This is where it started.
Yes, it is true that Beginning of the End wasn’t Bert I. Gordon’s first film. He’d directed King Dinosaur first, but that was one of the many films built around leftovers from One Million B.C.
But it really wasn’t an example of the sub-sub-genre Bert I. Gordon made his own, the creature feature where the lead monster has been optically enlarged from something far smaller.
Yes, I know, King Dinosaur’s borrowed footage features lizards blown up to the size of houses and pretending to be dinosaurs. But everyone was borrowing that footage.
And would keep borrowing it until the Mexicans finally gave up on black and white film somewhere in the Sixties.
Beginning of the End was the first time Bert created his own giant creatures, and he must have had some idea of the huge role it would play in the rest of his career as the other two films he released in 1957 — The Cyclops and The Amazing Colossal Man — both feature men blown up to giant size.
Photographer and War Correspondent Audrey Ames (Peggie Castle) is on her way to her next assignment when she stumbles across a military roadblock. Something destroyed the town beyond — and did it overnight without anyone hearing an explosion.
And, of course, the military have no idea what it could be.
Now, this was the Fifties, so she knows that radiation is the leading cause of giant monsters, and goes to investigate the nearest source of radioactive materials, an agricultural research station not too far from the ruined town.
There she learns that these materials are part of Dr. Edward Wainwright (Peter Graves)’s research into how to grow giant plants, which he assures her can’t possibly have caused the destruction of a small town.
And, if you are wondering, those giant plants are actually oversized props, not real plants made to look big.
Yeah, I know, that’s disappointing.
But when she goes to check out a warehouse which exploded mysteriously a few weeks earlier, not too far from their lab, they find an army of giant locusts.
The army doesn’t believe them, of course, but they send a few men to check on the story.
They get eaten.
They send more men, and the locusts easily defeat them.
And then the army of locusts marches towards Chicago…
It’s quite obvious at times that the film was inspired (at least in part) by Them! There’s even a very similar scene early on where a pair of cops find a house the locusts attacked: one of them stays to wait for backup, while the other goes to follow up on a clue.
Very familiar.
However, you can also recognize the influence of Jack Arnold’s Tarantula, and perhaps even that of The Deadly Mantis, which debuted only a month earlier and would have been in production as this one was made.
You might expect Audrey Ames to be one of those hard-bitten, tough as nails newsgirls from the Thirties, but instead she is polished and Fifties elegant, the image of the career girl in the Fifties movies. As I’ve noted before, despite our stereotype of women in Fifties science fiction films, they actually tend to be trained scientific assistants [the Thing from Another Planet], or NASA calculators [The Giant Claw] or even occasionally scientists [Them!] or Doctors [Blood of Dracula] in their own right. But Audrey reflects an even larger shift in how women were portrayed at the time :the career girl is no longer the tough girl trying to act as tough as the guys, but is actually allowed to be feminine.
We also need to note something about the most important actors in the film: those darned locusts.
Bert I. Gordon had the largest-sized non-flying locusts he could find shipped in from Texas. The only problem was that there were a lot of requirements involved in shipping a creature which might swarm and devastate acres of farmland: only male insects were allowed to cross state lines, so the grasshoppers had to be sexed and it never occurred to anyone to feed them while this was being done. So they ate each other, leaving him with just a dozen of the more than 200 he started with.
Gordon actually did the effects for the film. He used a lot of low-budget tricks, including finding an in-camera way to combine his giant bugs and the live action shots without the expensive matte process. The most obvious trick, however is that he decided not to build a model city for his bugs to crawl over and used photographs of major Chicago buildings instead.
And this almost works. Willis O’Brien used the same trick in the Giant Behemoth and got away with it, but then I think he probably put a lot of work into laying out those shots.
However, in Beginning of the End, the effect starts out reasonably well, with the shadow of the grasshoppers the only real giveaway, but the effect falls apart completely when they get to the upper floors of the building and end up walking on the sky instead.
And, let’s face it: if a miniature set filled with rats fails because they just end up wandering around, looking for the bits of cheese hidden in the set and, darn it, look too cute and cuddly, then trying to make a (tiny) horde of locusts look terrifying is even worse. After all, he had to push them around with gusts of wind to get them to do what he wanted.
We all know that won’t look scary.
Still, it’s a better film that King Dinosaur (not that that is saying a lot), and it set his career in motion on the path he would follow for the next two decades.
Which might not have yielded any great masterpieces, but led instead to a string of dumb but consistently fun films and gave us giant people, giant spiders, giant grasshoppers, giant teenagers, giant chickens, giant ants, and even a handful of miniaturized beings in The Attack of the Puppet People.
Oh, well. Who needs greatness when you can bring so many people so much giant monster joy?…
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