X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes

Dr. James Xavier, "X", the hero of Roger Corman's X- The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963) wants to see farther and deeper than anyone has ever seen.  So he anoints his eyes with a magic potion that increases his visual acuity and allows him to see through brick and mortar and, of course, women's clothing.  In his mania, he cries out to his girlfriend:  "I'm really seeing you the first time...you are a perfect living dissection."  But where there is hubris of this sort, so also comes retribution.  The alert viewer waits for the inevitable Bible quotation, Matthew 5:29 from the Sermon on the Mount -- something about an offensive eye being plucked out.  Corman's cheap, but extremely effective, X is a highly sophisticated entertainment.  The movie begins with its tongue in cheek as a witty parody of 1950's vintage monster movies, but, ultimately, morphs into something far more dire, and, dare I say, visionary.  Corman always made money on his exploitation pictures -- he knew in his bones what people wanted to see on screen:  nudity, gore, car chases and flamboyant acting.  And X delivers the goods but in a way that, somehow, doesn't cheapen the audience.  I think this effect is achieved because of the film's excellent script, it's poetic imagery, and fantastic brevity -- the move is only 79 minutes long but packs a universe of events into its plot.  Corman obviously knew the old Universal horror films from the thirties, also pictures that are generally between an hour and eighty-minutes long and he understands how to propel a movie from one sensational sequence to the next -- and all of this done on a low budget.   

Dr. James Xavier (Ray Milland as "X") is experimenting with eye-drops applied to capuchin monkeys, a potion that allows the little critters to see through solid surfaces.  Unfortunately, as is the case with most sci-fi movie-breakthroughs, there's an alarming side-effect:  the monkeys roll over, gaze into the heavens, and tormented by the enormity of their vision, promptly die.  X's project (funded to the tune of $27,000) faces a crisis -- the foundation paying the bills has threatened to cut off the money.  So X decides to experiment on himself to prove that there is a medical application for the magic eye-potion.  (From the outset, the film establishes implicit parallels between medical research funding and budgeting for a cheapie movie -- that miserly $27,000 budget.)  Despite the reservations of his love-interest, the formidable Dr. Fairfax (a blonde with a spectacularly leonine mane) and his long-suffering ophthalmologist. X applies the drops to his eyes and, after some wincing and grimacing, can see through things.  The concept is that our vision is calibrated to only a narrow spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation and that the eye-drops magically expand the range of radiation visible to the eye.  Notwithstanding his demonstration of the efficacy of the potion, the board members on the foundation see no application for this risky venture and X, to use his language, is "cut off like an arm with gangrene."  In the picture's brisk first act, X interferes with surgery on a sick child (he has peeked into her thorax and know exactly where the tumor is located), attends a party where he leers at all the naked women (until dragged out of the place by Dr. Fairfax), and, then, accidentally throws the poor eye-doctor, who is horrified by the experiment, out the window of an eight story building with dire effects.  All of this action is played for laughs,. except the sudden death of the ophthalmologist which signals a transition into the increasingly ominous narrative in the second part of the movie.  (Some of this stuff is very funny:  the docs letting their hair down at the wild party make "perfect" martinis with syringes full of gin and dance frenetically, doing the twist and the watusi -- Ray Milland's dancing has to be seen to be believed.  Of course, with his x-ray eyes, he perceives everyone naked although we don't enjoy the full Monty as it were -- we just get people's feet and bodies from shoulder up gyrating with prismatic diffraction-grating halos around everything.)   In the second act, X is on the lam.  He is working on an amusement pier as mentalist, not too imaginatively named, "Mentallo".  His barker is played by Don Rickles who looks like a beefy thug in this film and, of course, scathingly insults everyone.  Mentallo does his mind-reading act by looking into people's pockets and purses and reporting on the contents and his show is very effective.  Rickles' character has figured out that Mentallo is the fugitive, Dr. James Xavier, and blackmails him into offering his services as a healer with the carny taking a cut of the action.  The carny sets up X in a exceedingly grim ruin of an apartment where he sees crowds of sick old ladies and elderly men.  The imagery has become increasingly grim and surreal -- the chambers in which Rickles confronts Mentallo are decorated with swaths of gory red paint on window sills and window frames; the apartment in which Mentallo sees his customers, most of whom are doomed (they are growing cancers in their bellies and chests), is like an art installation by Edward Kienholz, all shabby genteel carpet and faded wallpaper with dark trim around all the doors, a sort of lightless sitting room from hell poised above an entirely grey (indeed, morbidly grey) backlot city street where people listlessly sit on grey stoops in front of grey, crumbling facades.  This second act concludes when Dr. Fairfax appears and rescues X from his servitude to the caustic carny.  She and X flee to Las Vegas.  By this time, fatal hubris has set in and X keeps pouring the potion into his rotting eyes.  He taunts the casino staff and, of course, wins at all of the card games that he tries (he also beats a slot-machine using his x-ray eyes).  Casino security gets wise to X (although it takes them awhile -- this seems odd because the guy is wearing four-inch thick black goggles) and they pursue him.  The police get involved and even a helicopter joins the chase -- the helicopter, of course, doubles as a location from which to shoot thrilling overhead perspectives on the chase.  By this time, X's eyes are deteriorating and everyone he sees appears to him as a skeleton.  The chase ends in a delirious sequence in which the blind X wanders around on a highway embankment stumbling down to a forlorn intersection in the desert where a tent-revival is underway.  (In this scene, Corman brilliantly suggests X's acuity of vision by shooting a desolate range of remote mountains with a telephoto lens, pushing the weird peaks and canyons close to the action, including a strangely pyramidal black summit that hovers like doom over the action.)  Of course, the moment the blind X staggers into the tent revival, the grim denouement is inevitable.  By this point, X's excess of vision  has led him to the nihilistic revelation that the universe is empty except for a vast eye at its center.  His own eyes have decayed from amber cat-like orbs with pitch-black irises to dark pits in his head.  

The movie makes the most of its limited resources.  The laboratory has a weird grid on its walls, the sets and costumes are good (particularly Mentallo's garb) and Corman's direction is fluent and imaginative.  Milland gets to chew the scenery in a satisfying way, speaking in lyric poetry about the "flesh of the world dissolved in the acid of light."  The enucleation implied in the final horrific shot rhymes nicely with an extended, almost avant-garde introduction in which we see an eyeball with a bloody fringe floating in space -- the shot lasts for about a minute and, then, cuts to an eyeball with tissue still attached to it in a lab beaker.  Corman's inventive staging always adds value to the mise-en-scene:  in the car chase, X almost smashes into a truck which turns out to be hauling chickens in cages-- of course, feathers fly.  (I think Sam Peckinpah reprises this gag in one of his car chases.)  An example of Corman's dynamism is a scene in a hospital involve a pallid sick girl.  X looks into her rib-cage and figures out what's wrong.  As he leaves the scene, departing into a nearby corridor, the sequence seems to come to an uninteresting ending, but Corman, surprisingly,re-positions the camera to show the girl turning restlessly on her pillow, that is, a disturbing motion on which he cuts.  The movie is an allegory about cinema, an art that exploits the audience's desire to see what is forbidden.  Of course, within the limitations of the era, there's a not a lot shown in the film although, at one point, Don Rickles leers that he wants x-ray vision so that he can see all the naked women he wants.  The movie makes two important points above seeing -- first, to see is not necessarily to be able to heal or ameliorate (in fact, what we see in movies can't be remedied) and, of course, there are some things that once seen can't be unseen.