Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was a natural extension of the profitable The Amazing Colossal Man (released one year earlier) and its sequel War of the Colossal Beast (released three weeks after this film) in which the basic plot is this: a man gets too big.

Here, a woman gets too big. But it’s a very different thing for a man in a patriarchal society to get too big for his britches than a woman.

Nancy Archer enjoys a $50 million net worth, but she’s got plenty of troubles even before she encounters an extraterrestrial in the desert. She’s got a drinking problem. Harry, her husband, is fooling around. No one believes her when she reports the alien monster. Not the police. Not her doctor. Nor the townfolk. Not even her butler.

She lacks all credibility. She has zero standing, despite her wealth. She is a woman – worse, a woman with a history of mental instability. She is powerless.

Eventually, she extracts a promise from her spouse: He’ll help her look for the creature in the desert and she’ll check herself back into the sanitorium if all they find are cacti. Their search proves Nancy’s truthfulness. Harry fires a shot into the creature, then runs away, abandoning her.

Next, returning to town, he finds her, delirious, on a rooftop. Soon, she begins to grow, presumably as an effect of radiation poisoning. Naturally, Harry injects her full of morphine and chains her to the bed. (This seems like an almost natural response in the language of the film.)

If she can’t be involuntary committed to an asylum, the men will invent some other restraint. But she breaks free and goes on a rampage – against Harry; against men; against all of it.

The most delicious parts of the film show us fearful fellows cowering from the awesome female power which has been unshackled. Not even their guns have much effect. When she finally extracts vengeance on her worthless partner, they still poke fun at feminine psychology, commenting, “She finally got Harry all to herself.”