THE CYCLOPS (1956)
Written and Directed by Bert I. Gordon

Despite governmental warnings, Susan Winter (Gloria Talbot) is determined to find her fiancee Bruce Barton (Duncan Parkin), who disappeared in the Tarahumara Mountains of Mexico three years ago. She has bought a small plane, hired a pilot (Tom Drake), and has two paying passengers with agendas of their own: Russ Bradford (James Craig) wants to study the flora and fauna and convince her that his former rival for her affections is dead, while Marty Melville (Lon Chaney) wants to find uranium so that he can sell it on the stock exchange. When they crash in the midst of the remote mountains, they find giant monsters, dangerous levels of radiation, and her fiancee - who has grown to the size of a house. I first saw this favorite on Boston’s “Fantasmic Features”, and find its mixture of mystery, adventure and horror to still be a winning combination. Gloria Talbot carries the movie with her stubborn determination to not take “no” for an answer, and even manages to suggest purely through her performance that her inability to recognize her fiancee, however mutated he may be, is willful denial rather than mere lack of observation. Craig manages to eliminate his giant romantic rival in a particularly nasty manner, while Chaney plays his usual rugged gold digger (watch him eat a sandwich and drink a beer with gusto), but the script interestingly makes him a precursor of the type of Wall Street manipulator that caused our current recession. The best line is Chaney’s, when, after he has attempted to inadvertently crash their plane and Craig has tried to get his hands off the controls, Chaney whines “You choked me, and you hurt my back!” For the record, in addition to the title character, the hunting party meets up with three giant lizards, a giant hawk feeding on a giant mouse, a giant spider who puts in a brief appearance, and a snake who attacks the giant mutated man; and a continuity gaff occurs when we see Gloria Talbot in two blouses, one tan and one black, torn in precisely the same way on the right shoulder, when her character would have had no opportunity to change her clothes. When the title character pops up from behind a boulder, his sudden appearance and his grotesque make-up still carries a jolt. One of the most enjoyable parts of the film for me is when they crash land in Bronson Canyon, trek through the jungle (Griffith Park, perhaps?), then wind up back in Bronson. The immediately recognizable Paul Frees supplies the inarticulate grunts of the title character as well as the voice of a Mexican radio operator, and Paul Glasser supplies an effective score. A fun piece of fast moving genre entertainment. (Viewed on TCM whose print is fine but is missing the shot of the Cyclops getting a flaming spear in his eye, as well as several other violent images, reducing this 66 minute film’s running time to 64 minutes.)

— Robert Deveau, The Doomed Farmer