R.I.P. Mr. B.I.G. (1923-2023)
In the mid-1950s, American theaters were awash in giant monster pictures, fuels by out fear of the A-bomb and the as-yet-unknown side effects of radiation exposure. People were itching to see mass destruction take on a comprehensible, mythical form—a form which could, by films end, be contained and destroyed leaving the world safe once again.
There were masters of the genre at work at the time: Ray Harryhausen (The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms), Jack Arnold (Tarantula) and Inoshiro Honda (Gojira). Along with the thrills and the special effects, their films had an intelligence, a meditative, philosophical quality when it came to confronting man’s relationship with science and nature.
But of them all, the true king of the giant monster picture was Bert I. Gordon, who wrote, produced and directed a dozen films about giant lizards, locusts, spiders, ants, rats, and teenagers. And he did this with almost no money at all.
Born and raised in Kenosha, WI (sharing a hometown with Orson Welles, who would later star in Gordon’s 1972 film Necromancy), Gordon began making home movies at the age of nine. His first feature, King Dinosaur, was released in 1955 and focuses on a small group of astronauts who encounter a dinosaur on an alien planet.
Given that he didn’t have major studio money behind him, Gordon was forced to rely on his own ingenuity and sheer chutzpah to pull off a film whose script obviously called for elaborate effects (including spaceships, alien planets, and live dinosaurs). The first third of the film is composed of stock footage, and the alien planet sequences were filmed in a state park. Instead of relying on stop-motion animation or rubber suits and miniature sets (both of which were expensive and time-consuming processes) to bring his titular dinosaur to life, Gordon shot close-ups of a Gila monster and used rear projection to give the illusion of mammoth size.
He wasn’t the first to use the technique—in 1954’s Killers From Space, W. Lee Wilder used rear-projected close-ups of spiders and lizards to achieve the same effect—but few used it quite so extensively or to such great effect. With Gordon, the technique would become a career.
King Dinosaur wasn’t a very good film, but it was made at the right time. It was also made with such confidence given that there was so little on screen that you have to admire it.
Working with American International (where they knew a thing or two about chutzpah), Gordon (or “Mr. BIG” as he would later be dubbed) returned in 1957 with three pictures, one of which would come to be considered a classic of the genre: The Cyclops, Beginning of the End (in which B-movie regular Peter Graves battles a horde of giant locusts heading for Chicago), and The Amazing Colossal Man.
Released the same year as Jack Arnold’s thoughtful and profound The Incredible Shrinking Man, Gordon’s film stars Glenn Langan as Glenn Manning, an Army colonel who miraculously survives after being caught in the blast of a nuclear test. Unfortunately for Manning, he also begins to grow at an astonishing rate. In a surprisingly nuanced performance for such a role, Langan portrays a man quickly coming to recognize his own freakishness and isolation before losing his mind completely and rampaging through Las Vegas.
By this point already, Gordon had made a huge leap forward in style and technique. Although he’s using the same rear projection techniqu the effects are much more fluid and convincing here, the story telling is more complex, and the film as a whole has a professional sheen about it.
The following year saw another three films, including a sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man (War of the Colossal Beast), the flipside of a giant monster picture (Attack of the Puppet People), and Earth vs. The Spider, perhaps among the best of the giant tarantula films. Rarely had Gordon used the rear-projection technique so well or with such frightening results.
I sometimes have to wonder if he ever saw himself in competition with the likes of Arnold over at Universal, given that many of their films seem to reflect each other, albeit on different budget levels. But that’s just speculation on my part.
In the 1960s and early ‘70s, Gordon made a sharp break from giant monster pictures, trying his hand instead at human-scale adventure films, fantasies, thrillers, and sex comedies. For the most part the films weren’t as popular or memorable as the ones that earned him his nickname. The only nod to his early career was 1965’s Village of the Giants, mostly played for drive-in laughs as a group of teenagers try to deal with hormones, adults, and unexpected gigantism.
One of the standouts of his more adult films was 1973’s The Mad Bomber, in which Chuck Conners plays against type as a tightly-wound conservative seeking revenge against a liberal world he blames for his daughter’s overdose. It’s a strange and funny films that may have you sympathizing with Conners at the end. Although he’s still working with microscopic budgets at this point, over the years Gordon found a way to do quite a lot with nothing, using cameras and locations in interesting ways.
In the mid-70s, perhaps recognizing what audiences really wanted from him, Gordon returned to the genre that created him with a double bill of giant monsters pitted against all-star casts.
By 1976 the threat was no longer the atomic bomb so much, but technology and pollution as three Hollywood greats—Ida Lupino, Ralph Meeker, and Marjoe Gortner—find themselves confronted with giant chickens, wasps, mealworms and rats. Loosely based on an H. G. Wells story (and returning to a premise first visited more lightly in Village of the Giants), Food of the Gods was both a technical and commercial success, and marked the pinnacle of Gordon’s career. (It also had a major impact on schoolyards across the country, where it was declared an instantaneous classic.)
Gordon followed it up with a return to H.G. Wells the following year with Empire of the Ants, in which a swarm of giant ants on a would-be resort island turn the likes of Joan Collins into mindless slave labor. It, too, made a lot of money for American International.
That was it for Gordon and giant monsters. For the next ten years he mostly made comedies. But his legacy had been well-established.
Gordon made his films simply, quickly, and cheaply, and he gave audiences what they wanted. There was no time to awaited on fake profundities—once the monster was dead, the film was over and you roll the closing credits.
If his films are at best considered “unsophisticated” and “really stupid” by critics, and ignored completely by film historians, images from these films—even the titles themselves—remain an indelible part of the American cultural landscape. Which makes it all the more confounding that so many of these films remain unavailable today. It’s more than a shame—it seems downright criminal.
by Jim Knipfel