Horror Express 2020 #2: The Amazing Transparent Man (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1960)

Over a quarter of a century after ‘The Black Cat’ (1934), and the best part of a decade since The Man From Planet X, Edgar G. Ulmer found himself in even more reduced circumstances than usual, shooting this late doors atom age ‘invisible man’ programmer back-to-back with the same year’s ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’.

Despite working under the contraints of a punishing two week shooting schedule (for both films) however, the indefatigable Ulmer still managed to transform ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ into a haunting rumination on state power, the trauma of war and the malign consequences of scientific brinkmanship, with a touch of sombre, American gothic pictorialism thrown in for good measure – all neatly wrapped up in 57 minutes.

In a scenario highly reminiscent of the Bogart/Bacall vehicle Dark Passage, the movie opens with an incarcerated safecracker, the pointedly named Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy), escaping from the pen (ten bucks says the brief prison break footage must have been stolen from another movie), only to find himself aided in his getaway by an attractive blonde (Laura, played by Marguerite Chapman) whom he’s never seen before in his life.

(Whilst researching this post on IMDB, I was astonished to discover that Douglas Kennedy was actually in ‘Dark Passage’, playing a detective; which seems like a fairly remarkable coincidence, but… if there’s a behind-the-scenes story here, I don’t know it, so let’s move on.)

The imitation of Delmer Davies’ 1947 film continues for at least a little bit longer as Faust and Laura negotiate a police check-point, but things subsequently takes a hard left – both literal and metaphorical – as she proceeds to drive him down a series of ominous, rather bleak looking country lanes, emerging in front of an austere, wood-panelled farmhouse, standing starkly against the landscape like something out of an Andrew Wyeth painting.

Approaching the house, the couple are met by a surly, gun-toting man named Julian (Red Morgan), who ushers them inside, where Faust is granted an audience with Major Krenner (ubiquitous TV villain actor James Griffith), the sinister cat who seems to have been responsible for orchestrating his prison break.

(There’s a great, hard-boiled bit here as Krenner disarms Faust whilst Julian covers him with a rifle; “Y’know what one of these bullets will do from behind? It’ll rip out yr spine and roll it up like a ball of string,” Morgan croaks venomously, channelling a thousand western villains.)

Politely declining to identify the country in whose armed forces he has attained the rank of Major (any guesses?), Krenner informs Faust that if he wishes to remain alive, he will henceforth he required to assist him in his as-yet-unspecified plans, after which he is ushered upstairs to take a look at – you guessed it – the laboratory.

In a cramped, lead-lined attic set jam-packed with outdated mad science clobber, we meet Dr. Ulof (Ivan Triesault), an elderly scientist of apparent Eastern European extraction, and learn that he has been working under Krenner’s command to perfect a form of time-limited invisibility, enabled through exposure to highly unstable radioactive isotopes.

The humans retreat to a lead-lined observation chamber whilst the super-charged atomic x-rays do their work, reducing a cute little guinea-pig to a state of complete invisibility (quite a decent effect actually) - and of course it don’t exactly take a disgraced experimental physicist to figure out that Faust himself is going to find himself strapped to the same gurney PDQ.

As Faust finds himself rendered invisible and forced to break into a series of government research labs to steal a load of even more dangerous nuclear material, it gradually becomes clear that no one in this ill-fated farmhouse is there of their own will; all are being coerced by Krenner through a mixture of blackmail, threats and lies.

Ulof, we learn, is a concentration camp survivor assumed dead by the U.S. authorities. In a horribly surreal touch, Krenner is forcing him to conduct work he feels is dangerous and immoral by keeping his young granddaughter – Ulof’s only other surviving blood relative – imprisoned in a locked room right next to the lab.

The thread drawn between the atrocities of WWII and their continuation in the movie’s present feels horribly palpable in Triesault’s convincingly haunted, emotionally desolate performance, whilst the image of him subsisting on a shabby camp bed, screened off in the corner of the lab right next to the steel door of his granddaughter’s cell, is queasily heart-breaking.

An unusual protagonist, Kennedy plays Faust as essentially a big lug, his actions self-serving and fool-hardy, but he says “yeah” in that same clipped way Warren Oates does, so we know he’s got a bit more than that going on upstairs - or enough base cunning to upset Major Krenner’s unstable house of cards at the very least.

This uncertain struggle for power lends the film a weird noir grit, as characters are repeatedly whacked with bottles, threatened with guns and locked in dark rooms as the interplay between the residents of the house becomes increasingly frantic - whilst all the while, the threat posed by the heaps of lethal fissionable material casually stashed in the attic throbs gently in the background.

Offering up a bleak dose of atomic existentialism, the film’s pessimistic conclusion seems to mirror the blasted, lifeless rural location in which the film appears to have been shot – itself an echo of an imagined, post-nuclear hinterland.

Once Krenner has been overpowered and his mis-matched prisoners have made their escape, Dr Ulof hits Faust with the bad news that many viewers will no doubt have already guessed – namely, that the vast doses of radiation he has been exposed to in the course of the invisibility process has left him with barely days to live. Possessed by a sudden sense of fatalistic moral certainty, he leaves the other surviving characters to drive off toward a decidedly uncertain future, making his way back into the farmhouse for one final conflagration…

Though ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ is not really a horror movie in terms of its plotting, the characteristically doom-laden atmosphere Ulmer brings to proceedings sways it pretty heavily in that direction. Even the swampy terrain Faust stumbles through during his opening prison-break is shadowy and foreboding, whilst the relentless, sawing cello of Darrell Calker’s appropriately minimal score does an efficient job of putting us on edge right from the outset.

Whilst the impoverished circumstances under which the film was produced prevent it from even approaching the same level as Ulmer’s best work, for anyone seeking further evidence to cement his status as classical Hollywood’s favourite underdog auteur, this one is absolute gold dust.

Not only does it find the director throwing in some striking, expressionistic visuals which seem distinctly out of place in the realm of low budget ‘50s sci-fi, but he also twists writer Jack Lewis’s admittedly potent premise toward the same themes which had dominated his work ever since ‘The Black Cat’ and Detour, exploring ideas of imprisonment and inter-personal control, of the trauma of the past contaminating the present, and of inescapable, predestined doom.

Viewed in wider genre terms meanwhile, the film stands as a noteworthy, albeit minor, entry in the lineage of stark, atomic paranoia which runs from Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ a few years earlier to Joseph Losey’s ‘The Damned’ a few years later, and even, eventually, to Troy Kennedy Martin’s extraordinary BBC drama Edge of Darkness in 1985.

So far as I’m aware, ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ remains largely unacknowledged by surveyors of this particular sub-genre / sensibility, but I would strongly urge them to track it down. Though a ‘small film’ in every respect, the intrinsic merits of its strange scenario, and of its director’s cracked vision, lend it a rather haunting, morally ambiguous quality which easily surpasses its budgetary shortcomings.

“What The Hell?” File: Runts of 61 Cygni C by James Grazier (Belmont, 1970)

A somewhat legendary volume within SF/pulp fandom for, well… fairly obvious reasons, I remember laughing a great deal as a teenager when I first read the extraordinary cover blurb of James Grazier’s ‘Runts of 61 Cygni C’, as quoted in Kim Newman & Neil Gaiman’s Ghastly Beyond Belief.

Now that I actually own a copy (£2 from the basement of Booth’s Books in Hay on Wye) and have skim-read it, I’m happy to report that this cheapie from Belmont (frequent publishers of pretty weird, throwaway stuff, or so it would seem) is thankfully not the depraved runt-orgy that casual browsers may have feared.

Indeed, thoughts of pro-creation remain far from the author’s mind during the book’s thoroughly formulaic first half, during which a team of potential space travellers are laboriously selected by an infallible computer to crew a ground-breaking mission to investigate a distant planet with an atmosphere much like our own, and, more importantly, inhabitants much like our own:

“The two video-motion tapes of Planet C have shown earth-type men scurrying around a dark, sandy beach area. We clearly saw two legs and arms, no nose, and only one eye in a hairless head. We could not see ears nor hair on any part of the body – there was no evidence of clothing.”

Amid much talk of food-tubes, interstellar arcships and global under-population, two married couples are eventually selected for this task (presumably in an attempt to foster a harmonious atmosphere onboard ship or something), and, by and large, generic mid-century sci-fi reigns supreme.

If this book was indeed intended as some kind of edgy sci-fi sex comedy, then needless to say, it misfired badly (I mean, as if you couldn’t tell that from the cover alone). Indeed, the first inkling of anything remotely saucy going on doesn’t reach us until page 59, after the voyage to Planet C has finally departed;

“Alex put the tape measure’s zero mark flat on Diana’s chest, then he ran the measure out to the very tip of the extended nipple. His cheek touched the expanded breast wall, at the same time Diana sucked in her flat, hard stomach and her magnificent torso swelled, about to burst with desire. He measured eighteen centimeters exactly, about six and a half inches, with Diana in a half-sitting position, leaning back, panting, on the soft airpillows.
‘Now the other’, calmly remarked Alex, ‘this one is precisely eighteen centimetres, that one should be sixteen, two centimetres smaller according to that simple, silly, silver-fingered robot!’”

Ah – science fiction erotica. You can’t beat it.

Anyway, skipping ahead a good number of pages - shortly after they reach their intended destination and begin observing the diminutive, one-eyed occupants of 61 Cygni C freely frolicking in their jungle paradise as planned, our intrepid astronauts receive some grim news from Earth. Apparently, nuclear war has broken out (the utopian scientific advancements of 2090 have had little effect on “the Red Chinese”, it would seem), and the human race seems likely to be well on the way to complete annihilation.

“Their faces were grave”, Grazier writes of our heroes’ reaction to these events, and, a few pages of incongruously cheery discussion later, three of the four space travellers find only one viable solution to the situation they find themselves in – namely, to give in and join the runts.

The remaining earthman, Alex, refuses to be party to such primitive debauchery, and as he continues to obverse the nature of the runt culture, the remainder of the look becomes a quasi-scientific rumination on the manner in which a parallel species to humanity might have evolved, had nature seen fit to deposit them in an environment furnished with an endless supply of nutrition, warmth and sunshine, with no natural predators or other sundry threats, thus allowing them to dedicate themselves entirely to pleasure, with no thought of self-preservation or technical / intellectual advancement. (Why they only have one eye is anyone’s guess, but I’m sure there’s an explanation for it thrown in here somewhere.)

It’s a fair bet that James Grazier was influenced to at least some extent here by Robert Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ (the writer of the back cover blurb certainly was), and indeed, far from the smirky tone you might have expected based on occasional, hideous ‘erotic’ passages such as the one quoted above, Grazier remains surprisingly straight-faced throughout, posing the question of whether the earthman or the runts represent the more ‘natural’ (read: admirable) state of being with what appears to be the utmost seriousness. This is, after all, his first venture in the ‘literature of ideas’, and his ideas must be clearly expressed!

Overall, there is something quite sweet about Grazier’s determination to plough on in earnest, in spite of the sheer goofiness of his scenario or the bizarro appearance lent to it by his publishers. As a result, ‘Runts of 61 Cygni C’ has a kind of perverse, Kilgore Trout-like nobility about it – a feeling that is only enhanced by the cack-handed horrors of Grazier’s singularly dreadful prose. Insofar as I can tell (and assuming “James Grazier” wasn’t a pseudonym), this was the author's sole published work.

Of course, this being a novel published in the aftermath of the sixties counter-culture, you can probably guess which course Captain Alex eventually ends up steering in this none too subtle moral conflict between atomic devastation and guiltless free love, and the section of the readership who were actually anticipating some red-hot runt action eventually find themselves rewarded on the book’s final pages, which for the sake of internet posterity are reproduced below.

Those already feeling a bit queasy are advised to look away now.

 
Selected highlights from the 1970 Belmont Books catalogue can be seen below. (Click to enlarge.)

Nippon Horrors: Genocide / ‘War of the Insects’ (Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1968)

Even when writing a weblog that prides itself on plunging headfirst into discussion of some pretty crazy motion pictures, there are some films that just present so much of a WTF it’s difficult to know what to do with them, and here we have a case in point. Quite what was going through the minds of Shochiku studio’s short-lived sci-fi/horror division when they decided to follow up their fairly jaunty low budget kaiju picture ‘The X From Outer Space’ with the cheerily titled ‘Genocide’, I almost think I’m happier not knowing.(1)

So first off, two things I’m usually reluctant to do in the course of reviewing movies: (i) classifying these sort of sci-fi / ‘nature goes bad’ disaster movies as ‘horror’. (I know strictly speaking they kind of are, but y’know… in aesthetic terms, there’re way off from what constitutes ‘horror’ in my mind.) And, (ii), giving in to the school of thought that seeks to frame everything shocking or extreme in post-war Japanese culture as a response to the trauma created by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. (It seems some Western critics like to crow-bar that issue in wherever they possibly can, but much of the time I just don’t buy it, personally.)

Both of those rules, however, are going to be jettisoned whilst we look at ‘Genocide’, a frankly extraordinary venture that resembles a humble genre programmer that’s somehow lost its mind and gone completely insane, beginning in the detached, utilitarian mode common to ‘50s and ‘60s science-goes-bad disaster films, but gradually spiralling off into a kind of beserk, hysterical fatalism, conveying a sense of absurd, nihilistic cruelty that surpasses just about any contemporary horror film, and reflecting the unthinkable reality of an era in which pointless mass death seemed ever imminent.

So how the hell did that happen…? Well, let’s begin at the beginning, shall we.

The very first thing we see in ‘Genocide’ is stock footage of an atomic bomb explosion.“The moment mankind unleashed the power of the atom..”, reads a somewhat gnomic opening caption, “..he immediately began to fear it”. So that’s the second of my above-stated caveats out the window right from the outset, I guess. I also get the feeling that anyone who bought a ticket in the hope of seeing a fun movie about killer insects is already beginning to feel somewhat uneasy.

After a beautifully garish title sequence (rather reminiscent of the similarly insect-filled credits to Teruo Ishii’s equally unhinged Horrors of Malformed Men), we join an American bomber carrying a nuclear payload, flying over Kojima Island in the Anan Archipelago on a routine exercise. The pilot Charly, played by Japanese cinema’s go-to guy for black American roles, Chico Roland,(2)spots a wasp outside the window and inexplicably freaks the fuck out, suffering flashbacks to Vietnam as he thrashes around, assaulting his fellow crew members and trying to activate the release mechanism for the bomb. Temporarily distracted by their colleague’s outburst, the crew fail to notice that they’re flying headfirst into an inexplicably gigantic swarm of insects, whose combined mass burns out the plane’s engines, setting the vessel ablaze.

From a hideaway on the nearby cliffs, a blond Caucasian woman, Annabelle (Kathy Haran, who also did some first-class freaking out in ‘Genocide’s sister film, ‘Goke: Bodysnatcher From Hell’), and her Japanese lover Joji (Yûsuke Kawazu), watch as the plane and its cargo fall to earth.

This Joji, it quickly transpires, is a bit of a creep. We soon learn that he’s been frolicking with Annabelle on the pretext that he’s out hunting for rare insects, leaving his trusting Japanese wife, a hotel maid, at the mercy of her boss, a disagreeable oaf who seems to try to rape her every five minutes. The next time we see Joji furthermore, he’s sailing into harbour in his dinghy, trying to palm off a handful of suspiciously obtained US military watches on the local fishermen. Yes, he’s a bad ‘un alright.

When army personnel make it to the island to investigate the crash meanwhile, they find the plane’s crew dead, having apparently contracted some hideous, bubonic plague-like disease whilst sheltering in a cave. That’s with the exception of Charly, who is found unconscious on the beach, having apparently fallen off a cliff whilst fleeing from his comrades. The wreck of the plane itself, and the H-bomb onboard, remain unaccounted for. So until Charly wakes up, I think Uncle Sam might want to have a quick word with Joji...

Joji’s arrest on some slightly trumped up murder charges brings the whole mess to the attention of Dr. Nagumo of the the Tokyo Biological Research Centre (Keisuke Sonoi), who, with a sense of taste and restraint typical of this film, is introduced to us via a shot that sees him stabbing a large rodent with a syringe full of bright blue fluid, apparently for real. (What can I say, you’ve gotta learn to wince and shrug this stuff off in older movies sometimes..). According to the doc, Joji has recently sent him samples of a rare insect found of Kojima island, one whose poison “..attacks the nervous system, causing madness and death”. Things just keep looking up for our poor islanders, don’t they?

Meanwhile, a world news report on the radio in the hotel bar announces that food supplies in Egypt and India are under attack from unseasonable swarms of locusts, and by the time Charly finally awakens in a hospital bed, portents of both local and global doom are accumulating so thick and fast it’s not surprising folks are starting to get a bit twitchy.

Ah, poor Charly. Rarely have I seen a character who has such a persistently dreadful time in a film as he is subjected to here. From his very first appearance on screen, he’s practically losing his mind with fear, and the catalogue of torments he experiences through the rest of the film beggars belief. After suffering severe head injuries on the beach, he awakens in an insensible state, raving about his fear of insects. So naturally the doctors decide to try to revive his memory by sitting him in a dark room and playing reels of insect footage whilst he screams in abject terror, after which he immediately gets smacked around by the attending US Colonel, who accuses him of being a hallucinating drug addict.

On his way to a military prison, he narrowly avoids being torn apart by machine-gun fire as he is kidnapped by a gang of Communist agents temporarily in the employ of the film’s main villain (who will remain nameless here). Determined to use him to locate the missing h-bomb, they tie him up, beat him and torture him with a cigarette, before trying out a new technique, confining him in a descending tunnel of that kinda gauze-like fabric that bee-keeper’s hats are made of, and pumping in a swarm of those nervous system shattering wasps.

Completely unhinged by this point, Charly is dumped by his captors on the shore of the island; out of sheer malice, they throw him a pistol before they depart, hoping he’ll wreak some kind of carnage before the insects’ poison kills him. Next, we see him staggering toward the island’s hospital, letting off shots in the air and laughing like a loon as he prepares to menace the film’s two heroines, who are within. Suddenly transformed from a hapless victim to a psychopathic monster by the poison, he suffers a singularly inglorious death, shot down from behind as he sets about trying to rape the nurse.

So basically, the unfortunate fellow spends the entire duration of the film in a state of extreme pain, terror and confusion, culminating in a pointless death that leaves everyone assuming he was a violent maniac. And as his corpse leers up at us, we’re suddenly hit with one of the film’s most singularly unglued innovations, as a hideous, electronically filtered voice that we’re apparently supposed to interpret as the ‘chorus of the insects’ begins chanting (in English): “genocide…. genocide…”.

As with the aforementioned ‘Goke’, there is a kind of vicious misanthropy at work in ‘Genocide’. In spite of the massed threats the film lines up against humanity, most of the characters seem incapable of uniting with each other or acting rationally for even a few moments. Dr Nagumo and the Red Cross nurse (Reiko Hitomi) are presented as our standard issue trustworthy, heroic characters, but aside from their obligatory presence, the whole film seems to take place in some upside down moral universe in which people routinely say things like “thank you for the poisonous insects” and “thank heavens for that plane crash”.

Just about everyone in this film’s world, it seems, is motivated either by callous selfishness or horribly misguided ideological fervour… unless, that is, they’re one of the contingent who is actively welcoming and encouraging the forthcoming nuclear/insect/plague apocalypse. Amid layers of political, global, cultural distrust and despair, “kill ‘em all and let god sort it out” seems to ‘Genocide’s general message to the world, a sentiment that is only amplified by a truly jaw-dropping plot twist that occurs midway through the film. Totally crazy and utterly black-hearted, I won't spoil the surprise for you here, but… just you wait.

Strangely enough though, despite all this bleakness, ‘Genocide’ actually remains pretty fun to watch. As an example of formula genre picture that’s gone completely off the rails into uncharted territory, it is astoundingly entertaining, and the weird, sledgehammer ineptitude with which many of its more extreme situations are portrayed, together with the randomised hysterical energy of the whole thing, is a whole lot of “WTF is UP with this movie?!” style enjoyment.

Initially, the basic characterisation, impersonal medium-shots and functional, exposition-heavy dialogue of a more traditional sci-fi / disaster movie predominates, but when the film goes full-on ape-shit following Charly’s death, the situations that transpire swiftly become so twisted, it’s almost as if the two dimensional characters can barely comprehend what’s happening to their little world. Meanwhile, the dry cinematic syntax in turn becomes freakier and freakier, until it practically collapses into an orgy of solarised stock footage, shrieking close-ups, assaultive montages and utterly bizarre psychedelic visual effects (the latter an attempt to portray the ‘mindspace of the insects’, or somesuch, as experienced by victims of the poison before they die).

And so, what could, in a more orderly, less threatening world, have just remained a mildly diverting Japanese answer to ‘Them!’ instead becomes a celluloid equivalent of Colonel Kurtz, gazing deep into the abyss, cackling as flies buzz around the heads on spikes, reflecting on the mad, unending horror of it all. Christ almighty. But, you’ve gotta laugh, haven't you? Just ask Charly.

(1)The original Japanese title, 'Konchû Daisensô', translates roughly as ‘War of the Insects’, a title that was also used for at least one English language release (see the film’s IMDB page for a poster using that name). How in the hell it ended up being called ‘Genocide’ for it’s slightly more high profile US release, I can’t begin to imagine.

(2)Chico Roland is perhaps best known for his appearances in Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Gate of Flesh’ (1964) and Shigehiro Ozawa’s ‘The Streetfighter’ (1974), as well as for playing the rebellious black GI ‘Gill’ in Koreyoshi Kurahara’s pair of cinematic molotov cocktails, ‘The Warped Ones’ (1960) and ‘Black Sun’ (1964). He always seems to present a rather weird, gentle, child-like demeanour on screen, and his frequently bizarre line readings suggest that he wasn’t very fluent in either Japanese or English. Quite who this guy was, and how he ended up appearing in so many awesome Japanese movies, I would love to know.