Review of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) by Edith N — 01 Feb 2010

In Search of a 50-Foot Marriage Counselor.

It's probably only the film's cult status that prevents its having a status of Puppets in the Corner. Yeah, I know--you think there are films which have both. Only they have the former because of the latter. You think anyone had heard of [i]Manos the Hands of Fate[/i] before Dr. Clayton Forrester inflicted it on a horrified world? They had not. Movies people had heard of, they couldn't afford the rights to, for the most part. (They did a Godzilla movie or two; they don't have the rights to release them on DVD, though, hence a very expensive new version of the tenth box set.) Gamera started as just another cut-rate knock-off of everyone's favourite Tokyo-crushing lizard. This movie, though, is actually iconic. For real. Glenn Manning, a small selection of people not familiar with the Puppets in the Corner version have even heard of. Heck, right now, I'm picturing Mike Nelson in a bald cap. This movie? Shoot, they bothered remaking it in 1993.

Nancy Fowler Archer (Allison Hayes) is a bit of a lush. We find out from a newscaster (Dale Tate, who worked behind the scenes on some good movies) that a "satellite" has been spotted circling the Earth, and it's due to appear in California just any time now, and we know--no dummies, we--that that alcoholic woman heading out into the desert is due to meet up with it soon. Which she does while her husband, Harry (William Hudson), is drinking with Cheap Floozy Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers). Now, Nancy hasn't actually been drinking that night. On the other hand, try to convince someone of that when she returns to town with a tale of a thirty-foot monster attacking her. Only, yeah, thirty-foot monster attacking her. There is radiation involved, as when is there not, and Nancy starts to grow. She is still pretty unstable, and giant and unstable are a bad combination. So, you know, the titular attack. They are also citizens of a town pretty much full of unstable people of one stripe or another, so there's that, too.

For example, let's talk about Cheap Floozy Honey Parker a moment. She is, pretty much from the beginning of the movie, trying to convince Harry to kill Nancy. I mean, take out the aliens and the radiation and so forth, and you've got a decent little noir building up. Shoot, even with the aliens! Nancy has seen something which is there but which no one believes can be, and Harry and Honey hatch a bit of a plan to have her institutionalized. He married Nancy for her money; he's staying with Nancy for her money. Honey has no interest in Harry without Nancy's money in the bargain; she actually says so. They don't care if Nancy is or isn't crazy. They care if she can be made to seem crazy enough so that she'll get locked up, which will leave Harry to do as he pleases with Nancy's money. That's if they don't give her an overdose of what seems to be a sedative, which Harry ad Honey also discuss. Barbara Stanwyck she ain't--but she did appear on an episode of Stanwyck's TV show as well as, well, two movies which aired with puppets in the corner.

The alien craft is referred to, repeatedly, as a satellite. To anyone with even a modicum of relevant knowledge, it's pretty obvious how wrong that one is. On the other hand, all of this took place pretty much at the same time as the Sputnik launch. In the '50s, space and radiation were both new and scary. No one had ever gone up there before. Breaking the sound barrier was still new. It was only with the launch of Sputnik that space became a Big Thing to the average person. It was a scary time in a lot of ways--Stephen King has written of the terror the launch of Sputnik struck in his heart, and he was actually watching a sci-fi horror movie when the movie was interrupted for the announcement. Nancy and the alien and the growing and all that were part of a long list of so-called Atomic Horrors, and hers is only unusual in that the horror was both alien and atomic.

Still, it's worth noting that the real problem in this movie is, at that, the complicated relationship between Nancy and Harry and Honey. Noir's day was over, pretty much, all those gumshoes having hung up their fedoras and the dames having put down their cigarette holders. The story of Honey's working on Harry to get him to kill his wife would have flown ten years, maybe even five, earlier, with actual Barbara Stanwyck, but you couldn't build much of an exploitation movie on that anymore by 1958. 1958 was deep in the era of the drive-in, and this movie was really aimed at those days. No one ever wants to tell you what movie any given feature was on a double-bill with, but this seems to have been an honest-to-Gods B-picture, just made to sell popcorn and fill out the four hours or so of the picture show. Nancy, whose actress was twenty-eight at the time, was a bit older than most of the women whose predicaments would be shown in similar movies; these were really teen movies. It's not a good movie, but it isn't a bad snapshot of its time.