The Return of the Fly (1959)

The Return of the Fly (1959) is a monster mad scientist shocker feature guinea pig hands and feet sequel effort from hell that is mild in noir relevance, so mild in noir relevance that the owners apologise, and here we argue that in fact this film's flyness and expected shock moments scientifically double effect a tale of industrial espionage, if indeed there is any hovering narrative to this atomic age sequel, and give it little reason to be here.

A minor creature, buzzing at the margin of the sublime, a mote in the cathedral of science, this film describes like no other the moment when the man and the insect pass through the molecular eye together, the universe commits a grammatical error, and republishes cheap. What emerges is not human, not fly, but a grotesque synthesis: the moral algebra of hubris incarnate. A catalogue entry in worst sequels?

Boo-de-hoo-dee, Return of the Fly (1959) is generally not considered one of the "worst" sequels, I am not sure, but the musos know this sort of thing. It is instead but rather a typical, low-budget B-movie sequel that was made to cash in on the success of the original The Fly. While it lacks the suspense and impact of its predecessor, it is seen as a fair and entertaining effort on its own merits, featuring Vincent Price and offering some creepy and effective moments for its time. 

The film is considered a competent, low-budget B-movie that is entertaining in its own right, offering a fast-paced watch. The return of Vincent Price adds a significant draw for the film. 

The story finds a plausible way to continue the experiment and create another fly-human hybrid, providing some originality for a sequel.  But hey: Cash Grab! The sequel was primarily made to capitalize on the success of the original, leading to a lower-budget production. 

As a sequel, it is necessarily trapped by the premise and lacks the surprise and suspense of the original, making the screams lose their impact. Generic monster movie: It falls into being a more average, typical 50s monster movie, failing to capture the magic of the first film. 

The film was shot in black and white, a decision many, including Vincent Price, found ridiculous after the color original, due to budget constraints. 

Return of the Fly (1959) arrives like a cinematic revenant, less an inspired continuation of its predecessor than a compromised effort borne of commercial inertia. Directed by Edward Bernds in the wake of Kurt Neumann's untimely death, the film reopens the doomed saga of the Delambre family with Vincent Price as the only surviving connection to the prior work. 

 

A black and white sequel to a Technicolor original, the monochromatic aesthetic of Return of the Fly (1959) is both a cost-saving measure and, paradoxically, a fortuitous enhancement to its eerie ambiance. The film trades in melancholic terror for sensational grotesquerie, repurposing thematic strands from The Fly (1958) but discarding its emotional gravity in favor of pulpish escalation.

The action is situated some fifteen years after the events of the first film. Philippe Delambre, now a grown man, is determined to redeem his father's discredited legacy through the successful application of teleportation. Brett Halsey, a chiselled yet unremarkable fixture of mid-century cinema, portrays Philippe with a zeal that fails to rise above perfunctory. 

His earlier roles in The Atomic Submarine (1959) and Twice-Told Tales (1963) suggest a career destined to orbit minor genre entries rather than command them. Opposite him is David Frankham as Ronald Holmes, a duplicitous interloper who channels espionage into grotesque scientific vandalism. Danielle De Metz, whose ethereal presence adds little more than decorative appeal, plays Cecile Bonnard. John Sutton, replacing Herbert Marshall as Inspector Beecham, does his utmost to lend gravitas but is ultimately underutilized.

Price, meanwhile, returns as François Delambre with his customary enunciation and gravity. Having already established his capacity for moral vacillation in House of Wax (1953) and The Tingler (1959), Price here leans into paternal restraint, attempting to prevent the tragic recursion that inevitably ensues. His presence—both calming and uncanny—functions as the film's only bridge to a semblance of classical drama.

The plot, such as it is, refashions the original’s tragic scientific accident into a melodrama of betrayal and revenge. Philippe's assistant, Holmes, is revealed as a spy eager to monetize the teleportation device. 

In a sequence both absurd and disquieting, someone murders an agent by fusing him with a guinea pig in the transporter. Later, Philippe suffers a parallel fate when someone combines him with a fly out of malice rather than accident. What follows is a series of killings by the insectoid Philippe, who haunts the night with his bulbous papier-mâché head—an emblem of the film’s schlocky aspirations.

Where The Fly (1958) plumbed the psychological dread of bodily disintegration, Return of the Fly (1959) substitutes revenge as its animating force. The son-turned-monster dispatches his enemies with brutal finality, and the sense of scientific awe that animated the earlier film gives way to a crude calculus of retribution. 

This flattening of emotional stakes is symptomatic of the film’s diminished ambitions. Yet, its chiaroscuro palette—although born of budgetary necessity—imbues the proceedings with a noirish visual grammar. Stark lighting, deep shadows, and angular interiors evoke the aesthetic lineage of noir cinema, even if the narrative itself eschews its existential preoccupations.

Indeed, Return of the Fly (1959) bears the fingerprints of noir not merely in its mise-en-scène but in its themes of duplicity, guilt, and the perils of obsessive inquiry. Holmes functions as the noir antagonist par excellence: morally hollow, self-interested, and ultimately undone by his own hubris. The Delambre laboratory, like the crumbling cityscapes of classic noir, becomes a crucible for moral ambiguity and distorted identity. Science, as with crime in noir, is both temptation and trap.

One must remember that Return of the Fly (1959) emerged in a year of intensifying Cold War paranoia. In 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba, the Barbie doll was launched, and the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in escalating space race bravado. 

The film, with its themes of espionage, unethical science, and invasive technology, mirrors the anxieties of a culture increasingly suspicious of both state secrecy and unchecked innovation. The specter of the atomic age hangs heavily over the narrative: here is a world where boundaries between man and beast can be obliterated by the casual flick of a switch.

Within the broader context of American cinema, this sequel epitomizes the opportunistic sequel-making of postwar Hollywood. Studios eager to extract residual value from box office successes often enlisted journeyman directors like Bernds—whose résumé included comedies and B-grade sci-fi—to produce serviceable yet artistically stunted fare. The production reused standing sets from the original film, and the shooting schedule was reportedly compressed to fit within a limited budget, further testifying to the film’s makeshift origins.

From a gender analysis, Return of the Fly (1959) betrays the anxieties of a deeply patriarchal order. Women in the film are sidelined, ornamental, or entirely peripheral. Cecile Bonnard, the nominal love interest, functions more as a narrative obligation than a meaningful character. 

The world of scientific discovery is entirely male, its discourse encoded in rivalry, ambition, and paternal dread. The female body, meanwhile, is absent from the spectacle of mutation and violence, suggesting an implicit assumption that the trauma of transformation is a uniquely male inheritance—one that must be suffered, avenged, and ultimately controlled.

As a work of science fiction horror, the film possesses moments of ingenuity. The early guinea pig hybrid sequence disturbs with its visceral absurdity. The image of human hands protruding from rodent limbs is not merely grotesque, it is ontologically destabilizing, calling into question the integrity of corporeal identity. 

Yet such moments are fleeting, undermined by uneven pacing and effects that veer toward the ludicrous. The oversized fly head, in particular, draws inadvertent laughter, its wobble betraying the fragility of the illusion.

That said, one cannot dismiss the film entirely. As a cultural item of cinematic fantasy, Return of the Fly (1959) occupies a near-liminal space between earnest horror and disreputable spectacle. Its failings are also its fascinations: a misaligned sequel that inadvertently exposes the cracks in mid-century genre filmmaking. 

Though inferior to its predecessor, it deserves its place in the canon—not as a triumph of storytelling or character, but as a document of a cinematic culture grappling with the boundaries of flesh, technology, and fear.

Dan Seymour, whose role as Max Barthold offers another faint tether to noir tradition, previously featured in films like Key Largo (1948) and To Have and Have Not (1944). His gravelly menace adds ballast to a script otherwise beset by expository dullness. Frankham, meanwhile, would go on to appear in Master of the World (1961) and various television roles, while De Metz’s brief Hollywood career included Valley of the Dragons (1961). 

Each performer is competent, but none rival the gravitas of Price, whose sonorous delivery remains the film’s only unassailable virtue.

So yeah yeah, Return of the Fly (1959) is less about narrative coherence than the articulation of a mood: one of betrayal, bodily horror, and scientific arrogance. It lacks the tragic depth of the original and often succumbs to camp. Yet in its better moments, being those which are those that linger in the borderlands of monstrosity and guilt, it offers a mirror, cracked but compelling, to a society entranced by the promise and peril of transformation.

Return of the Fly (1959) looks like a repetition. It is not only that. It is a study in lowered means and sustained appetite. It toys with inheritance. It experiments with the debris of a prior hit. It reworks a laboratory of grief into a showroom for market demand. The result is a compact specimen of late‑fifties horror craft. It moves briskly. It refuses grandeur. It finds a certain pleasure in its own vulgarity.

The narrative rests upon legacy. Philippe Delambre comes of age with a secret ache. He receives a family myth in fragments. His mother has died. His uncle, François, keeps the older calamity wrapped in discretion. The young man thinks resistance is cowardice. 

He wants proof. He wants redemption by demonstration. The script grants him a lab, a partner, and a financial ultimatum. It also grants him treachery. The structure is simple. The arc is foreordained. Yet the film sustains momentum through staccato incident and brisk cutting. The rhythm forgives much.

This picture is often called cheap. The label is earned. The earlier film, The Fly (1958), dazzled in colour. This continuation turns to monochrome. The frames lose luster but gain grain. The black and white stocks the image with nocturnal grit. 

Faces fall into sharp planes. Chrome shimmers under studio light. The laboratory apparatus looks improvised and stubborn. One does not marvel at science. One touches a metal box and fears a smear of oil. The low budget becomes a texture. The CinemaScope frame, stretched but underfurnished, feels like a warehouse emptied after a sale. That hollowness carries mood.

The film is often dismissed as a cash‑in sequel. That is fair. Yet the shapeliness of its opportunism deserves attention. The director Edward Bernds builds a bridge from household melodrama to caper intrigue. He adds a criminal double game. The assistant is no assistant. He is a courier for other appetites. He fixes the machine and breaks the men. Thus the picture grafts a crime plot onto a science‑fiction skeleton. The hybrid has its own pulse. When bodies are pushed into the disintegrator, the act reads as industrial disposal. When the machine hums, it becomes a furnace in a B‑noir factory.

Violence arrives in tidy bursts. A policeman intrudes. He is eradicated and rearranged. The screen then offers an unforgettable perversion. A dead man returns with the paws of a guinea pig. A guinea pig twitches with human hands. The logic is preposterous. The impact is undeniable. This set‑piece rescues the film from mere repetition. It shows a will to surprise and an appetite for the macabre. The camera lingers just long enough. The shock lands, then silence follows, then flight. It is one of those small trophies of Cold War horror.

Vincent Price lends elegance to the workshop of compromise. His François is a man of tact who knows too much. Price eases every scene. He makes apology sound musical. He wears doubt like velvet. This is not his grandest role. It is a steady one. 

His reputation from Laura (1944) as the ambiguous suitor, from The Web (1947) as the suavely dangerous employer, and from His Kind of Woman (1951) as the flamboyant actor‑adventurer, hangs like a subtle perfume over his performance here. The memory of these titles matters. It frames the sequel within a larger conversation about refined menace and theatrical deceit. Price’s presence brings that aroma of cultivated peril.

Brett Halsey plays Philippe with a clean jaw and a restless brow. He is credible as an heir who confuses boldness with fate. Halsey would soon appear in The Best of Everything (1959) and later in Return to Peyton Place (1961). Those credits announce a decent range within studio melodrama. Here he is most effective when silent. He listens, calculates, and then refuses counsel. His ardor serves the plot’s inevitability. His moral stubbornness supplies the fuse.

David Frankham, under the name Alan Hinds and also Ronald Holmes, gives the film a necessary toxin. He smiles and talks of partnership. He steals and speaks of opportunity. He treats science as a ledger of sellable parts. His deception pushes Philippe into the machine. 

Thus the metamorphosis is not cosmic accident. It is human malice. That choice revises the franchise’s theme. The first catastrophe felt like a tragic miscue inside a private marriage. This one feels like sabotage within a market of thieves. The tonal shift matters. It points from the household to the syndicate.

John Sutton arrives as Inspector Beecham with a faintly paternal air. Sutton carried a measured authority through the decade. He appears in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), which bears the architecture of noir domestic entrapment. He also appears in The Second Woman (1950), a moody psychological puzzle that critics often shelf with noir. In this sequel he does not solve much. He does anchor the film’s public face. He represents an official world that cannot decipher scientific obscenity yet can file the bodies afterwards.

Dan Seymour supplies a different register. He plays Max Barthold, a mortician who sniffs profit in stolen designs. Seymour’s career threads through crime cinema with pleasing consistency. He is visible in Key Largo (1948) as one of the hood’s lieutenants. 

He knows how to lean and watch. He turns a room into a risk. In this picture he functions as a gatekeeper between invention and the black market. The funeral parlor becomes a counting house. The scent of lilies mixes with cash.

Danielle De Metz appears as Cecile. She smiles with an open innocence that the script does not protect. Janine Grandel, as the housekeeper, carries a trace of European propriety. Their presence signals another pattern. Domestic spaces serve men at work. The women cook, tidy, worry, and witness. The machine, gleaming and loud, occupies the center. The bodies that might complicate that center are pushed to the margin. The effect is intentional. The film shows the cost of male inheritance as it renders female attention into atmosphere.

The opening cues exhibit skill. A funeral in the rain, the black shapes, the umbrellas, the slow procession. The house looks like a mausoleum for ambitions. The laboratory sits like a shrine to an error that refuses to evaporate. The setting moves. We tour benches, coils, switches, dials. The frame insists on metal. It insists on the upright posture of cylinders. The screen becomes a catechism of knobs. It is beautiful in a stern way. It is also comic in an uninvited way.

The story logic is mechanical. The son wants to erase a stain. The uncle warns against the ritual. A partner pockets documents. A lawman appears at the wrong instant. The machine receives them all. The montage yields mutations and corpses. Then the creature walks. The head is larger than before. The arm is a claw. The suit hangs oddly on the frame. 

A city street becomes a haunted corridor. The creature’s gait is heavy. The murders look deliberate. The image conjures Frankenstein (1931) more than the first The Fly (1958). The monster now behaves like a wronged laborer. He exacts payment from those who exploited him. The shift toward vengeance is clear.

Many viewers object to the enlarged insect head. The mask overwhelms the scale of the body. The result invites a smile. Yet the choice makes thematic sense. The film turns away from secret marital grief toward public menace. The swollen head becomes a billboard for misapplied technology. The first film hid the horror behind a cloth. This one parades it down the aisle of commerce. A mask that cannot tuck into a coat tells a truth about spectacle. The sequel embraces exhibition. It will show you everything. Then it will apologize for nothing.

Dialogue is not subtle. A line about a “murderous brain of a fly” earns laughter today. It probably earned some laughter then. Yet the line clarifies the film’s experiment. The soul is no longer a tragic residue seeking reunion.

The mind is a corruptible organ. Swap it with an insect’s impulses and one receives a map for rampage. The ethical seriousness is thin. The philosophical play is thinner. The dramatic clarity is strong. The picture chooses ruthlessness over melancholy.

The editing helps. Scenes do not linger after their use expires. The plot takes corners at speed. Transitions cut from guilt to action without much rhetoric. This plainness, a byproduct of modest means, becomes a style. No moment becomes sacred. Everything serves the forward push. The pace suits the short runtime. The film wears its B‑movie identity as a neat uniform.

Context matters. The year is 1959. Alaska becomes a state in January. Hawaii follows in August. The United States literally grows. Nikita Khrushchev tours America in September and meets a public hungry for theater and anxious about missiles. The “Kitchen Debate” has erupted in Moscow that July, with domestic appliances turned into trophies of ideology. 

A vast steel strike cripples industry through the summer and autumn. The Mercury Seven are introduced by NASA in April. The nation watches engineers ascend into celebrity. Motown is founded in Detroit. The Twilight Zone (1959) begins to air in October and teaches viewers to fear convenience. The air thickens with talk of technology, labor, and spectacle. In that climate Return of the Fly (1959) reads like a modest parable. 

A machine promises mobility. A corporation smells profit. Foreign agents hover. The law arrives late. A body becomes an advertisement for caution. The fable rests in pulp, but it breathes the same air as the headlines.

The film’s relationship to science is naively literal. The machine disintegrates and reintegrates. The screenplay uses the verbs as metaphors for character. A conscience disintegrates under pressure. A family reintegrates around a lie. The assistant’s identity splits and recombines with new aliases. Even the funeral parlor scene works with that grammar. The dead officer is broken into parts and returns as a different sum. The film treats empiricism as a folk ritual. Press the switch and reveal the truth about people.

One should speak about class. The laboratory is not a university space. It sits inside a private industrial site. The equipment is expensive yet not academic. It belongs to a manufacturer. The family fortune bankrolls experiments. Men in suits visit to discuss licenses and contracts. The machine becomes a patent before it becomes a moral trial. 

The presence of a fence, a mortician, and foreign bidders converts wonder into hustle. Science becomes warehoused curiosity. The sequel is canny about this. It treats discovery like stock. It tells a story about extraction rather than enlightenment.

Consider the film’s women with care. Helene is dead when the sequel begins. Her earlier anguish is removed from the frame. What remains is a young woman who loves Philippe and a housekeeper who looks after them both. Their speech marks hinge on care, worry, and loyalty. Their bodies receive shock. They witness pain. They offer comfort. They do not occupy the console. They do not write the formula. 

The film indeed it does, we say it here, it replays a familiar division of labor. Domestic labor sustains experimental zeal. The men break things and seek promotion. The women sweep up despair and hold the door for ambulances. There is a quiet critique available here. The camera shows the cost of male honor and filial duty as it silently taxes the women around them. The absence of Helene’s voice is eloquent. Her son’s crusade honors a dead parent while repeating the harm that killed her husband. In that circle the women are asked to be custodians of masculine pride. They deserve better pages.

The picture fits into the American story in an unsurprising way. It is the tale of a nation in love with machines yet uneasy about their operators. It dramatizes the rhetoric of progress and the habit of theft. It watches a prototype become contraband in a single cut. 

That conversion mirrors the clamour of an economy where patents, spies, and law firms chase one another through the same corridor. The movie therefore reads as a small allegory of American modernity. Build the gadget. Secure the capital. Suffer a catastrophe. Hire the press. Begin again. By 1959 the nation had temples of industry and nightly news about rockets. It also had hearings about espionage and union strikes that halted mills. The sequel’s little world collects those threads.

Its relationship to film noir deserves emphasis. The palette helps. Monochrome grants contour. Faces acquire guilt in shadow. The assistant functions as the classic betrayer. He cultivates proximity to the protagonist. He sells the plan to a darker market. The mortician plays the fence who knows the city’s back channels. 

The police stand ready to tidy the mess but cannot prevent it. The funeral parlor, with drawers and cash boxes, resembles the shabby office that houses so many noir schemes. Even the law’s language sounds procedural and resigned. In effect this science‑horror tale borrows a noir chassis. The themes of duplicity, greed, compromised institutions, and fatal momentum are all here. 

Price himself carries noir lineage from Laura (1944) and The Web (1947). Seymour brings the underworld aroma of Key Largo (1948). Sutton arrives from titles like The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) and The Second Woman (1950), both saturated with suspicion. The sequel’s action therefore blooms within a noir greenhouse. The monster is a costume for an old anxiety about corrupt money and weak men.

The special effects provoke both admiration and laughter. The man with the massive insect head belongs to a gallery of rubber wonders that includes reptiles, octopi, and aliens with stapled foreheads. The effect is not convincing. It is, however, iconic. The proportions feel like a poster come to life. The claw hand, swinging and pinching, offers a grammar of threat visible from the back row. The creature’s encounters in corridors possess a certain credible weight. The genre asks for a body to punctuate the chase. The picture supplies one with a clear silhouette.

One must name the film’s defects. The dialogue chops ideas into slogans. The continuity with the first film frays at the edges. Fifteen years pass yet fashions barely adjust. A laboratory seems to relocate between titles without much explanation. The machine’s capabilities expand and contract according to narrative convenience. The police step forward only when the plot requires them. The villains handle evidence clumsily. The ending arrives with relief, not revelation.

Yet the film’s virtues have stamina. The pace keeps boredom at bay. The funeral opening conjures atmosphere without extravagance. The guinea‑pig transposition remains audacious. The parlor sequence in Max’s place has tension and fine framing. Price invests his lines with rue and affection. Halsey’s stubborn idealism registers. Frankham’s duplicity gives the picture a spine. Sutton and his colleagues in uniform polish the edges with a credible official tone.

It helps to see the film as a brief on mid‑century apprehensions. The machine promises a new logistics of matter. It threatens human order. It invites exploitation by men who seek money without mastery. The law, too slow, chases the profits and misses the ethics. The family, eager to recover honour, repeats an experiment that should probably be buried. The result is a pattern of American ambition. Work hard. Get swindled. Strike back. Clean the mess. This cycle is as national as baseball.

The soundtrack behaves like a metronome for dread. It fattens the leaps and underlines the shocks. It also, at times, smears sentiment across scenes that do not need it. The orchestration, familiar from many studio programmers, draws on brass for menace and strings for pity. The mix is not delicate. It is sufficient. It keeps the blood moving as the edits do their work.

Cinematography deserves a word. Brydon Baker arranges light with practicality and occasional flair. The lab glows like a shrine. The parlor darkens like a ledger hidden under a cloth. The outdoor scenes retain a mild gloss. The camera movements are modest. The compositions are uncluttered. The film benefits from that economy. One sees every switch and dial. One reads every face.

There is also a strain of comedy. It is unplanned and inevitable. The monster pauses. The head turns at a curious angle. The hand opens like a jammed tool. A line about insect psychology lands with the weight of a pulp magazine cover. These instants do not sink the film. They puncture solemnity and keep the experience terrestrial. One remembers that the picture is a piece of popular culture assembled at speed. One can forgive its elastic seriousness.

The performances beyond the principals contribute texture. Danielle De Metz, as Cecile, adds light without much agency. Janine Grandel’s presence gives the house a European scent of order. Michael Mark, in a small turn, reminds one of a long arc through horror history. Each minor figure keeps the world inhabited. They are not asked to reshape the plot. They are asked to hold it in place. They do so with competency.

If one regards Return of the Fly (1959) as a parable of inheritance, the lesson is austere. A father’s error becomes a son’s test. An uncle’s prudence becomes a nephew’s charge of cowardice. A family business supplies funds and a rhetoric of innovation. The true enemy is neither insect nor switch. It is a familiar vice. It is greed disguised as assistance. The monster serves as a gaudy index of theft. Punishment arrives, but understanding does not. The cycle will restart if the papers survive.

The film’s year again matters. The space race magnifies technicians into celebrities. Magazines print photographs of capsules and pilots. The nation debates whether machines will liberate bodies or standardize them into parts.

In that conversation the disintegrator‑integrator reads like a vulgar prophecy. It disassembles the human and reassembles a commodity. Cold War thrillers speak about secrets. Television shows valorize detectives and scientists. This modest sequel places its machine at the crossroads of those trends. It imagines a device that both law and crime can use. It refuses to assign purity to either.

Price’s performance glues it all together. He withholds hysteria. He offers regret as a kind of ritual. He does not believe the lab deserves another trial. He also cannot deny his nephew’s demand. That ambivalence suits the national mood. Progress must proceed. Caution must be voiced. Both positions lose on contact. The picture presents that logic without arguing for a solution. It simply shows the bruise.

The connection to noir can be put even more plainly. Noir is less a set of hats than a climate. It requires treachery, appetite, and systems that absorb guilt without repair. This film supplies each. Its criminals want the blueprint, not the sublime. Its policeman works within polite limits. Its hero misreads friendship and pays with his flesh. 

Its lighting assigns sin to rooms rather than souls. When the fly‑man shambles through night, he becomes a brute metaphor for the way technology reveals the animal inside the bureaucrat, the thief, and the avenger alike. It is not a perfect marriage of modes, but it is a visible one. The seams show, and the seams are instructive.

The film’s place in American film history is secure but humble. It belongs with efficient programmers that extended profitable ideas and shaped audience habits. It taught a generation of young viewers what to expect from laboratories in cinema. 

It codified the sight of switches, coils, and glass panels as emblems of danger. It amplified the taste for hybrids, both in plot and in creature design. It also participated in a broader trend where horror absorbed crime and crime absorbed science fiction. That trend would flourish in television and in the drive‑in circuits. The film is a link in that chain.

It is time to return to the four actors already named and their larger trajectories. Vincent Price grants gravitas drawn from an earlier gallery of suspicious men. He carries the shadow of Laura (1944), where he played the charming but compromised lover. 

He carries the chill of The Web (1947), where he crafted corporate menace like fine furniture. He carries the flamboyance of His Kind of Woman (1951), a picture often shelved with noir for its crime plot and nocturnal irony. Each credit gives this sequel a slow, inherited voltage. 

Dan Seymour, by contrast, offers the ground note of gangster cinema. In Key Largo (1948) he moves among guns and sweat with casual venom. That memory turns his funeral parlor into a credible den. John Sutton arrives from settings steeped in suspicion. The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) arranges domestic space as a trap, and he fits that blueprint. The Second Woman (1950) tests male authority with prying doubt. Those echoes inform his officer’s caution. Brett Halsey does not carry the noir trunk in the same way. His path runs through studio melodrama and later European adventure. 

Titles such as The Best of Everything (1959) and Return to Peyton Place (1961) show his alignment with romance and ambition in modern dress. Here he grounds the film’s filial ardor. His part is not designed to be cunning. It is designed to be driven.

The film’s morality is both severe and forgiving. The villains meet appropriate fates. The hero survives through technological undoing. The family remains intact enough to resume ordinary life. Such mercy is at odds with classical noir endings. It is in line with studio horror practice. The hybrid form therefore reveals its quiet compromise. Darkness is permitted. Total ruin is not. The audience can leave the theater with a small shiver and a moderate smile.

Why does this sequel still entice? Partly because pulp is honest. It announces its tricks and performs them briskly. It asks for an hour and twenty minutes and gives back images that linger. The guinea‑pig hands. The gigantic head turning in profile. Price in profile, too, with his threatened kindness. The funeral rain. The neat rows of drawers in a parlour of the dead. These are durable tokens. They populate a memory palace of mid‑century dread.

One final angle should be mentioned. The sequel adjusts the origin of monstrosity from accident to sabotage. That shift carries weight. It suggests that the true terror of the age is not the hiccup of the atom but the intention of a thief. The machine is dangerous. The human is worse. The film trusts that idea more than it trusts any lecture on scientific ethics. 

In this way it aligns with an American pessimism that runs through the late fifties. The worry is not that rockets will fail. The worry is that someone will sell the blueprint while the rocket burns. The officer will arrive in time to catalog the ashes. The family will rebuild. The market will reopen. The next scheme will begin.

Return of the Fly (1959) therefore deserves its modest reputation. It is a lively sequel with a blunt, durable aesthetic. It blends laboratory spectacle with noir intrigue. It converts grief into hustle. It shortens its speeches. 

It prefers incident to inquiry. It grants Vincent Price the chance to pour civility over chaos. It allows a young lead to chase the ghost of a father. It lets a petty crook play destiny’s hand. The film is not elegant. It is effective. It is not profound. It is persistent. In the history of American cinema, that persistence has its own honour.

Return of the Fly (1959)

Directed by Edward Bernds

Genres - Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller  |   Sub-Genres - Monster Film  |   Release Date - Jul 22, 1959  |   Run Time - 80 min.  | 

Vincent Price as François Delambre

Brett Halsey as Philippe Delambre

David Frankham as Ronald Holmes / Alan Hinds

Danielle De Metz as Cecile Bonnard

John Sutton as Inspector Beecham

Dan Seymour as Max Barthold

Jack Daly as Granville

Janine Grandel as Mme. Bonnard

Michael Mark as Gaston

Richard Flato as Sgt. Dubois

Barry Bernard as Lt. MacLish

Pat O'Hara as Inspector Evans

Francisco Villalobos as The Priest

Florence Strom as The Nun

Joan Cotton as The Private Duty Nurse

Ed Wolff as The Fly-Creature