The Fly (1958)

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Year:	1958
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Kurt Neumann
Genre:	Mutation
Starring:	David Hedison, Patricia Owens, Vincent Price
Rating:	5/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051622/
Tagline:	If she looked upon the horror her husband had become... she would scream for the rest of her life!
Favourite line:	"She disintegrated perfectly, but never reappeared."

I've avoided watching this movie for years, simply because I felt I could not give it a fair viewing.
My love for the Cronenberg remake is so strong, I think about scenes from that flick most days. I'll be eating my bran flakings of a morning, chowing down on something that tastes vaguely like wet hippy, when the image of the wrist shredding scene will enter my head. Later, running, ten kilometres into my daily 40 kilometre fun yomp, the sight of Jeff removing his fingernails will become manifest.
But I was wrong.
Being from the 50's, clearly the gore and special effects cannot compare, but I am not the kind of drooling buffoon that thinks there were no good movies before Terminator 2, so no problem.
The bare nones of the story remains, that of the teleportation booths, but beyond that, this has little to compare it with the remake.
Here, a scientist, Andre Delambre is working on his telepods when he becomes fused with a fly. Instead of the gradual transformation, here the metamorphosis is instant, as one hand and his entire head are replaced by the fly equivalents, and we follow his wife's desperate attempts to find the fly that now is bestowed with a human head and one human arm.
Vincent Price adds gravitas as the scientists assistant, though there is the feeling that he is sleep walking through the piece, somewhat.
The melodrama, whilst an irritant on occasion with movies from this era, here only adds to the nightmare, the wife so distraught that she is compelled to utter such nonsense as 'I'll find that fly' and, whilst with a less accomplished piece that would bring a moment of mirth, here it brings only pity as you empathise with the true scale of her plight.
Harrowing, intense and more than a little scary, this is a genuine classic.