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The MacGuffin is, why not, "the cosmic force of creation itself," distilled by the wicked egghead (Albert Dekker) in a lurid-green laboratory deep in the Peruvian jungle. (His assistant's moral outrage is swiftly silenced with a radioactive blast to the skull.) Dekker has the right malevolent look, bald as a badger and with thick round specs over a thin mustache, and so riotously obsessive that he invites a batch of scientists from another continent just so they can peep into his microscope for two seconds. Miniaturization is the experiment, the subjects shrunk down to pocket size include a windy biologist (Charles Halton), a comely doctor (Janice Logan), a lazybones mineralogist (Thomas Coley), a burro merchant (Victor Kilian), and a campesino sidekick (Frank Yaconelli). (In keeping with the occasional allusion to Greek mythology, all the tiny prisoners are attired in handkerchief tunics except for Yaconelli, who must do with a red diaper.) "Strange how absorbed man has been in the size of things." In Ernest B. Schoedsack's fantasy of characters at the mercy of high and low camera angles, every other shot is a pulp poem. The amalgamation of Incan rubble, soundstage foliage and bottomless wells is strikingly odd and satisfyingly silly, with lush Technicolor hues like freshly printed comic books. (Winton C. Hoch is listed as "associate director" of photography.) A cat's meow turns monstrous, a cactus garden becomes an emerald city. One rare sight has the Lilliputian fugitives silhouetted against a cobalt sky along with a white cockatoo, later they struggle to push a vast canoe into the river and suddenly it's Fitzcarraldo, except for the pink alligator maws snapping their way. "Un film passionnant" (Truffaut), the boyish cliffhanger before Arnold's spiritual rumination (The Incredible Shrinking Man). With Paul Fix and Frank Reicher.
--- Fernando F. Croce |