On a remote, fogbound Hibernian island in the far Outer Hebrides beyond the end of the line an astronomer sets up a small private observatory in a conveniently abandoned castle with his bright and beautiful daughter along with his assistant Igor.
Why?
The locals find Prof avuncular and his daughter comely, but still a puzzle. This Scottish island was in Studio 13 on Poverty Row, i.e., Monogram Pictures.
Lobby poster
Fredrick Ulmer, the director, grew up on German expressionist films before fleeing the new regime in 1933, and it shows in his many American films. The set is dark; it is foggy; it is misty; it is ominous in silence; it closed in and stifling; nothing is quite in focus. Ulmer did much himself, from painting the backdrops to manhandling the camera, and the editing.
The professor went to the island because Planet X has come swooping into the Solar System and is headed for a near miss with Earth. The island is the point on Earth closest to the passing Planet X from whence the Prof will train his telescope onto it. So much for science.
Then in the island gloaming there are flashes of lightning without thunder. Strange that. A handsome young American journalist comes from Chicago to interview the prof but finds the daughter in the gloaming.
Then there is a diving bell on the moor in the mists, in the dark, in the fog, in the night, and ….
Diver with woman.
The diver is very well realised, and there is an intriguing ambiguity in this alien. The sci-fi imperative is that the alien is evil, aggressive, mean, in short, a Tea Party acolyte, or a benign figure, because of bad table manners, who is misunderstood by the locals. Not so here. This alien is neither one stereotype nor the other in Act I. Damn confusing that mystery.
The Tin Man from the diving bell is tiny, expressionless behind the fish bowl on the head, and vulnerable with a gas regulator on the back shoulder which he can barely reach. (The designer of this space suit, the low bidder, has a lot for which to answer.) Once revealed Tiny Tin Man hardly seems a threat. In fact on first sight he keels over and only quick thinking by Handsome restores the gas supply to the fish bowl.
Yet when the intrepid journalist and doddery Prof then try to communicate with him, the Tin Man projects a beam on the professor that saps him of the will to publish (and so he will perish on the horns of key performance indicators). Whoa! They beat a hasty retreat.
But Tin Man follows them back to the castle, rather like a lost dog in the park and, well, they take him in. That castle will be familiar to cine-junkies because it was the set for Ingrid Bergman’s ‘Jeanne d’Arc’ (1948). Director Ulmer borrowed the keys to use it.
Igor is a greedy bastard, the goatee being a dead giveaway. See!
He proceeds to torture the Tin Man with the calculation of pi! The Tin Man cannot take it! Who could? Igor is none too subtle but subtle enough to mislead Handsome, Prof, and Daughter. While they are otherwise occupied, Igor hopes to extract technological secrets from the Tin Man to make a fortune. It does not occur to Igor that the Tin Man might have an agenda. He does.
Tin Man subdues Igor with his mind ray and the plot thickens. Tinny also grasps the daughter and zombies any number of locals who all work on his diving bell in the gloaming, which seems twenty-four hours a day.
By now Handsome has convinced the local plod that all this is really happening and together they decide to tell the truth to the local citizens, such is their faith in rationality and discipline of the demos. Hysteria and blind panic ensue. So much for the community spirit and the democratic ethos.
This Island of Otranto is cutoff from outside help, as per the script. Handsome alone must overcome the odds. He does.
What is interesting is the intention of the Tin Man. Was he always intent on enslaving the locals. despite the kindly assistance Handsome and Prof lent him at the first? Or did Igor’s clumsy mathematical abuse rile Tin Man up to retaliate? Or were Tin Man’s intentions always malevolent but tactically concealed at the first while sussing things out?
In the B sci-fi genre of the time this ambiguity is unusual. Stopping to think is usually not the objective of the B film maker.
Equally out of the ordinary is the daughter who has a cool head, a steely determination, and a sense of humour. She is not the stock celluloid woman of the time, weak, flighty, hysterical, uninformed, and the target for sexist remarks. If she looks familiar in the dark, she should, being Margaret Field, the mother of ‘Norma Rae.’
Igor is played by Mr Pomfritt, a stalwart of B movies, especially science fiction, with more than 370 credits on the IMDB. Yes, Mortimer, it is the ever reliable William Schallert whose laconic and sanguine guidance of Dobie Gillis lives on.
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