The Colossus of New York.

Time to take a momentary break for all that TV to take a look at a piece of cinema history...or at least in a sense...you probably know what to expect from Locke and this blog, it's gonna be a weird one, enjoy!

TCONY came out in 1958 so that means it's black and white, I wonder how many retards just closed the tab at that. Ew, black and white movies? That is almost as bad as movies where I have to read! I don't watch any movie that came out before 2005, since old movies suck! It's hard to believe I had a girlfriend like that once...yeah we never had a chance, did we?

And erm...I really know nothing about this film, it has one of the emptiest google pages and IMDb pages I've ever seen, but apparently it's really under appreciated? Well let's find out!

Our main character is Dr Jeremy Spensser who is basically a mad scientist (although at first not really played as one), building machines with the goal of making human workers obsolete and he is really bloody good at it, winning awards and becoming a celebrity in his own right. His entire family though are just as insane and just as brilliant, his brother is brilliant in a similar field and his father is one of the best brain surgeons in the country...what are the odds? Jeremy swiftly dies in a stupidly written, awkwardly edited - fifties censored car accident.You probably think it odd our main character dies before the ten minute mark, but this film is barely longer than an hour itself. This then starts the plot of our film, Jeremy's father, unable to accept his sons death uses his brain surgeon powers to try and bring his son back to life, utilising his other son Henry's help too. And so Jeremy is reborn, as a robot...no, seriously.

To be fair, the plot makes more sense than it probably should. Jeremy's father, being a brain surgeon, places more importance on the brain than the body, claiming that Jeremy's genius was let down by his body, that it was stolen because his body couldn't keep it safe, which is why he rebuilds Jeremy into something stronger...something immortal. Even when Jeremy becomes a murderous, rampaging monster it is given a logical explanation as to why, wider than just simple motivations. This is just a really cool story.

It only really starts to get weird when they decide to throw in an ESP plot, for whatever reason, although Jeremy's senses were lost in the transfer from life, to death to life as a robot he can now predict the future and see everything, everywhere. Wha? Why? Also, why does he have eye beams? Wouldn't that have to have been built in? Why'd anyone do that? And as cool as it was seeing him walk along the riverbed, wouldn't that destroy him?

Plus the progression of William's experiments is really fascinating, despite the short length of the film, there is a real sense of pace and progression of the mad science, coupled with 1950's science jargon really seems to ground the entire thing in a sense of mock reality.

Much can be said for Jeremy, for all the limitations of a film in the 1950's the plot of his realisation of the monster he has become and his loss of control is just so well written and paced, it's really believable and powerful. Who knew a big rubber suit, that seems to be using all its might to not fall over, could give such a great performance. Plus just in general it manages to be really quite disturbing. I mean could you imagine being Jeremy, dying then waking up as a monster?

The movie really does play around with a lot of fascinating concepts, the notion of 'genius', the place of the body, the concept of the soul, morality, dehumanisation, the importance of human emotion and experience, monsters and so on. For what amounts to such a silly premise, TCONY is a really smart little movie.

The acting is very...fifties...you know that sort of hammy, melodramatic over acting that is still somehow so very wooden? Yeah that is everyone in this film...

However the drama portions, that are outside all of the crazy sci-fi stuff, really aren't that bad. There is very little original story of their own here and the acting isn't really selling it but I'm glad there is a human side to a movie about a giant robot with laser eyes.

I know this is 1958 so a certain amount needs to be forgiven, but couldn't they have used better sound recording equiptment? In itself, the film looks fine, the quality of the transfer was a little dodgy but I don't have a bluray copy, so that might not be the film itself's fault but my God, the amount of sound lost to actors mumbling and the sound equipment not picking it up is just frustrating. You thought Bane's voice was bad? Jeremy's muffled static robot voice will drive you nuts.

You think violence was limited in the 1950's? Not in this movie, the closing action scene, if you will, involves Jeremy brutally murdering a large collection of humanitarian scientists with his eye beams before his own son must take him down, his child son. Awesome.

So do I recommend it? Although it is rarely ever the case the reason The Colossus of New York works so well is how straight the whole thing is played. At the heart of it, it is a silly monster movie about a guy in a clunky rubber costume with eye beams, sure. But it is wrapped in this deep and well written human drama about life, love and everything in between with some fascinating science and intellectual debates thrown in to boot. It just has such a great story to tell and feels years ahead of its time. It's a shame this is a largely forgotten film, because this is a classic.

Think About It!

-Locke