Small Scale Mayhem

One of the biggest problems faced by low budget films, especially those with ambitions beyond their budgets, is their inability to provide a satisfying climax to their dramas.  This is particularly true for science fiction pictures which set us up for some kind of world shattering conflagration, but instead provide the audience with a damp squib.  The Man Without a Body, for instance, sets us up for a climactic monster rampage, as the creature consisting of the revived head of Nostradamus sewn onto a new body breaks out of the lab.  What we get is a guy running around a couple of studio back lot streets before climbing a fake church tower, where his head falls off.  Konga (1960), Herman Cohen's small scale King Kong rip off does slightly better, with the use of some actual location shooting allowing the back projected titular man in a monkey suit at least appear to menace some London streets.  (One of these is the row of shops that stood near Merton Park Studios - unlike the studios, they are still there - while the Central London footage was shot illicitly, without permission, with the blanks fired by the 'soldiers' allegedly resulting in the police being called out).  It was still completely underwhelming.  I was put in mind of these films when I recently caught The Colossus of New York (1958) on a streaming channel the other day.  It is a film clearly building toward a cataclysmic monster rampage which it knows it can never properly realise.

Which is the problem with the entire film - it sets up an intriguing idea, but simply doesn't have the resources to properly execute it.  The frustration of the film makers seems palpable, as the movie resolves into a series of largely static, studio bound laboratory schemes, punctuated by domestic dramas.  The story is well worn, but nonetheless interesting: when a brilliant scientist dies in a road accident, his father saves his brain and transplants it into an outsize and somewhat grotesque looking android body.  Horrified by his new appearance, the resulting cyborg refuses to leave the lab and demands his wife and child are never told of  his mechanical after life, in the meantime, he agrees to continue his experiments with his father and his colleague.  Both the questions of self-identity and morality which surround the situation are touched upon, but in a seventy minute running time can never really be properly addressed.  The film instead keeps cutting to the dead scientist's family, his brother's relationship with his widow, the son's attempts to come to terms with the loss of his father and his reactions to the cyborg when it turns up, having given into its urge to see its family.  While these elements could, in their own right, have provided a fascinating story, again the running time and the demands of the B-movie format, dictate that they end up feeling like filler until the cyborg inevitably turns evil and starts killing people.

The transition of the cyborg from good to bad is the best handled part of the film, with the scientist's situation - a brain trapped in a mechanical body - taking its psychological toll.  The unemotional logic of the machine inevitably superimposes itself on the living brain's rationality, his compassion losing out to simplistic, black and white judgements, resulting in his killing of his brother who has fallen in love with the widow and his eventual rejection of his work to relieve world hunger as those it would help are 'worthless'.  This last is the pretext for the climatic bout of small scale mayhem, as the cyborg goes on a very modest rampage in the lobby of the United Nations building in New York, disintegrating a few members of a very sparse crowd with beams firing out of his eyes.  While his demise, the living brain finally asserting itself and getting his son to press his deactivation button, is a logical development of what went before, one can't help but harbour a sneaking suspicion that it took place that way because the production couldn't afford the usual destruction by the massed military of the United States.  The film is actually well made, particularly bearing in mind its budget, but this was only to be expected bearing in mind the talent involved - Eugene Lourie, art director turned director and something of a specialist in monster movies directs, while former Orson Welles associate William Alland produced and John P. Fulton, formerly of Universal's golden age of monster movies, provides the special effects.  With regard to the latter, the cyborg itself is quite impressive, the flexibility of its face combined with its bulk and huge hands effectively suggesting a melding of man and machine.

It's worth pointing out, of course, that not only low budget movies sometimes conclude with a less than spectacular climax.  There are all manner of bigger budgeted productions that, despite spectacles and action sequences during their running time, just seem to peter out, leaving the viewer feeling short-changed.  Sometimes this is due to the budget running out or, in the case of Avalanche Express (1978), both director and star dying before production was completed.  In other cases, though, it is because the film's scenario is based on real life events, which don't lend themselves to providing a spectacular ending.  Such a case that springs to mind is the US-Italian World War two epic Anzio (1968), which features a star studded cast and a large scale battle sequence part way through in its chronicling of the titular Allied marine assault in 1944.  The film's climax, however, is decidedly small scale, with its surviving characters having to run a gauntlet of German snipers in order to return to the beaches.  Which reflects the fact that the Anzio operation was characterised by the commanding general's refusal to advance once he had landed his forces, minimising contacts with the enemy and meaning that, in reality, there was no climactic battle.  (His caution allowed the Germans to reinforce their defences).  Consequently, the film's makers had no choice but to come up with this small scale action to provide some semblance of the sort of action finale viewers tended to expect of war movies.