You’ve gotta respect a medical scientist who lights a cigarette with a bunson burner.
I remember one of my mother’s old film books featuring a black-and-white still from X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes (1963) depicting Don Rickles pulling at Ray Milland’s arm – Milland wearing dark shades – and Rickles bearing a big smile. The film itself is photographed in gorgeous colour, the type of 1960s film colour where everything seems bright and pastel. Directed and produced by Roger Corman, X exists between the cheapo sci-fi flicks he made in the 1950s and gestures towards his counter-culture cash-grabs.
Ostensibly a ‘mad scientist’ story, a variation on The Invisible Man, Milland plays a medical scientist who is researching how to extend the range of the human vision, going beyond the visible spectrum. He achieves this and experiments on himself, dosing with eye-drops and experiencing kaleidoscopic POV visions. His quest is to see through the human body and be able to identify what is wrong with a patient beyond x-ray technology of the time, but of course, his obsession takes him further than he anticipated, towards an existential terror in how much he can see and the fact that he can’t turn it off.
Diana Van der Vis plays a fellow doctor who is his only ally and love interest, while Rickles plays Crane, a carnival worker who employs Milland as a sideshow “psychic” when Milland is on the run from the law due to manslaughter. There’s also the welcome appearance of Corman regular Dick Miller in a small role and a great chance to see him exchange insults with Rickles. With a great score by Les Baxter and trippy spectral visual effects, I found X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes to be an ideal Corman film in its own way. While Milland might be slumming it in this sci-fi fare, he gives a gravity and emotional weight to his downfall, and in between the corny sequences (like seeing people without clothes on at a party), there are also artful moments of eerieness (the montage of Las Vegas neon signs blurred and distorted by X’s vision). Recommended
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