This blog was begun Friday night March 27th and completed the following day :
Tonight's movie was yet another Mad Scientist Masterpiece, "The Amazing Transparent Man"(1960), directed by noted low budgeteer Edgar G. Ulmer, a Hollywood craftsman who could make a film in almost any genre, just so long as it was B or C-grade. A few of his movies rose to prominence; "Detour", a Film Noir, is considered one of the best in it's class, and "The Man From Planet X" is a near-classic of 1950s Science Fiction. An early work, "The Black Cat" from 1934 starred both of the giants from the Universal Horror era - Karloff and Lugosi, and was as creative and well produced (if a whole lot weirder) as any of the better known fright flicks from that studio. Ulmer had the talent to be a major director, or at least a steady and stylish one, but for whatever reason his career veered all over the map, and he became known in later years as "The Thinking Man's Ed Wood".
From that description we can examine this evening's showcase. A safecracker (Douglas Kennedy) has just escaped from prison. As he runs across a hillside, a car pulls up to meet him on a wooden bridge, driven by his girlfriend (Marguerite Chapman). She takes him to a house out in the sticks that looks suspiciously like the one we saw last night, and no, I'm not kidding.
These coincidences are getting out of hand. Once again I chose the movie only for it's title and the fact, as noted in a Youtube summary, that it featured a Mad Scientist. These days I've just gotta have my Mad Scientists, as you know. But when the film was over, I checked IMDB again because of the house, and sure enough......."The Amazing Transparent Man" was shot in and around Dallas, Texas.
The house the safecracker is driven to is a near replica of both the Chainsaw house and the one we saw last night, the only difference being the lack of surrounding woods in this film. Still, it's located near Dallas, so I guess in Texas it was common in the 20th century to stick a three story Victorian mansion in the middle of nowhere. Wow, two houses in a row, in Dallas, in two Mad Scientist movies. Really weird.
But then we like Weird, don't we? What would life be if it wasn't weird? Boring is what, so let's be glad for weirdness, coincidental or not.
But back to the movie, when the safecracker and his woman arrive at the house, they are greeted by the man who arranged the prison break (James Griffith, a tall angular actor whom you've seen in a million movies). This man, a Major in the armed forces (branch unspecified) owns the house which has a laboratory in the basement, where a famous German physicist works.
I must take a moment here to note the recent frequency of German physicists in our movies.
So yes, there is such a physicist in the basement, and of course he's an ex-Nazi, but in this case he is remorseful, so I'm not sure it fair to call him a Mad Scientist. What he's doing is certainly Mad, but he's being forced to do it against his will by the Major, who has his daughter captive - locked up in room - and won't let her go unless the physicist carries out his experiments. He's working with high level X-Rays in order to produce invisibility, which he's achieved in small animals. Now he's ready to try it out on a human being, which is why the Major broke Kennedy out of prison.
You see, the Major is a Crazed Psycho, a megalomaniac who wants to create an army of Invisible Soldiers to achieve World Domination. But he's gonna need a huge supply of radium to make them all invisible, and the radium - a dangerous element - is kept locked up in a vault at the local Army base. This is why the Major needed Douglas Kennedy. As a notoriously skilled safecracker, he is reputed to be capable of picking any lock, no matter how secure. The plan is to make Kennedy invisible so he can walk past the base's checkpoints unseen. Then, he can go straight into the building containing the vault, open it up and bring the radium back to the lab. It all sounds so foolproof, and it might be if Kennedy didn't have ideas of his own. You see, once he becomes invisible he plans to head over to the bank instead of the Army base. He's gonna unload enough dough to take himself and Marguarite Chapman to Mexico, or maybe Europe, where they can live out their days in peace, away from the law and the Major, who they think is nuts (and he is).
The Major has a Loyal Henchman, of course, who overhears Kennedy tellling Chapman of his plan. This is where the trust starts to break down between the Major and the other two, and from this point the plot will move in several different directions as the Major tries to force Kennedy to comply with their original bargain, which was his freedom in exchange for the theft of the radium. There's also the reluctant physicist, who's only going along to protect his daughter. Will he continue to obey the Major? And what of the Henchman? Will he remain Loyal in light of a secret being kept from him? The Major is playing a rather weak hand, I'd say, but then I'd never bet against James Griffith in any situation.
There are some great scenes in "The Amazing Transparent Man", including some of the unintentionally humorous variety, as when Kennedy is stealing the radium and gets into an "invisible" fight with one of the guards. On the more serious side, or at least as serious as you can get in a movie like this, the physicist's laboratory is very well rendered, and has enough machinery, gauges and dials to satisfy the most discerning '50s Sci-Fi fan. There is a lot of conflict in the plot, too. Almost everyone will turn against someone in the film's 58 minutes, and some outrageous schemes will be hatched. The ending is a shocker, which you might be expecting given the dangers of radium, but you'll be impressed even so. I'd like to know where Ulmer got his footage for the final scene; it didn't look like a typical Stock shot.
"The Amazing Invisible Man" gets points for an inventive script and good B-movie acting. There isn't as much location shooting as I'd have liked, but lab experiments and invisibility sequences make up for it. I'm gonna give the movie Two Big Thumbs Up, in a less than classic sci-fi way. This isn't a cheesy movie or worse, a Good/Bad one, but it's no work of art either. My high rating and recommendation, therefore, is based on Fun, and it's a lot of that. //////
I'm gonna go for my walk now. Back in a little while at the Usual Time.
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
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