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One year ahead of Borges, a stark poem on the Golem. "Question of genius," the brilliant researcher (Ross Martin) Stockholm-bound for the "International Peace Prize," flattened by a truck while retrieving his son's toy plane. Aghast at the waste of an exceptional brain, the surgeon father (Otto Kruger) balks at a colleague's mention of spiritual matters. "Look, I'll give you a meaning, and I'll give you an ugly one!" His solution is to keep the victim's prized gray matter on life support transplanted into a new body, said new body being a metallic husk with quarterback shoulders, a bulbous dome, and glowing slit-eyes. (Facing his nightmarish reflection on a mirror, the revived maven screams in unforgettably strangled static.) "You want to help me?" "Yes." "Then... destroy me." Rattle of the ghost in the machine, end of the scientific dynasty, a dry miniature tragedy by Eugène Lourié. The widow (Mala Powers) is courted by her brother-in-law (John Baragrey), the automaton's rage upon discovery manifests itself in short-circuiting cracks. The son (Charles Herbert) meets a certain "Mr. Giant" out of fairytales while visiting Dad's grave, and learns of a button that would slip the towering friend into eternal slumber once pushed. All the while, the protagonist's formerly humanitarian sentiments give way to an alarming nihilism, particularly as a United Nations meeting looms: "We must eliminate the idealists." It builds to a massacre of tuxedoed swells between the Isaiah Wall and a checkerboard floor, and the deliverance of patricide. Tumbled Goliath and humbled doctor for the injunction, "without a soul, there's nothing but monstrousness." Verhoeven's RoboCop intensifies the cyborg's melancholia. With Robert Hutton, Roy Engel, and Ed Wolff. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |