Directed by:
Edgar G. Ulmer
Somewhere in Texas, Laura Madison (Marguerite
Chapman) helps bust violent-tempered burglar Joey Faust (Douglas
Kennedy) out of prison. Oddly enough, she happens to be a complete
stranger and he has no idea why she's done this or what she wants with
him. After evading the police, the two go to a house out in the middle of
nowhere, where the mean, bitter and distrustful Faust is introduced to
Major Paul Krenner (James Griffith), an evil spy whose military
career was cut short thanks to a piece of shrapnel. The Major happens to
know a lot about Joey, including the fact it was his wife who squealed on
him and that he's never even had a chance to meet his own daughter. He
also knows that Faust has a reputation in the criminal underworld as a
genius when it comes to cracking safes and vaults. Krenner would like to
put Faust's skills to use stealing raw materials from government research
facilities for some vague experiments being conducted there by Dr. Peter
Ulof (Ivan Thiesault); a former Nazi concentration camp scientist.
Dr. Ulof has created an invisibility ray which "neutralizes all tissue and
bone structure in the body" and "utilizes x-ray alpha, beta and omega rays
and ultra violets" and they plot to use that technology to get Faust in
and out of heavily-guarded buildings. What could possibly go wrong there?
After Dr. Ulof demonstrates his ray on a guinea pig; making it invisible
and then restoring its visibility, to show how safe it is, Faust is
convinced. Not that he has much of a choice anyway. He either cooperates
or he's turned back over to the authorities. Pretty much everyone working
under the major is only doing so because he's blackmailing them. He's
keeping Dr. Ulof's daughter Maria (Cormel Daniel) prisoner in the
home and threatens to kill her if he doesn't cooperate. The Major's
rifle-toting thug Julian (Boyd 'Red' Morgan) is only loyal because
he claims to know the whereabouts of his missing son. Laura is his lover,
but he keeps her in check by slapping her around. And now he has Faust,
but he's not planning on taking orders from anyone. Once he's turned
invisible, he steals a metal canister of nuclear material from a vault,
but then he decides he wants lots of money, so he has Laura drive him to a
bank so he can steal a bag of cash. The whole arrangement seems too good
to be true, and that's because it is. Because Ulof has been using
radioactive materials in his experiments, both he and Faust have come down
with lethal radioactive poisoning and their days are numbered.
This low key crime drama with horror and sci-fi touches was one of the
final films for the fairly prolific Ulmer, who has a handful of gems under
his belt, including the Boris Karloff / Bela Lugosi Gothic horror classic
The Black Cat (1934) and the superb low-budget film noir Detour
(1945). He also contributed the worthwhile Bluebeard (1944),
starring John Carradine as a murderous artist, The Man from Planet X
(1951), a silly though ahead-of-its-time alien invasion tale, Daughter
of Dr. Jekyll (1957) and others to our beloved genre. In its own
small, unoriginal, zero budget way, Transparent Man shows the
hallmarks of an experienced director who knows what he's doing. Filmed for
peanuts, it's efficiently made, very quickly paced and doesn't really
waste any time on unnecessary filler like similar films. As a result, this
whole thing is compressed into a tidy 57 minutes. The performances are
also pretty competent, though there's not much here that can't be seen
elsewhere (primarily in Universal's Invisible Man series). But hey,
if you've got an hour to kill, this can do just that pretty painlessly... you just won't be remembering it about a week later. It received the Mystery Science Theater treatment in 1995.
Filmed in 1959 under the title Search for a Shadow, Ulmer shot this back-to-back with Beyond the Time
Barrier (1960) around Dallas over a 2 week period. It was one of the first efforts for
Roger George, who'd keep busy for the next 30 years doing special
effects for such wide-ranging films as The Dunwich Horror (1970),
Blacula (1970), Humanoids from the Deep (1980), The
Howling (1981), The Terminator (1984), Night of the Demons
(1988) and many more. He also did invisibility fx for Invisible
Invaders (1959), The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966),
Invisible Strangler (1976) and others. Photographic effects are
by Howard A. Anderson. Legendary Universal make-up artist Jack
B. Pierce gets a credit, though I can't really recall any make-up
effects work in this one.
★★1/2
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