In 1945 Edgar G. Ulmer directed the film noir classic Detour, which transcended its meagre budget to become one of the most enduring and best loved examples of the genre. It was a testament to Ulmer’s skill with a tiny budget and sparse resources, an ability to conjure something of worth from next to nothing. There’s no trace of that man at all in The Amazing Transparent Man, shot back-to-back with the equally inept Beyond the Time Barrier in Dallas, Texas. Plodding, derivative and hopelessly misnamed (“amazing”? Far from it), it barely runs an hour and still doesn’t have enough plot to go around.
Major Paul Krenner (James Griffith) is planning to raise an army of invisible soldiers using a process developed by Dr Peter Ulof (Ivan Trisault) who he keeps in line by holding captive his daughter Maria (Carmel Daniel). But the device that Ulof has invented needs a rare nuclear isotope to power it and in order to get more, Krenner arranges for safecracker Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy) to be sprung from prison to steal more supplies while invisible. As Faust tries to manipulate Krenner’s lover Laura Matson (Marguerite Chapman in her final film) he begins to lose control of his invisibility.
Predictably, the invisibility process is ill-defined and inconsistent – it makes some things invisible but not others – and the effects are no more sophisticated than those used in Universal’s The Invisible Man (1933) almost three decades earlier. The script, by Jack Lewis (it was his only non-Western) attempts to explain how Ulof’s invisibility machine works but it quickly devolves into a mess of unconvincing techno babble that one suspects Lewis himself didn’t actually understand.
Technically the film is unsurprisingly shoddy, from the flat lighting to the baggy editing, from the poorly used score to the cheesy effects. Ulmer had previously made a virtue of marshalling what resources he had at hand to come up with something coherent and at last part-way interesting (not even his other low-budget genre films, including Bluebeard (1944), The Man from Planet X (1951) and The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957) were quite as bad as this) but here he was near the end of his career and it was a career whose shine had long since worn off.
The undistinguished cast is mostly made up of second (and even third) tier actors whose collective CV encompasses the likes of Flight to Mars (1951) (Chapman), The Land Unknown (1957), The Alligator People (1959) (Kennedy), Son of Sinbad (1955), The Vampire (1957) (Griffith), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), Cry of the Werewolf (1944) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) (Triesault). Here, none of them are particularly notable, merely going through the motions, hardly stretched by Lewis’ mundane screenplay.
After 58 muddled and tedious minutes, The Amazing Transparent Man stumbles to a climax with an unconvincing atomic explosion as Keener’s secret base is blown up and a tacky breaking-the-fourth-wall final shot as Ulof pontificates about the dangers of his process and the fact that the CIA wanting to use it for their own ends before turning to the camera and asking the audience “what would you do?” It’s that kind of film – one that cant even manage to find a proper conclusion and instead just comes to a stop leaving audiences baffled as to why they’d waster almost an hour of their lives on this nonsense.
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