The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)
Posted on July 3, 2005
Filed Under Turkeys
There’s no getting around the fact that this is a bad film. It uses its meagre resources badly, manages to wring any entertainment out of what is a naturally engaging premise and draws together a cast of pretty ropey actors. It’s a real shame too, as there are one or two points in ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ where you can detect faint hints of the larger story the producers were trying to tell but came nowhere near to doing justice.
The transparent man in question is one Joey Faust (played creditably by Douglas Kennedy), an infamous bank robber who’s broken out of jail on the orders of the mysterious Major Paul Krenner (James Griffith). Krenner has also enlisted the help of the world’s foremost nuclear physicist-Dr Ulof-and has plans to create an invisible army to take over the world. Ulof is the sole figure of interest as we discover that he is an unwilling accomplice of the evil Krenner and is building the invisibility ray only because his daughter is being held hostage by him.
This relationship between the reluctant scientist and his bullying and murderous ex-military paymaster is obviously set up as a warning to the audience of the potential for innocent knowledge to be harnessed for the most malicious of purposes, in this case by nefarious military types. Ulof revealing that he was also forced to work for the Nazis is a particularly interesting development in light of the contemporary political developments at the time of the film’s release (the use of German scientists like Werner von Braun for American post-war needs was still a sensitive subject in 1960’s) and his repentance in the closing minutes of the film is intended as a cautionary tale to keep scientific advances under close scrutiny. I also think that the lead character being named Faust was no coincidence, and his realisation that his greed to aquire the power of invisibility has had the gravest consequences, and the act of redemption this brings, are utterly wasted.
None of this is ever developed though, which again is a real shame as it could have turned a very bad b-movie into a half-way interesting one. When I first started watching this I thought it would be a bad variation on Universal’s classic ‘The Invisible Man’. It’s to Edgar Ulmer’s credit that he tried something different with it, but unfortunately ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ comes nowhere near to making any mark on the genre.
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