The Amazing Transplant Man (1960) ***

Sci fi film noir. Anything that involves cult director Edgar G. Ulmer (Hannibal, 1960) tends to put an unusual twist on a tale and here he takes the kind of mad scientist who would be perfectly at home in the MCU and turns him inside out. In fact, Major Krenner (James Griffith) is pretty close in intent to Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) in the asterisk version of Thunderbolts (2025) in wanting to build an indestructible army.

His is going to be invisible. (Presumably, this would have been called The Invisible Man had Universal been more obliging.)

It was quite the thing as we have seen from I Aim at the Stars out the same year for the U.S. after World War Two to purloin German scientists, and here Krenner is one step ahead of the Government by snaffling Dr Ulof (Ivan Triesault).

The good doctor is given something of a free pass here because he’s been coerced into working for the major on account of his daughter being held hostage. And because he accidentally killed his wife during one of his experiments. But given he was working for the Germans in a concentration camp and his experiments, had they been successful, would have resulted in the creation of an invisible army for the enemy, maybe we shouldn’t be so lenient.

Ulmer isn’t so lenient with the rest of the bunch and there’s double cross all the way. Safecracker Joey (Douglas Kennedy) doesn’t show the gratitude you’d expect after being sprung from jail by Krenner and his moll Laura (Marguerite Chapman). Being amply rewarded for being a guinea pig isn’t enough and he reckons that if he can walk unnoticed into a government facility and steal nuclear materials, then he could just as well walk into a bank unnoticed and make off with the kind of cash that would fund retirement.

Laura begins to warm to the notion of sharing her bed with a hunky action man rather than a weedy pedant and even more to the idea of sharing the loot and the retirement. There’s also a resident thug Julian (Boyd Morgan) who’s been duped by the major into adding muscle to the operation.

So instead of the usual set-up of good guy, and a girl he met on the way (or vice-versa), intent on stopping the mad scientist, you’ve got the complete opposite, bad guy and hook-up planning to keep on being bad.

There’s a heap of good old-fashioned fun with the invisibility. Some trick photography to make Joey disappear but it’s more fun to watch the other actors throw themselves around to simulate being punched in the face or stroke an empty space and pretend they are touching a real human being, and to see vault doors miraculously open, or onlookers agape at watching a bag of loot hovering in midair. Or even better to see parts of Joey’s body unexpectedly materialize in the middle of a robbery.

You can’t build tension in normal heist fashion. You don’t need to endlessly go over an elaborate plan or hold your breath to see if a guard or some such is going to appear at an awkward moment or another obstacle get in the way, not when you can just walk in and walk out and nobody even know you’re there. So Ulmer doesn’t bother with that aspect, concentrating more on the personalities involved, each as mean and calculating as the others.

Even free pass Ulof, who could sabotage the project at any opportunity, decides it would be better if a hunky action man rather than another weedy individual took on that task. So he lets on to Joey that just as invisibility wears off so does his lifespan courtesy of the radiation which is slowly poisoning him. So it’s Joey who does the needful, not out of a hero’s ambition to save mankind, but out of pure revenge.

Thanks to the characters involved this is never corny. Old-fashioned maybe in an enjoyable old-fashioned way before it cost the world to create special effects.

It says a lot about the marquee quality of the stars that Marguerite Chapman (The Seven Year Itch, 1955) as the femme fatale is top-billed when she hadn’t been in a movie in half a decade and wouldn’t be in another one ever again. Douglas Kennedy (The Destructors, 1968) was a bit-part player and this was as close as he’d get to playing a leading man. Ditto James Griffith (Heaven with a Gun, 1969). But since mostly what they’ve got to show is malevolence nobody is being asked to step outside their comfort zone.

Ulmer filmed this back-to-back with Beyond the Time Barrier, with the two films forming a double bill.

Good fun.