Allison Hayes was the bombshell Joan Crawford, able to portray powerful, commanding women with an air of confident femininity. "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" is the most well known and iconic of her on screen performances. It's a classic psychotronic B-movie, often held up as an example of a "bad" film-making and recognizable even to people who haven't seen it through it's memorable poster. Yes, the special effects are entertainingly atrocious, but the actual film is fun and not as terribly made as one might expect.
Director Nathan Hertz was an Oscar winning Hollywood set designer, who worked on classy productions such as John Ford's "How Green Was My Valley" and who had a second act to his career directing a number of movies where things are giant and/or stop motion, including a number of Ray Harryhausen pictures. What he gives us with "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" is the first and only sexpot kaiju noir.
We start off with Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) driving frantically through the desert, hysterical that she caught her no good philandering husband, Harry (William Hudson), making eyes with Honey (Yvette Vickers, unfortunately now best known for the incredibly sad story of her death), the chick he's been stepping out with, at the local roadhouse. Nancy encounters a giant white satellite come to Earth, that looks like the older brother to the "Rover" from "The Prisoner". A huge hand reaches out and attempts to grab her.
Meanwhile, Harry and Honey hatch a plan to try and get at Nancy's money. Seems she's a multimillionaire who, in the past, has had issues with the bottle and her mental health. When Nancy returns to town ranting about spacecraft's and giant's, they see their opportunity to have her locked up in the loony bin for good. I have a suspension of disbelief issue with this aspect of the story. In what reality does a guy end up cheating on an outrageously wealthy knock-out like Hayes?
Nancy isn't stupid, though, and makes Harry drive her out to the desert to find proof she's not crazy. When they find the satellite, to which Nancy runs in a fantastically ecstatic over-the-top manner, the giant appears and grabs her. Harry, ever the weasel, empties his gun into it and hightails it back to town.
Upon his return to town, the local authorities question Harry about Nancy's disappearance, and he gets in a ridiculous fist fight with Jess (Ken Terrell), her butler. Nancy soon mysteriously reappears and Harry attempts to off her once and for all by overdosing her on the medicine the nurse has been administering. In a beautifully stylized sequence that begins as Fritz Lang and ends as Bert I. Gordon, Harry makes his way upstairs, syringe in hand, through the nighttime shadows of the house, only to find a gigantic papier-mache hand.
Soon, things like meat hooks and elephant syringes ("Meat Hooks and Elephant Syringes", coincidentally enough, is the name of my first poetry collection) are being shipped to Nancy's mansion, so that the doctor's might secure her while searching for an anti-giant serum. The local sheriff and Jess follow a set of huge footprints to the desert and find the alien ship. As they enter the ship, Hertz again proves he knows what he's doing with a camera, using light, smoke and distorted imagery to get the most from his non-existent budget; pegboard apparently plays a huge role in interior design on whatever planet this alien is from. Hertz's more than competent staging of scenes like this proves he's in on the joke.
The giant (Michael Ross) finally appears, throws a car at these guy's and then boogies on out of there aboard his ship. The look of the giant is odd. He's played by the same guy who is the bartender at the roadhouse, and he's dressed in a kind a medieval garb. There's zero backstory to the character other than he needs diamond's to power his ship, so we don't know why this choice was made. I know, I know the answer is "because they didn't want to hire another actor and they had that costume laying around", but somebody humor me and write a comic further detailing the adventures of "Lurgo, Giant Diamond Squire of the Spaceways" and his bar tending alter ego. Also, why didn't we ever get "The Amazing Colossal Man Meets the 50 Foot Woman"? After all, they both have the same screenwriter. Somebody Kickstart these ideas.
Nancy eventually breaks free of her chains and stomps her way to town periodically shrieking "Harry?!" in a manner befitting a Godzilla monster, as she seeks her sleazeball husband and his bimbo. All the optical effects have a translucent glow, making Nancy and the Space Giant look like behemoth, marauding ghost's. The finale in which Nancy tears apart the roadhouse is as good as could be expected for the budget, with the giant, kind of gross looking, prop hand again making an appearance. It's a wonderful inversion of the "King Kong" dynamic, the love struck male replaced by the betrayed woman.
"Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" is a campy 1950s mix of melodrama, film noir and sci-fi. Ultimately, though, it's a revenge story. Hayes is the ultramega embodiment of scorned female vengeance, a symbol of self-actualized femininity literally breaking free of her bond's to take on the tawdry and common elements that have invaded her life. Now, does anybody know if the giant prop hand still exists?
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