BY HANK REINEKE
Ernest B. Schoedsack’s
Dr. Cyclops (1940) was certainly not the first - nor is it the most famous
- horror/sci-fi film to exploit the cinematic possibilities of shrunken humans
as ghoulish entertainment. Audiences of
the 1930s were first introduced to Ernest Thesiger’s deliciously devilish Dr.
Pretorius as he dabbled with his experimentations-in-miniature in James Whale’s
The Bride of Frankenstein. The miniaturization of human specimens were central
to the plot of Tod Browning’s The Devil
Doll (1936). In that film, an embittered
Lionel Barrymore misuses a scientist-friend’s discovery to convert people to
doll size in order to extract revenge on those who had earlier sent him to
prison. In the Silver Age of Sci-Fi,
this device was most famously captured in Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and again, rather exploitatively
a year later, in Bert I. Gordon’s less-celebrated but still amusing knock-off Attack of the Puppet People (1958).
In some manner of speaking, the size-reduced victims terrorized
by Dr. Cyclops is frightening to them only as a matter only of ratio. The combat between the unusually very large
versus the very small was already a well-established trope, straight out of the
playbook of such giant-ape films as King
Kong (1933), Son of Kong (1933),
and Mighty Joe Young (1949). Interestingly, Schoedsack and Dr. Cyclops producer Merian C. Cooper
worked together on all three of these epics, though their involvements were not
always credited on-screen.
Brooklyn’s own Albert Dekker portrays the titular Dr. Cyclops, otherwise known as Dr.
Alexander Thorkel. In his steamy
scientific-research laboratory nestled deep within the green and leafy Amazon
jungles of Peru, the secretive doctor has managed to tap into what’s described
as a “deposit of the richest radium ore known to man.†Though he would have preferred otherwise,
Thorkel’s poor eyesight requires him to request the assistance of a scientific
colleague, Dr. Bulfinch (Charles Halton). Bulfinch travels the thousand or so miles to Thorkel’s remote Amazon
base – if only to look through a few microscopic slides and confirm his colleague’s
findings.
With his task accomplished, Dr. Bulfinch – who has visited
with a small expedition party – is surprised when he’s summarily dismissed:
Thorkel has – somewhat ungraciously - told Bulfinch and Co. to pack up their
things and head home. Though his time at
the jungle laboratory was short, Bulfinch recognizes that Thorkel’s “drawing
the cosmic force from the bosom of the earth†is an inherently dangerous
practice. Especially when one considers
that, by almost all measure and standard, the “abnormally secretive†and
obsessive Dr. Thorkel is clearly a bona fide paranoiac. Bulfinch deems him as a “delusional†who is recklessly
“tampering with powers reserved for God.â€
The “cosmic force†that Bulfinch has referenced is
radium. Dr. Cyclops has been collecting
radium ore through a sophisticated ringed and phallic two-bulb-shaped instrument
of his own invention. Having extracted
the subterranean radium from an open-pit mine, this unrelentingly malevolent madman
then transmits the alkaline and highly radioactive metal through a condenser unit
housed inside his home laboratory. It
there’s that he tricks his overstayed-their-welcome but curious visitors into
taking a closer look at his technical handiwork. Their apparent trusting willingness to do so
will prove to be unfortunate for them as Thorkel reduces them to 12â€-13†in
size. He does this gleefully and without
a hint of remorse, assured that his scientific secrets will remain… well,
secret.
Paramount’s Dr.
Cyclops – one of only a handful of horror films commissioned by the studio
during the genre’s Golden Age – isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the
imagination, but it’s never dull. It
must be said that the photographic effects of Dr. Cyclops are very well done for the period. The work of Visual Effects team of Farciot
Edouart and Gordon Jennings’ would earn both a “Special Effects†nomination at
the 1941 Academy Award celebration. Though they would lose out that year to the flying carpets featured in The Thief of Bagdad, both men would go
on two win Oscars for later special projects.