"A fascinating example of how Hollywood treats a disability that it has not defined as such, so that the film remains largely unburdened by false assumptions about the nature of disablement" (Dwoskin and Sutherland, NFT). Science fiction, more than any other genre, offers us "the face of our fear"; The Incredible Shrinking Man, shown tonight in an excellent 16mm print, faces it, then transcends it, in one of the most palpably existential narratives to emerge from Hollywood. Richard Matheson adapted his own novel to the screen and if the result lacks some of the psychological insights of the original, the film is a classic in "reducing nuclear catastrophe to intimate terms" (Carlos Clarens). It also is a study in relativity, and the relationship of body to soul in a world where size, and by extension physical condition, counts. Robert Scott Carey (Grant Williams) is an average American guy whose consciousness is raised as his size diminishes following exposure to a radiation cloud. When he is reduced to the size of a small child, self-loathing alienates him from his wife as it has from himself: "Easy enough to talk of soul and spirit and central worth," he says, "but not when you're three feet tall." But shrinking ever smaller locks him into a battle for survival in which such received notions become irrelevant. The film's second half, for its day a special effects tour-de-force, is a Robinson Crusoe-like adventure among the terrors of the cellar, with Carey smaller than a matchstick. But the most incredible thing about The Incredible Shrinking Man is that Carey is never cured of his condition; his condition cures him. "I exist," he maintains up to, and beyond, the point where physical evidence is to the contrary.