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Hélène (Patricia Owens) has just killed her husband André (Al
Hedison) in a particularly gruesonme way, she squashed his head and arm
with a hydraulic press - and twice, too. What makes this particularly
macabre though is that according to her brother-in-law Francois (Vincent
Price) she and André were deeply in love - and when asked about that, she
admits it, but still sees nothing wrong in her action, in a way she even
seems happy about it. It's only each time she hears a fly buzzing that she
totally loses her cool and starts saying irrational things, like going on
about a fly with a white head that's supposed to be the key to the whole
mystery.
So eventually, Francois tells her he has caught the white headed fly,
upon which she tells her whole tale to him and the investigating inspector
Charas (Herbert Marshall) ...
... like mad, André, a gifted and rich scientist has worked on a
teleporter, and it took him quite some time and effort to not only invent
it but also make it teleport live matter. But finally he made it and sent
guinea pigs from here to there unharmed (and still alive too). So
eventually, he teleported himself ... but somehow a fly got into the
teleporter with him, and somehow, his molecules and those of the fly got
mixed up, so suddenly out came André with a fly's head and arm, while
somewhere out there is a fly with a human head and arm ... the white
headed fly.
The real problem is that André (the man with the fly head) still
thinks like André, but more and more the fly's brain seems to take over
(don't ask how, somehow it makes sense int he film anyways). At first,
Hélène desperately tries to catch the fly with the human head, which
would be needed to turn André back, but all of her efforts are futile, so
André persuades his wife to kill him before he turns into a dangerous
beast, and to prevent such things from ever happening again, he destroys
his lab, all his documents, and tells his wife he has to be destroyed
himself - squashed like a fly in fact - to erase all evidence of his
experiments. So Hélène squashes him, using the hydraulic press, and when
she in the first go misses to squash his fly arm, she has a second go ...
Hélène has finished her story, but the inspector refuses to believe
her, and only now Francois admits he has not caught the white-headed fly
at all ... which puts Hélène on the spot, since the fly was her only
evidence. And soon enough, she is arrested for murder. It's only when,
rather coincidently, Charas and Francois find the white-headed fly caught
in a spider's web amd recognize the head to be André's that htey realize
there is truth in her story ... but Charas is so shocked by the discovery
that he squashes the fly with a stone, before realizing the fly would have
been vital evidence. But he agrees to cook up a story to free Hélène
from her charges ...
From today's point of view, The Fly might look a tad
old-fashioned: the special effects are rather unconvincing, the shocks are
few and far between, and the pacing is (deliberately) slow. However, The
Fly boasts a despite all its silliness very interesting story that is told
in an interesting and largely unsensationalistic way, and the performances
are uniformly great.
Recommended.
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