The actors aren’t well known, but the handling is skilful and Richard Matheson’s script is a masterpiece. Grant Williams is the poor guy who happens to be sunbaking on his boat when it passes through a cloud and later finds himself shrinking. His wife was downstairs getting a beer – benefits of housewifery.
Matheson works through the story with excellent paranoid logic – cloud, early shrinkage, doctor, more shrink, serious tests, media exploitation, discovery of anti-toxin, false dawn and romance with a midget, fight with a cat which the wife thinks he’s dead, winding up in the basement, which takes up the second half: search for cheese, mountaineering up stairs to get at cheese, the flooding of the basement, fight with the spider, then the “I still exist” finale.
Matheson has a great eye for the image – Williams is unable to fit into clothes, then his wedding ring slips off, then we see him small in a chair, moving into the doll’s house. He’s also terrific with “man against the elements”, as he later shown in Duel – the terrific scene where he tries to retrieve cheese from a mousetrap (he’s successful but, in a great reversal, the cheese falls down a drain), and most of all the final battle with the spider, one of the great film villains. If I found the second half dragged a little, maybe it was because I was waiting for the spider fight, which is thrilling. The ending is striking too – a slice of existentialism, totally unHollywood.
The miniature work has aged very well, although some of the back projection is a bit iffy. It’s such a shame Universal didn’t get Matheson and Arnold to make I am Legend as a follow up. And I think Grant Williams would have done fine – he’s pretty good here. A lot of more renowned actors never got to star in a film this good.
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