pening credits in stark and lurid colors feature a severed eyeball floating in space, another eyeball, with nerves attached, bubbling in a beaker, and hypno-swirl patterns drawing us into the opening scene. Here we find Dr. James Xavier (Ray Milland) being given an eye exam by his colleague, Dr. Sam Brant (Harold Stone). After getting a clean bill of health, Xavier hints at his current project: to extend the range of man's vision. Brant advises Xavier to beware of trespassing on the territory of the gods, and Xavier replies that he is fast closing in on the abilities of the gods themselves.
At his lab, Xavier is greeted by a stranger: Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van der Vlis), who oversees the funding from a foundation that is supporting Xavier's work. Fairfax informs the doctor that his funding is subject to withdrawal unless he can show some progress. Xavier gives her a demonstration of his eye-sensitizing liquid, employing a monkey. Apparently the monkey acquires X-ray vision, but dies of shock. Desperate for something concrete to offer to the foundation board, Xavier resolves to apply the treatment to himself. With the aid of Brant, he doses himself. Indeed, his vision undergoes radical new effects, but he is plunged into a coma. When the board meets, Fairfax—who has become friendly with Xavier and a confidante—presents his case. Nonetheless, funding is canceled.
Xavier is now up and about, but continuing to dose himself with the fluid, which proves to have a cumulative effect. His research canceled, Xavier must earn his salary back in the operating room. There, he sabotages a colleague's misguided surgery and perform an operation on a young girl by himself, guided by his new vision. The result is a charge of malpractice. Afterward, being counseled by Brant, Xavier reacts violently, sending Brant out a high window to his death. Panicked, he flees.
The scene shifts to a tawdry carnival. We focus on a sideshow run by the loudmouthed Crane (Don Rickles). Crane is the tout for Mentallo, a mind reader. Mentallo, of course, is Xavier, working under an assumed name. When Xavier diagnoses the wounds of a fairgoer, the greedy Crane is inspired to set him up as a faith healer in town. Patients throng to the man in dark glasses, and eventually he is tracked down through the publicity by Fairfax. She agrees to aid him in setting up a clinic in Mexico to further his vision quest, and they head to Las Vegas to earn some quick cash. In the casinos, Xavier sees through slot machines to their inner workings and plays 21 infallibly by reading the dealer's cards. But he wins too much, is accosted by the casino bosses, and flees once again, more mad than sane. A car-and-'copter chase culminates in a wreck, followed by Xavier's stumbling entrance into an evangelist's tent, where he meets a biblical fate.
A silly and horrific masterpiece
Deep in the middle of his most accomplished period of film-making, hot off his streak of Poe adaptations, the famously prolific and outrageously inventive Roger Corman teamed up with a then-well-known SF writer, Ray Russell, to concoct this small masterpiece combining plausible scientific speculations with a horror vibe. Beautifully filmed by Corman, ingeniously and respectfully plotted by Russell (a writer once at the top of his field, yet lamentably neglected today), this compact, relentless film has not an ounce of spare flesh or excess melodrama on it, and holds up remarkably well. It's proof that a dramatic and keen-witted script by a real SF writer can guarantee a good film even with a minimum of special effects.
Equally deserving of credit are the cast. Of course Ray Milland carries the bulk of the movie on his back. Fifty-seven years old at this point in his career, the star better known for such vehicles as The Lost Weekend (1945) brings a beefy gravitas to this role, not slumming in this low-budget flick but instead giving a stellar performance. His portrayal of hubris and misguided nobility create a picture of Faustian dimensions. And his eventual descent into madness, knowing he's coming undone but unable to stop himself, is wrenching, climaxing in an Oedipal finale. The physicality of his final plunge into insanity is also remarkable. As for the others, all sturdily capable, the never-was Van der Vlis is a hoot, a kind of second-string Tippi Hedren, emoting with a weird accent while wearing Jackie Kennedy fashions. But by the end of the film, when she commits to aiding Milland, she's acquired a certain tragic vulnerability. As for Don Rickles, still in his prime, he steals every scene he's in, eyes popping and mouth running at 500 rpm.
Corman's sensibilities run the gamut, from silly to horrific. Among the former is surely included the party scene, full of twisting swingers and dry martinis, during which Milland acquires for the first time the ability to see through clothes, in a tribute to the "nudie" films of the period. However, it is images of estrangement that dominate, culminating in a moment when Milland loses his special protective glasses and finds himself surrounded by skeletons. Supporting all this are nifty special effects, relying mainly on solarized, cutaway views replicating what Milland is seeing. When he first injects the drops, the viewer is taken aback by eyelids blinking swiftly across the camera's lens.
Russell was of the same generation as C.M. Kornbluth and Theodore Sturgeon, and the ambience of this film reflects such works as Kornbluth's "Little Black Bag" and Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels (1950). But a deeper subtext is undeniably Lovecraftian. As that writer so often said, man's sanity survives only because he is unable to apprehend all the information flooding in on him from the exterior universe. Opening himself to this torrent, Milland pays the ultimate price.
