Written by James Clavell and produced and directed by Kurt Neumann, The Fly was made in DeLuxe Color CinemaScope. It was released in 1958 on a double bill with Space Master X-7.
The film begins in Montreal, Canada, where we meet scientist Andre Delambre (David Hedison) who is dead with his head and arm crushed in a hydraulic press.
His wife Helene (Patricia Owens) confesses to the crime but refuses to provide a motive, and begins acting strangely. In particular, she is obsessed with flies, including a supposedly white-headed fly. Andre’s brother, Francois (Vincent Price), lies and says he caught the white-headed fly; and, thinking he knows the truth, Helene explains the circumstances surrounding Andre’s death.
In flashback, Andre, Helene, and their son Philippe (Charles Herbert) are a happy family. Andre has been working on a mattertransporter device called the disintegrator-integrator. He initially tests it only on small inanimate objects, but he eventually proceeds to living creatures, including the family’s pet cat (which fails to reintegrate, but can be heard meowing somewhere) and a guinea pig. After he is satisfied that these tests are succeeding, he builds a man-sized pair of chambers. One day, Helene, worried because Andre has not come up from the basement lab for a couple of days, goes down to find Andre with a black cloth over his head and a strange deformity on his left hand. Communicating with typed notes only, Andre tells Helene that he tried to transport himself but that a fly was caught in the chamber with him, which resulted in the mixing of their atoms. Now, he has the head and left arm of a fly; and the fly has his miniature head and left arm, though he keeps his mind.
Andre needs Helene to capture the fly so he can reverse the process…
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