The improvised togas look familiar, and there's that pet cat, Satana, who tries to eat them in a frightening scene.
An amusing diversion.