I watched X - The Man with the X-Ray Eyes over the weekend. This is a 1963 Roger Corman-written-produced-and-directed film that I’ve wanted to see ever since I saw the Coming Attractions for it in my now long-gone home-town cinema. For some reason, it’s never ben on TV anywhere that I’ve been (at least that I’ve been aware of). It never showed up on independent stations in the dead of night or on TNT’s Monstervision (or similar such schlock-reveling venues)when I was looking. So i bought it with a stack of other Roger Corman films when I found the DVDs on sale, and it got buried until I cleaned out my stash a week ago.
The film is actually much better than I thought it’d be. Corman actually starts getting “deep” at times. On the other hand, he often ham-handedly pushes the plot along with ludicrously unlikely accidents and stupidities.
It stars Ray Milland, who was a major star (The Lost Weekend, Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder) who had already slummed for Corman with The Premature Burial (which looks like Corman showing that he could make Poe-derived movies with someone besides Vincent Price). What is surprising is the appearance of Don Rickles (!) as a carnival barker (his dealing with hecklers fits in perfectly with his insult-comic schtick, but the rest of his performance is surprisingly straight.)
the film is in color, which surprised my wife, who always thought of it as black and white (probably because she caught part of it on TV). I’d seen the color trailer, so I knew otherwise, but a lot of the pictures I’d seen (in Famous Monsters, for instance) were black and white, so it was easy to think of it as a black and white film.
But it isn’t. It’s a film about vision, and is filled with interesting brightly colored shots depicting the title character’s new visual experiences (The character is named Dr. Xavier, which is pretty ludicrous, given the title. The film was released the same month as the first issue of the Marvel comic X-Men, so I don’t think the movie or the comic influenced each other). “Spectrovision” is given the credit for several of the color sequences. This seems to be shooting through a prism, because the colors separate along one direction. They do so in a way that suggests a prism was used rather than a diffraction grating. A lot of the shots don’t make an awful lot of sense, but considering that a lot of movies were still being released in black and white at the time. Disney’s Wonderful world of Color, broadcast every week in full color, had debuted only two years earlier, and the yearly broadcast of The Wizard of Oz in color was still a big deal. so a film could revel in being in bright colors as part of its appeal.
The film ends with…
Milland’s Dr. Xavier being told by a tent preacher that “If thine eye offend thee, tear it out.” So he does, and the final shot shows two red holes where his eyes --, previously shown with black or black-and-gold scleral contacts – should be. It seems to be a quick, cheap optical effect.
Nevertheless, there was a rumor, which i first read in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, that there was a final line from Milland – I can still see!" Corman has denied such a thing, crediting King with writing a better ending than he did. King didn’t, of course – he was repeating a rumor. Corman then said that the idea was “talked about”. If it really was, and he isn’t trying to claim some retroactive glory, that could be the source of the rumor. But I suspect it wasn’t.
