Year: 1957
Director: Nathan Juran
Cast: William Hopper, Craig Stevens, Alix Talton
Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes
Happy October, everybody! It's time for the annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue! Somehow, this is our 13th year trading titles from our Census Bloodbath and Cardboard Science catalogues, so we decided to pull out all the stops. I have assigned him three 1980s slasher movies in the beloved genre of "holiday/special occasion" (which you'll hear from him about a bit closer to Halloween) and he has assigned me three 1950s sci-fi B-movies about killer arthropods.
We'll be starting off in the world of insects with 1957's The Deadly Mantis. This is a Nathan Juran joint, and that name should be familiar to anyone who has been keeping up with the Switcheroos over the years. Well, actually, maybe it won't be. Sometimes he was credited as Nathan Hertz.
Anyway, the man is an Oscar winner (Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White for How Green Was My Valley - how that mouthful of an award died out, I'll never know) who also directed the Ray Harryhausen classic 20 Million Miles to Earth, the charmingly daffy The Brain from Planet Arous, and the dorm room poster art mainstay Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (which is in contention for being my favorite Cardboard Science movie that doesn't star Godzilla).
I have a sneaking suspicion that the folks who made The Deadly Mantis were also somewhat familiar with Godzilla.
In
The Deadly Mantis, a giant prehistoric praying mantis is unearthed from the ice near the North Pole thanks to seismic activity. It begins making a beeline (or, rather, a mantisline) southward to warmer climes, in the process destroying an outpost or two of the American military's northernmost radar fence. I hope you like the word "radar," because it is going to grace your ears several trillion times during this movie.
After an Eisensteinian first act, where the military as a collective is the de facto protagonist, the story finally finds some characters to hang its hat on after about 21 minutes. Dr. Nedrick Jackson (William Hopper of 20 Million Miles to Earth) is a D.C.-based paleontologist working at the Museum of Natural History who is called upon to lend his expertise when the as-yet unknown creature leaves behind a super-sized body part. Along for the ride is Marge Blaine (Alix Talton), a journalist for the "museum magazine" (they were just handing out press jobs like candy in the 1950s) who Girl Fridays herself onto the mission.
Your sign that a Cardboard Science movie is finally starting is when you see a shot of a woman in an impeccable jacket walking through a door.
Actually, let's swing back to the first act for a moment before we dive in deeper. You'll see people complaining because it's mostly a bunch of stock footage with voiceover explaining, say, the various radar lines that were being used to defend good American families during the Cold War. While that is undeniably true, there is magic to quite a bit of this sequence.
I particularly liked the opening shot, which is cheap, yes, but also elegant and downright cheeky. We open on a map, with the camera slowly zooming toward the United States (the center of all culture and storytelling) before - what's this, now? - gliding southward to show the Antarctic region. We sure aren't in Kansas anymore, buddy! Just by moving the camera around a map, The Deadly Mantis tells us that it knows what we expect from this kind of movie and that it wants to have a little fun with us. That feeling doesn't last beyond the first 20 minutes, but I'll take it where I can get it.
There's another cute little moment where the pompous narrator explains a bank of phones by saying things like "in five seconds, this phone can reach your local library; in four seconds, this phone can reach a state official in Oklahoma," and so on. However right when he gets to "in two seconds, this phone can reach the Pentagon," that phone rings. The way the narration interacts so smoothly with the scene and the way the scene unexpectedly begins, practically before he's done speaking, gives you that off-kilter sense of "oh shit, something important is happening right now."
Look, it's not like The Deadly Mantis is a work of genius or something, but there are a few moments where it's snappy and has a bit of flair. I'm a fan of flair! And after four movies, I can confidently say that I'm a fan of Juran.
Juran is The Man... tis.
The Deadly Mantis does lose most of its sparkle once the actual plot kicks in, though. It's very much a meat-and-potatoes giant monster movie. The plot plays out exactly like everything from
The Giant Claw to
Beginning of the End to
Them!, with a few small, isolated attacks leaving behind clues about the creature, which eventually funnel into a big giant setpiece at the end.
The setpiece is pretty neat, sure. It's fun to watch the mantis puppet zoom around Washington, D.C. and wreak havoc around the National Mall for a bit. Plus, the mantis effects only look super shitty in close-up, so it's nice to give the creature something to play with after a long stretch of seeing it in barren Arctic environments where it's difficult to appreciate its size.
A toast to scale models!
The monster movie portion of The Deadly Mantis is presumably the only reason anybody bought a ticket, so it should probably be a big problem that it's not very interesting. However, I found plenty else to be amused by in the final hour. There were even two big surprises.
First of all, it was genuinely astonishing to me that [spoiler alert, I guess] Marge and Dr. Jackson don't end up together. All of a sudden in the third act, she's trading shockingly steamy kisses with Colonel Joe Parkman (Craig Stevens), a character who I didn't even notice was in the movie until about two minutes before that.
The second surprise was even more fun. Most of these Cardboard Science movies are "horror movies" but really only because they contain monsters. The Deadly Mantis, on the other hand, seems genuinely interested in being part of the horror genre. This movie is chock full of jump scares, including a rare early use of the "hand grabbing your shoulder from behind" trope.
One of them even works pretty well! I'm talking about the scene where the mantis is seen creeping up on a building. When the camera cuts to the interior of the building, a door abruptly bangs open. This is all pretty rudimentary stuff, but given the extremely dormant state that mainstream horror was in throughout the 1950s, it's a huge win to have a movie even admit that horror exists.
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
*Dr. Jackson informs his rapt military audience that "gentlemen, even birds have bony skeletons." Goodness me! Birds, you say? Whatever will they think of next?
The morality of the past, in the future!:
*During the scene where soldiers are being scrambled to respond to a mantis attack, we see a second or two of a Black soldier getting ready for takeoff, which might be the longest any Black person has been onscreen in all 13 years of this enterprise.
*There's some primo 1950s slang being tossed around in this movie. At one point, we learn that "everything is jake," which is a real relief if you ask me.
*In a montage of people watching the news in their living rooms, one of the kids has a flattop so crisp and gosh-darn flat that you could serve dinner on it.
Sensawunda:
*What struck me about The Deadly Mantis is that, in spite of its obsession with radar, nuclear testing and/or radiation have nothing to do either with how the mantis got so deadly or with how it got free from the ice. That's probably not a first, but it sure feels like one.
TL;DR: The Deadly Mantis is a mostly bland 1950s monster movie with a few surprises around the edges for those familiar with the genre.
Rating: 6/10
Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)
2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)
2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
2025: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) The Spider (1958) The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
2026: The Deadly Mantis (1957)
2026:
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