1960s SF film
The Amazing Transparent Man, 1960, USA DIRECTED BY EDGAR G. ULMER
This is more of a crime caper with a science fictional underpinning than a genre movie outright, and is another film loosely based - somehow - on Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man with a screenplay by Jack Lewis, who was already well known for his Westerns. Paul Krenner, a former US Army Major, plans to create an invisible private army with which he'll conquer the world, but he needs more fissionable material with which to complete the job. He springs from jail a selfish and notorious safe-cracker, Joey Faust, to steal the stuff from under the nose of the Army after he's been made invisible; Faust then tries to double-cross Krenner and things begin to spiral out of control. This is a very humdrum film, made even more so by too many scenes where little of interest is actually going on dramatically and characters are give too much low-key filler time instead of getting to the point. Douglas Kennedy, who played Faust, had already worked on some more memorable SF such as 1953's Invaders from Mars and the cheap 1957 dinosaur caper The Land Unknown, although in this movie he actually gets to act a bit more even if he is invisible half the time; This was also to be the last film for Marguerite Chapman, who played Alita in Flight to Mars. The film's biggest downfall is that all the characters are just uninteresting people, and the unbelievably cheap effects aren't in the slightest bit convincing. There were probably worse genre films around at the time although I'm sure none were given a worse ending.