The Fly (1958)

A scientist in Montreal steps into his own matter-transporter and emerges with the head and left arm of a house fly, which is the sort of premise that would once have been considered sufficient for an evening's entertainment. Kurt Neumann directs the 1958 original with a flashback structure borrowed from courtroom drama, opening on a murder confession and working backward through domestic calm into basement catastrophe. Patricia Owens carries much of the picture as Hélène, a wife who types notes to her disfigured husband and combs the house for an insect. She is central, undeniably, but she is central in the way that 1950s cinema understood women to be central: keeper of the home, guardian of the child, witness to male ambition. No critique of that arrangement is offered, and none appears to have been intended.

Nor does the film reach for any other contemporary cultural concern. The cast is uniformly white, the setting is a comfortable bourgeois household, and the drama turns entirely on personal catastrophe. The final mutation is presented as horror, which is the point of a horror film, and the altered body is not celebrated but mourned. When François Delambre tells the boy that his father was searching for truth and was careless for one instant, the sentiment is a standard caution about scientific hubris, delivered without sermonizing. It is the kind of closing line that genre pictures of the period produced routinely.

Vincent Price, in an early foray into the macabre, would go on to become the genre's most reliable face. Here he is merely the brother, reasonable and slightly bewildered. The film was a commercial success, spawned two sequels, and was remade by David Cronenberg in 1986 with a greater appetite for the flesh. The original remains a tidy, efficient B-picture, and its cultural footprint is that of a well-made thriller. There is nothing in it that speaks to the preoccupations of a later era, and it makes no effort to pretend otherwise.