Why did so many B-movies in the 1950s have giant things attacking small towns and/or large cities?
That’s a good question, but I think it’s because, if Godzilla has proven anything, it’s that it is easy for movies to make things look big using miniatures the like.
With that in mind, I found Attack of the 50 Foot Woman on Hulu.
The movie opens with a newscast as an anchorman explains that a UFO was sighted at various places around the world. Taking out a globe, he calculated where it will appear next, and it’s the California desert.
That would be when we meet our title character, Mrs. Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes). She sees a spherical UFO land in front of her and spends most of her first scene making a good impression by screaming her head off before running away from a large rubber hand.
We then cut to her husband Harry (William Hudson) hanging out with his mistress Honey (Yvette Vickers), plotting against his wife who is wealthy and has a reputation for being an alcoholic. Honey wants to run off with Harry, but the way divorce laws and the like work in this time period, apparently he won’t get any of Nancy’s money if they do divorce and, as bad as it is that he’s cheating on his wife in public and with the full knowledge of pretty much everyone else in town, but he also wants her money, so the two, again in a public space, plot to get Nancy committed or killed or something so they can have all of her money.
And that is, more or less, how the movie goes. Nancy wants her husband, he doesn’t want her, and Honey is working with him to get her out of the picture somehow. The movie only runs a little over an hour, but the actual “attack” of the 50 foot woman only comes in within the last 10 minutes or so. Nancy does grow huge by the midpoint, but she’s then mostly kept sedated, with the bad-looking rubber hand being the only sighting of anything large. When Nancy does go to giant size and stomp through the town where the nicer people there more or less tolerate her because she pays most of the town’s taxes (that is, seriously, what the sheriff says at one point), it does more or less work for the time period, but the movie keeps that to a minimum.
Instead, I spent the movie wondering who the hero here was. Harry is an awful person, ready to run away, first from the giant alien Mr. Clean that changes his wife, and then later with Honey. He doesn’t care who knows how bad he is. Nancy is, theoretically, sympathetic, but she spends a good chunk of the movie unconscious, and then when she is awake, goes around screaming for Harry or shouting that she isn’t insane. The movie seems to suggest she can’t be sane without her man, even if her man is a bad man. So, really, neither of these people come across as particularly likable for me. Really, the closest the movie has to a completely sympathetic figure is Nancy’s longtime butler, the one character in the movie who seems to legitimately care about her.
All I know is Harry and Honey are no good, and while we might argue that Nancy has a tragic end, Harry and Honey at least get one they deserved. The spectacle of a giant woman tearing up the town is saved for the last few minutes, and while the alien that causes all this remains suitably mysterious, Overall, it was a very typical 50s sci-fi movie, though at least it tries to create characters that are more than just the usual bland generic heroes and villains of that era.
Grade: C
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