Dr. Cyclops (1940)

To all intents and purposes, Dr Cyclops is a B-movie. It is about a mad scientist who discovers how to shrink living things, and has no big stars, although some of the actors in it were well known as character actors. There are a couple of things that raise it above the average though. First of all, it is in Technicolor, beautiful beautiful Technicolor; and secondly, it has some great special effects.

In 1940, the rich palette of colour film was still something of a novelty. The first full-length, three-strip Technicolor movie had appeared only 5 years before (Becky Sharp starring Miriam Hopkins) and cinema audiences had only the year before been amazed by the spectacular Wizard of Oz (1939), a film which blew the dial on colour saturation. Dr Cyclops is basically a sci-fi/horror movie, and before its release only musicals, historical dramas and cartoons had been in colour. Fantastic movie fans were used to atmospheric black and white, not these vibrant, comic book tones.

Director Ernest B Schoedsack had been DP on Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1925), and had also directed a little-known movie about a big gorilla in 1933. (Like King Kong, Dr Cyclops is another classic of the 'actors being manhandled by giant mechanical hands' school of special effects.) EBS' direction is solid, and he did a good job with this small cast of six main characters, trapped in a jungle compound, somewhere in South America (actually the Paramount Ranch in California).

Albert Dekker. Just your average linen-suit-wearing scientific mad genius

Albert Dekker gives a great perfomance as the gently menacing and ruthless Dr Thorkel, who's big discovery is making big living things little. I always wonder about how useful this kind of thing would be, (and Hollywood is still wondering; see Downsizing (2017)), but apparently mad scientists spent a lot of time on it in the old days of Hollywood (see also Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and The Devil-Doll (1936)). In the first five minutes of the film Thorkel kills a man who threatens to shut down his radium-powered animal-shrinking experiments, so we know what kind of guy he is straight off. He's an unusual mad scientist, as he is a pretty big bloke, hampered only by the fact that he can't see five inches without his glasses.

Dr Stuffy and Dr Gorgeous

The rest of the cast consists of a stuffy old professor with a paint-brush beard (Charles Halton); a young woman who is apparently a whizz with a microscope (the very lovely Janice Logan, who sadly died at the age of 50, after making only six films, of which this is the best known); a cocky young minerologist (Thomas Coley, who apparently only made this one film. The rest of his career was in TV); the owner of the mules who insists on coming along (Victor Kilian, who would be very well known to you if you'd ever seen the late 70s US TV show, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. I've heard of it but never seen it. It looks amazing); and finally, Pedro, a local peasant who provides a bit of comedy relief (Frank Yaconelli, a WWI pilot as well as an actor).

Dr Thorkel does some science, with his giant Spanner of Science

Dr Thorkel summons Bulfinch and his team to the Amazon jungle to help him with his research. When they get there, after travelling for weeks we assume, he asks them to look at something under a microscope as his eyes are too bad to use it properly. The scientists give him an answer and Thorkel is like, OK thx bai. Understandably the group are a bit miffed, and stick around. This turns out to be a bad idea, as Thorkel then uses them to test his theory about shrinking things, making them all less than a foot tall. This leads to the excellent 'tiny people' special effects, which are as good as anything I've seen in a movie that doesn't have access to computers. The movie was actually nominated for a Best Special Effects Academy Award in 1941, but lost out to The Thief of Bagdad, which is fair enough.

My Little Pony

The rest plays out much as you'd expect, although the callous murder of two of the characters by Thorkel raises the stakes, making us wonder who exactly will survive. The use of 'cyclops' in the title has a double meaning, relating both to relative size and to broken glasses. Clever stuff. I really enjoyed this movie, and I think it stands up pretty well for its time, and did I mention the Technicolor is beautiful?

Menaced by Giant Chickens

Dr Cyclops and the Little People

 

Dr Cyclops Trailer