Bless you, my son.
The Amazing Transparent Man (1960) is the unhappy issue of a marriage between some good acting performances, competent special effects, and a poorly honed story that doesn’t understand – or perhaps have – its own thematic material. A master lock-pick is broken out of jail for reasons he doesn’t immediately understand. When he’s told he will be subjected to an X-Ray which will make him transparent, he tries to object but is bent to the will of the man who masterminded his breakout.
The script grinds through a mundane plot more concerned with the novelty of an invisible man than with possible moral questions which might arise. The lock-pick is a drunkard; the scientist in charge of the research is being blackmailed into doing the work; the “Major” in charge of the operation may be motivated by money, but there’s little to believe here (and this performance may be the worst of the lot, although I’ve seen far worse); and the motivations of the mandatory cute lady also appear to be monetary, although her unexplainable attraction to the fairly coarse lock-pick alters the equation – but not in a believable manner.
The acting performance are not bad, but the script is that sort of awful where you think it may have been a couple of revisions away from tolerable. Motivations are blurry but not mysterious; characters react in the wrong way, such as a guard who had been told his son was in prison in Europe – the lady’s word that his son is dead is good enough to sway his loyalties. The mysterious “Security” group, pondering the potentials of a transparent man, do not seem unduly put out, but instead I suspect they went out for a beer after determining they couldn’t possibly catch him.
So this sad little picture shouldn’t have been made, and it’s a tragedy if you see it.
