Endless Hallways #2

Production Design in Moving Image:

Joseph T. Garrity & Pat Tagliaferro — ‘Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman’ (1993)

There is something intrinsically video game-like and unmistakably 1990’s in texture about Christopher Guest’s terrific television film.

A giant Daryl Hannah striding around the desert and in the streets of a small western town feel deliberately artificial, a conscious nod to the lo-fi modelled effects of 1950’s B-movies and the film’s 1958 predecessor of the same name.

But there is also a genuine beauty and atmosphere to the innocence of these production designs and graphics. It is surprisingly effective as well as enjoyably, obviously kitsch.

Photographed with solid and stylishly simple assurance by Russell Carpenter, the film excels in its desert textures, the night time scenes permanently backgrounded with a twilight blue horizon. The mise en scene of these outdoor scenes is charmingly sound stagey, as is the labyrinthine scale model work of some of the town’s buildings, backstreets and roads; a cosy recreation of rural America.

Photographically integrating Hannah’s giantess with the ant-like humans around her, there is some superbly done scaling work to admire here, highlights including Nancy (Hannah) taking a bath in a swimming pool complete with sudsy water, and the gatecrashing of a drive-in cinema during the film’s climax.

Take pleasure as a dinosaur-sized Nancy attempts peace talks with her slimeball husband (Daniel Baldwin) by calling a romantic makeshift dinner outside, and at a lovingly indiscreet nod to B-movie legends Samuel Z. Arkoff and Roger Corman, their surnames emblazoned across the side of a van in a fitting piece of art direction.

As the film reaches its delightfully camp end, you are left appreciating how confident it has all been and how much of an amusing world you have entered into. It’s interesting to note that Frances Fisher, in a supporting role as Nancy’s therapist, would go on to work with Carpenter only a few years later on James Cameron’s Titanic, the cinematographer successfully carrying over his unashamedly blue lighting to Oscar-winning effect.

Attack of the 50ft. Woman is a delightful piece of Americana.

Bath time

Nancy outside her makeshift bedroom, the barn

Townscape 1

Townscape 2

Townscape 3

Townscape 4

Townscape 5

Townscape 6

Desertscape

An old billboard on the roof of Honey’s (Cristi Conway) beauty parlour

Tony’s Shangri La motel

An artificially pleasant desert scene