The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)

This drab little second feature, which clocks in at 58 minutes, seems more like a padded episode of some 1950s TV show than a real movie, and is a notch or two less interesting even than director Edgar G. Ulmer's Daughter of Dr Jekyll. It mixes a lot of elements together - scientific invisibility, a megalomaniac with a scheme to run the country with his invisible army, atomic secrecy, hardboiled crime, parents coerced by threats to or thoughts of unseen or barely-present children (no, it's not thematic - it's cheap) - but comes up with a staid, albeit rapid plod.

The opening sequence has some Ulmerian visual flair, with an unusual use of darkness - the credits appear in patches of light as if spotlit and we segue into a prison escape where the face of protagonist Douglas Fowley is obscured by a fogging visual effect (a la Dark Passage, in which Fowley had a bit) or a pulled-down hat. In the end, it's for little: the next, well-lit scene shows us his face and we proceed with the story, all pretence to mysterioso dropped (did Ulmer initially plan never to show us the transparent man's face even when he's visible?). Having been busted out of jail by battered blonde Marguerite Chapman at the behest of crippled ex-major James Griffith, who toys with the shrapnel fragment that ended his military career, Fowley is talked into succeeding a lab guinea pig in aged, tired prof Ivan Triesault's experiments so he can steal fissionable material from a nearby installation. Duly rendered invisible by a zapping machine, Fowley carries out the first robbery but strikes out on his own to heist a bank. He learns that a) the process has given him incurable radiation poisoning and b) Griffith is dangerous on a national scale and redeems himself in a struggle with the villain that exposes the stolen material and blows up the county. Triesault, quizzed by government types, is unsure about continuing his research.

It's adequately acted, but written at fever pitch - see Ghastly Beyond Belief for over-the-top dialogue samples. Ulmer was working on the marginally more interesting Beyond the Time Barrier simultaneously, and seems to have made about as much effort on this as, say, W. Lee Wilder would have.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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