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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the End
will serve as an example of the whole genre. The scene
opens on a pair of adolescents necking in their car off a desert road.
Their attention is caught by a weird clicking sound, the boy looks up
in horror, the girl screams, the music stings and the scene fades. In the
next scene, we learn that the car has been completely demolished and
its occupants have disappeared. The police, totally baffled, are conduct–
ing fruitless investigations when word comes that a small town nearby
has been destroyed in the same mysterious way. Enter the young scientist
hero. Examining the wreckage of the town, he discovers a strange
fluid which when analyzed proves to have been manufactured by a
giant grasshopper. The police ridicule his conclusions and are instantly
attacked by a fleet of these grasshoppers, each fifteen feet high, which
wipe out the entire local force and a few state troopers. Interrupting a
perfunctory romance with the heroine, the scientist flies to Washington
to alert the nation. He describes the potential danger to a group of
bored politicians and yawning big brass, but they remain skeptical until
word comes that the things have reached Chicago and are crushing
buildings and eating the occupants. The scientist is then put in charge
of the army and air force. Although the military men want to evacuate
the city and drop an atomic bomb on it, the scientist devises a safer
method of destroying the creatures and proceeds to do so through
exemplary physical courage and superior knowledge of their behavior.
The movie ends on a note of foreboding: have the things been com–
pletely exterminated?
Externally, there seem to be very significant changes indeed, es–
pecially in the character of the scientist. No longer fang-toothed, long–
haired, and subject to delirious ravings (Bela Lugosi, John Carradine,
Basil Rathbone), the doctor is now a highly admired member of society,
muscular, handsome, and heroic (John Agar). He is invariably wiser,
more reasonable, and more humane than the bone-headed bureaucrats
and trigger-happy brass that compose the members of his "team," and
he even has sexual appeal, a quality which Hollywood's eggheads have
never enjoyed before. The scientist-hero, however, is not a very con–
vincing intellectual. Although he may use technical, polysyllabic lang–
uage when discussing his findings, he always yields gracefully to the
admonition to "tell us in our own words, Doc" and proves that he can
speak as simply as you or I; in the crisis, in fact, he is almost mono–
syllabic. When the chips are down, he loses his glasses (a symbol of his
intellectualism) and begins to look like everyone else. The hero's in–
tellect is part of his costume and makeup, easily shed when heroic
action is demanded. That he is always called upon not only to outwit
