This is a guest piece by loyal Shadowplayer Chris Schneider.
“There’s nothing out there, just emptiness.”
~ William Hudson as Harry the louse husband, having accompanied his wife to search for a flying saucer and a 30-foot giant.
Writes Joan Didion, at one point in SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM, “I just can’t get that monster out of my mind. It is a useful line, and one that frequently occurs to me when I catch the tone in which a great many people write or talk about Hollywood.” She describes, but doesn’t name the monster movie — THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK (1958) — in which she discovered that line.
COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK.
In a similar way, you could say that the 50 FOOT WOMAN line quoted above, which I heard while watching the film on TCM today, is “useful.” It has a certain existential ping! to it, which is easier on a producer’s pockets than the creation of actual decent special effects. There are some crisp and contrast-y b&w images to 50 FOOT WOMAN, which was shown in a nice print, but the special effects are execrable. Even by 1958 standards. How do you make a creature look glow-y and alien in a b&w movie, we ask photographer and co-producer Jacques Marquette? Make it slightly out-of-focus and seemingly unconnected with the rest of the image, or so it seems.
The script was written by Mark Hanna, who also wrote THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957) and was clearly drawn to stories of gigantism. The direction was by “Nathan Hertz,” a name used by Nathan Juran on this film and on THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS (1957). Both 50 FOOT and AROUS are low-budget, low-expectation science-fiction tales never too far away from comedy in their depiction of sleazy and venal behavior.
©Chris Schneider, 2015
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