It's hard to believe that 15 years before directing The Amazing Transparent Man, director Edgar G. Ulmer made one of the indisputably greatest film noir of all time: Detour. Not only is The Amazing Transparent Man a complete waste of a talented director, it commits the cardinal sin of filmmaking: being boring. Here's the plot: a legendary safe-cracker is busted out of prison by an ex-U.S. Army major obsessed with developing an invisible army. He uses the safe-cracker to steal sensitive materials that will aid in the creation of an invisible ray. But one day the safe-cracker gets a dose of the ray, becomes "transparent," escapes, and begins a crime spree. Admittedly, I like the premise of a hardened criminal becoming invisible instead of just a misguided scientist. But the film spoils any sense of tension with bland sets, preposterous special effects (which frequently take the form of objects "moving" because the transparent man interacts with them), a too many needless supporting characters. Ulmer frequently forgoes rudimentary A-B shots in favor of painfully static compositions where two or more characters in medium close-up just...talk to each other. The Amazing Transparent Man is a depressing film to sit through. But not because of its story. It is because it demonstrates how one of the great Hollywood filmmakers had fallen.
4/10
I wonder if Ulmer's "fall" here—as it is with some of his other pictures—has something to do with elements outside of his control, script and budget, in particular. The static shots are typical of zero-budget movies, not to mention sub-par FX. Poor Ulmer.
ReplyDeleteAnd while Detour is the Ulmer go-to, I always steer people to his more expressionistic noir, Strange Illusion (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038126/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1). File it with Lewton's re-imagining of Jane Eyre in I Walked with a Zombie: Strange Illusion is a Freudian riff on Hamlet!
Thanks for bringing that film to my attention!
Delete