Few movies have fascinated me as much as 1958′s THE FLY. It chilled me in childhood and enthralls me as an adult, so having an entire book devoted to the film — and becoming a definitive resource on such — greatly appeals to me. Unfortunately, THE FLY AT FIFTY: THE CREATION AND LEGACY OF A CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION FILM isn’t it.
Instead, Diane Kachmar and David Goudsward’s work appears — how to put this nicely? — too fanboyish, with not enough meat to it. It is more about facts and figures thrown together than actually written. I was alternately pleased by it and frustrated with it, in roughly equal measure.
While it does dish some behind-the-scenes detail about the movie’s making, it’s brief, scattershot and not well-organized. It also assumes the reader is readily familiar with the plot and story points; while some of that is to be expected, this book is too shorthand in that department. On the flipside, it’s overly detailed in other areas. For example, do you care about what dates each VHS and DVD release came out? What cities star David Hedison has appeared in for conventions? Where he celebrated his 80th birthday? When his mother died?
While that biographical chapter on Hedison annoys, the Q&A with him that immediately follows is entertaining and even charming, even though it repeats some of the information presented earlier, including from his own introduction. Each cast member then gets his own bio entry, which is fine when you consider the likes of co-stars Vincent Price, Patricia Owens and Herbert Marshall, but close to pointless when it includes that one woman who played “arts matron at the ballet” and some guy who played the waiter who “brings a telephone” into one scene. In that manner, THE FLY AT FIFTY is like one of those hardback cinema reference works put out by McFarland Publishing, only without the super-ridiculous price tags: too anal, too academic.
Information on the sequels is comparatively scant, but sweet. Another welcome inclusion is George Langelaan’s original short story, which first appeared in PLAYBOY. If you haven’t read it before, you should. Since it’s also available elsewhere, it’s not enough to quite merit a purchase of this particular tome, but it helps. —Rod Lott
Related posts:
- Science Fiction America: Essays on SF Cinema
- The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Sixteen Original Works by Speculative Fiction’s Finest Voices
- The Science Fiction Century: Volume 1
- H.G. Wells Collector’s Book of Science Fiction
- Novel Ideas: Science Fiction
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“Help me!”
I have a bunch of disappointing efforts like this in my personal library, the most recent of which is a slim tribute to the films of Don Knotts that I bought with genuine excitement, only to feel utterly betrayed when I sat down with it.
The authors purported to have spent years working on it, but as far as I could tell it contained nothing you or I couldn’t have come up with just using the IMDb as our only reference. It didn’t help that literally half of the book’s word count was taken up by the detailed credit listings of each and every film, which left room for–and this may be an overstatement–a paragraph’s worth of commentary (which I disagreed with). I started writing a ranty review of it for this site, but halfway through I realized it wasn’t worth the effort.
Still, it really does suck when writers are given an opportunity to publish a work that is likely never going to be attempted again and screw it up so royally.
Flies turn meat to pudding and then consume.
Freaky film for the time, re-made pretty well with Goldblum starring.
“Help me!” indeed. The viewer is left wondering which is worse, the fly with the human head and vocal chords, or the six-foot half-n-half monster.
Very cool concepts in horror sci-fi, but wouldn’t have thought there’d be enough material for a book on the subject.