This blog was begun Monday night, March 23 and completed the following day :
Tonight's movie was a previously unknown gem called "Indestructible Man"(1956), starring Lon Chaney Jr. as "Charles 'Butcher' Benton", an inmate on Death Row at San Quentin. "Butcher", as he is known, was part of a gang that pulled off an armored car heist. In the process, he killed the driver and now awaits his date with the gas chamber. When the movie opens, we see him talking through the bars to his lawyer (Ross Elliott), a scheming chiseler whose only concern is where the loot is stashed. The robbery netted 600k, a ton of dough in '56. Before he was arrested, Butcher hid the money. Elliott tries to coax it out of him, the location, but Butcher won't tell him. He knows that Elliott masterminded the job and set him up to take the fall. He swears revenge, saying "I'll get out of here, and when I do I'll kill you"! Elliott laughs in his face at that statement. "You'll be dead in twelve hours", he smirks.
Elliott is right, because in twelve hours Butcher will be sitting in the gas chamber, but he is also wrong, because.........well, because this is another movie with a Mad Scientist in it, just like "Donovan's Brain", and once a Mad Scientist enters the picture all bets are off. Butcher is indeed executed the next morning. His crooked lawyer Elliott hears about it in a bar in Downtown Los Angeles, the city where the robbery took place and where the money is likely hidden. He goes right away to visit a burlesque dancer (Marian Carr) who was a friend of Butcher's, but she swears no knowledge of the hiding place. For the moment, Elliott is stymied.
Meanwhile, back up at San Quentin, Butcher's body is being removed by the coroner, who takes it not to the local morgue but to the laboratory (pronun.) of a nearby Mad Scientist. At first glance, this doctor appears to be at least somewhat altruistic (and aren't they always, haha). He claims he is doing "cancer research" and needs the corpse for an experiment. Of course, this is against the law, so he pays the coroner off to keep him quiet. Then, with the help of an assistant, he lifts Butcher's body onto a gurney, placing electrodes on the chest and forehead. "He's big and strong", says the Doc. "And fresh, too". The assistant then utters the movie's best line : "So you're actually going to give him 287,000 volts"?
Now, let us be absolutely clear on that point. We aren't talking about 300,000 volts, or 250,000, or even an unrounded but still multiple-of-five number like 265. No - we are talking exactly 287k. I don't know how they arrived at that specific number unless it was by trial and error, so it is likely that Butcher is not their first guinea pig. But beyond that, what in the world does this have to do with cancer research? That question is never explained, as the switch is thrown and Butcher is filled with the full force of the electricity. It's positively Frankenstinian, I tell you! And just like ol' Frankie, you know Butcher's gonna wake up, and you know he's gonna be incredibly pissed off. He gets up off the gurney and stumbles about, something Lon Chaney Jr. was very good at (being a veteran of monster movies). The Doc attempts to calm him down, but Butcher ain't having any. He reaches out with both arms at once, finds two necks - belonging to the Doc and his assistant - and begins squeezing. So much for those guys and their "research".
The next we see of him, he is stumbling across the countryside of Northern California. It is pitch dark. He comes to a road, and wouldn't you know it, a pretty girl is standing there, next to a stalled car. She asks for Butcher's help (having no idea who he is, of course), but he doesn't answer her. You see, as our narrator explains, when Butcher was zapped, the high voltage destroyed his vocal cords. His mind, however, was left intact! And oh yes - I realise now I neglected to mention the narration, which begins at the start of the picture, and is done by the Lead Detective on the case, in "hindsight" mode.
So anyway, yeah, Butcher's mind was left intact, which means he can understand what the girl is saying. As she continues her plea for help, a man steps out from the shadows. Lo and behold, he's a carnival barker. No, I'm not kidding. The whole thing has been a publicity stunt, to drum up customers for his tent show down the road. After all, who wouldn't stop to help a pretty girl? Butcher wasn't pissed before, but he is now. He was all set to help before the barker appeared. So, he picks the guy up and tosses him about fifty yards, pushes the girl aside and jumps into the car. Lo and behold, it starts! Remember that his mind is intact, so he can drive, and drive he does, en route to L.A.
On the way there, he is stopped at a roadblock. The pretty girl has called police and the Highway Patrol is checking all cars for a Man of Incredible Strength (remember that he tossed the carnival barker half a football field). Butcher knows he can't stop, so he floors it and crashes through the barrier. The cops give chase, surround his car and force him out. When Butcher charges them, they fill him with lead.
Or.......um........I should say that they try to. They empty their guns at him, from point blank range, so by all accounts he should be dead, am I right? He should be dead and full of holes. But he ain't. One of the effects of the high voltage, you see, was to thicken his skin. It has become so dense as to be impenetrable. The bullets just bounce off him, and after tossing several cops down the road, he gets back in the car and continues his journey. By the time he arrives in L.A., the word is out to all police agencies : "Be on the lookout for an Indestructible Man"! They don't actually use that phrase, of course. Police language is always stark and specific, never speculative or....(heavens!) goofy sounding. But I needed to get the title of the movie into a sentence, so I used the description myself, and as a side note, I should mention for clarity's sake that there is no "The" in the title. It's not "The Indestructible Man", just "Indestructible Man". So yeah, or I mean no, the cops don't refer to him as "Indestructible" because they don't actually know that. Not yet, anyway. What they do say in their APB is that their bullets bounced off him, and he was of incredible strength (something also noted by the pretty girl earlier in the evening).
At LAPD headquarters, lead detective Max Showalter (also our narrator), thinks he can explain part of this : "The guy's probably wearing a bulletproof vest".
"But what about his strength"?, asks the Captain. "The CHPs said they were thrown around like rag dolls".
Hmmmm........no explanation for that one.
Meanwhile, back at the Burlesque Theater, the sleazy lawyer has returned and is again pressing Marian Carr on the whereabouts of the stolen dough. She swears she has no idea where it is. "I didn't know Butcher that well! I only met him a few times. I knew nothing about the robbery until he was caught"! They've both heard the news of Butcher's execution that morning. Neither, however, has any idea he's been brought back to life (how could they?) and is on his way to Los Angeles. Carr, the burlesque dancer, has an envelope from Butcher that he gave to her on her final visit to San Quentin. "To be opened after my death", it reads.
"Well aren't ya gonna open it"!, asks the scheming lawyer. Carr tells him it's private, for her eyes only, but then she is called back onstage to perform her encore and the lawyer sees his chance. He opens the envelope, and voila! It's a map, showing the sewer system beneath the city. A big "X" marks the spot where the treasure is certainly hidden! All he's gotta do is go down there and get it. He hires a couple of thugs to help, offering them a pittance of course, but before they can begin - it's not easy planning a sewer escapade, after all - word comes through on the news that one of the original henchmen from the armed car robbery has been murdered. He too had gone free when Butcher took the fall, but now he's dead. Who could have done it? The cops have no idea. Could it be the Man of Incredible Strength who got away from the roadblock? Hmmmm.......can't rule it out.
Not long after that, just the next day in fact, a Second Henchman is found murdered. This was the third and final member of the robbery crew. He'd escaped jail but he couldn't escape Butcher, who as we in the audience know has arrived in town and is exacting his revenge. Elliott the sleazy lawyer is getting a sick feeling about the murders, recalling Butcher's final words to him the night before the execution. But it can't be. How could Butcher be the killer? He's dead for God's sake! Could he have hired a hit man to carry out the deed? At any rate, the situation is creeping Elliott out big time. Better he just find that money and split town.
The cops, for their part, have made a breakthrough, though it isn't making any sense. They've found fingerprints on the body of one of the Henchmen, that match Butcher's prints exactly. But how could this be, they wonder? Butcher is dead! Hmmmm........does he have a twin brother? Anybody know? No, he doesn't have a twin, not that the detectives are aware of, and even if he did, the prints would be slightly different. These are exact. What in the world is going on?
Just then they receive a call from up north. San Francisco PD has new information from the coroner, who has confessed to selling Butcher's body to the Mad Scientist. They've crashed his lab, which turns out to be located underneath a power plant. So that's where he got the 287,000 volts! The coroner cops a plea and tells all, how he needed a few extra bucks and so sold the corpse on the down low, to the Scientist who told him he was only working on a cure for cancer. He didn't mean for this to happen! The SFPD have found the bodies of the Mad Scientist and his assistant, observed that their necks have been crushed and suddenly it all makes sense. It's got to be The Man of Incredible Strength, the same one who's been tossing coppers around. It's gotta be The Butcher, crazy as that sounds! They tell all of this to the Captain at LAPD, who puts out his own APB to look out for a man fitting the description of Charles "Butcher" Benton. Then he gets a visit from that crook Elliott, the lawyer, pleading for police protection. Though he knows nothing about Butcher's resurrection, he's got a weird feeling that Butcher must have escaped somehow. After all, the two Henchmen are dead and he may be next. Butcher swore revenge, remember? Elliott is so scared he confesses to being the mastermind of the armed car robbery. "Please, put me in jail", he begs. "At least I'll be safe there".
The cops agree to jail him, but first he's gotta show them where the money is hidden. Elliott produces the map, and now the race is on, to recover the cash and to stop Butcher in the process. I've told you a hell of a lot, more than for most plots haha, but only because this was such a great one, for a B-Movie horror/crime flick anyway. I found "Indestructible Man" on Youtube while browsing public domain movies for viewing. It was short (71 minutes) and had Lon Chaney Jr, a favorite of mine. It also had that great title, so I gave it a shot and now I'm giving it Two Big Thumbs Up and a strong recommendation for all films fans of any stripe. One of my favorite things about this movie, besides it's inventive plot, was it's fantastic use of actual Los Angeles locations, many of them fallen by the wayside now, like the original Angel's Flight before it was moved in the late 60s. The burlesque theater appears to be real as well, and so does an old rooming house when the Henchmen are holed up. There's a ton of great street footage from late 50s L.A., shot in classic black and white, on a print that's close to perfect. You can't ask for much more, and for a time like this it was the perfect movie. Even the title was hopeful sounding; wouldn't we all like to be Indestructible right now? :)
I'm gonna search public domain again tonight, and if I can find anything even half as good as "Indestructible Man", I'll be happy. Watch it for a much-needed diversion. //////
That's all for the moment. I am gonna head out for a CSUN walk in a little while. I hope all is well with everyone. See you later tonight at the Usual Time.
Tons of love! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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