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The "most fantastic ailment in the annals of medicine" is a case of tangible metamorphosis and spiritual expansion, a signature Jack Arnold diagnosis. The suburban specimen is a strapping adman (Grant Williams) literally engulfed by modernity's toxins, one moment he's lounging in the middle of the ocean and the next he's enveloped by a radioactive mist. Pants turn baggy, the wife (Randy Stuart) no longer stands on her toes for a kiss, the wedding ring slides right out of his finger. Suddenly "a land of giants," the carnival at night is a mocking panorama until a charming dwarfette (April Kent) stops by to share an oversized cup of coffee. Richard Matheson's allegory pushes on, the miniaturized protagonist soon discovers the absolute terror of a hungry kitty's amplified meow. "Easy enough to talk of soul and spirit and essential worth, but not when you're three feet tall." The absorbing parallel is to Ray's Bigger Than Life, glowing x-rays and all, replacing the growth spurt of megalomania with the impotent tragicomedy of living in a doll's house. The couple tested by unknown forces in It Came from Outer Space is dissipated here, the sprite must alone behold the "vast primeval plain" that is the basement floor. Contemplating the details of the tiny odyssey—the cataract under a leaky heater, the wonderment of mousetraps and matchboxes and straight pins, the black widow guarding a crumb of moldy cake—Arnold is nothing less than the Robert Graves of American science-fiction, positing mysterious perspective shifts as the mind's road toward pantheistic illumination. "So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite," muses the molecular adventurer slowly awash in serenity. The nightmare yields at last to an epiphany surprisingly akin to Fellini's in La Strada, a dissolve from a peebly garden to the cosmos points up not nullification but a new beginning. With Paul Langton, Raymond Bailey, William Schallert, and Billy Curtis. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |