I Watch Films: Six Inches Tall

 

Six Inches Tall*

A dollmaker is advertising for an office girl, as his last one has left him. He’s a nice old man, used to be a puppeteer in Europe**, loves to give people his dolls, but he does have a mysterious back room and is very particular about some of his special dolls.

Obviously the special dolls are shrunken people. A lonely man, every time someone the dollmaker knows is about to leave he takes them to the back room and shrinks them to six inches tall. Doll-size, he can suspend them in tubes, keeping them stored until he wants to see them.

His shrinking machine is analogised by using a projector to show how you can make an image bigger or smaller. In other words he shrinks them by making them further away. Having done this we then get all the amusing oversized props, a giant telephone, bathing in a tin etc. Eventually our hero and heroine escape and have to cross town, five blocks, to get away, with narrow escapes from traffic, rats, dogs etc.

Watch This: Old-school mad scientist science fiction, with some fun size-change scenes and a weirdly sympathetic villain
Don’t Watch This: Puppet-sized people are just creepy

 

* In the US this had the slightly misleading title Attack Of The Puppet People; indeed some people are turned into "puppets" and they "attack", yet this is an attempt to escape their incarceration.

** An old friend comes to see him, asking him to fix some puppets for the puppet Jekyll And Hyde he’s putting on. From their accents and discussion it's clear they used to work in Europe. Being older men, and this being 1958, I’m assuming that they lost a lot of friends in the war. This adds weight to the canonical explanation that he wants to shrink and keep his friends because his wife left him.