The Invisible Man Japan
Tomei Ningen (The Invisible Man, 1954) is a Japanese invisible man movie, made by Godzilla’s studio, Toho, the same year the mighty lizard stomped his first toytown Tokyo. I guess they were throwing whatever they could at the wall: the fire-breathing dinosaur stuck, the see-through guy bounced off. An earlier attempt to easternize H.G. Wells’ concept, The Invisible Man Appears (ha-ha!) in 1949, came from Daiei, and the only element in common, save for the titular gimmick, is the involvement of Eiji Tsuburaya as effects artist. This inventive fellow, who had been blacklisted for his work in wartime propaganda films (his miniature war scenes were so convincing, it is said, that the Americans recycled them as documentary footage), started his own effects company and was perhaps the major force in the explosion of Japanese fantasy films in the fifties, and he became one of the fathers of Gojira.
Tokyo. Boyish reporter Yoshio Tsuchiya brakes his car hurriedly, certain he’s hit someone. But nobody is there. Then, a woman screams: a pool of blood is materializing. And then, momentarily skeletal, a naked guy. A suicide note is discovered, and the whole story comes out…
During the war, the Imperial Army experimented with creating invisible soldiers, but these were all thought killed when a ship sank. But at least two have survived. The slain man’s note speaks of a former comrade, still living, his whereabouts unknown.
Making the invisible man a ghostly residue of the nation’s militaristic past is a really interesting notion, just as good as connecting a giant monster to atomic bombs in my opinion (and anyway they stole that from Ray Harryhausen’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, 1953). Possible Hollywood’s wartime adventure Invisible Agent (1942), the first movie to make the character a hero, was an influence.
However, much of this initial promise is frittered away by a series of generic scenes in a highly Americanized manner - night club dances, a torch singer, a blind orphan and her uncle, a street performer in clown makeup… A masked gang use the invisibility craze to perpetrate heists, though it’s unclear if anyone really believes they’re invisible under their balaclavas. A good half hour seems to go by with no genuine invisible man action whatever. Or so we might think. In fact, there’s been an invisible man in most of the scenes…
Have you guessed it? The kindly old clown, under his whiteface makeup, is the unseen former commando. Now he uses his powers of sneaking and punching to do battle with the criminal gang…
That’s about it for clever ideas. Tsuburuya’s effects are a little rudimentary compared to John P. Fulton’s Hollywood work - you can generally see finger-shaped bits missing from the objects our protagonist handles, but there are interesting moments. The showgirl strung up and whipped by gangsters is very, uh, Japanese. The fight scene where a gang of thugs is beaten up on a dance floor is spectacular and weird, like some kind of Michael Kidd production number gone wrong. The moped driving itself has a Disney live-action quality to it, and the White Heat style action climax at an exploding gasworks (“Made it, Ma, top of the floating world!” as nobody says) allows Tsuburaya to construct and destroy some of his famous models.
The Hollywood invisible men ran out of juice, or serum, pretty quickly - there seems only so much anyone can do with the idea, and in later shows it just becomes an excuse to peep at women (an activity referenced here by comic relief bystanders, prophetically). But would a series about this character get tired faster than having men in rubber suits trample miniature cities in slo-mo? Maybe, maybe not, but by concentrating on the behemoths, Tsuburaya ensured plenty of work for his model shop.
by David Cairns