The Fine Line Between Superhero and Monster

Hand of Death (1962)

If myths can tell us a lot about the people and cultures that created them, and comic books are a form of myth-making, then can we better understand ourselves by reading comic books? (Okay, even if you concede that comic books themselves aren't quite as big as they used to be, you also have to concede that they are still enormously influential in our popular culture-- witness all the recent movies and video games based on comics or graphic novels.)

To me, superhero comics (and by extension, the movies based on them) are the purest form of contemporary myth. The superhero presents us with the ultimate self-revealing question:  if you had the power (super strength, super speed, you name it), what would you do with it? Who would you be then? What kinds of wrongs would you right? Would you be in the service of the 1%, or the 99%? Or would you just use your powers for your own benefit, and start down the road into supervillain territory?

Just like real life, some heroes are made (Captain America in a wartime experimental lab), some are self-made (Batman), some are born that way (the X-Men), and some stumble into it by accident (Spiderman from a radioactive spider bite; the Flash from lightning striking lab chemicals).

Scientist Alex Marsh's fate in Hand of Death is the stuff of superhero legend, but the decisions he makes once he acquires his power turn him into a monster instead. Right from the very start, we know that somebody's gonna get hurt. A farmer pulls up to a remote country cabin in his pick-up to investigate what looks like a couple of dead sheep. Pretty soon, he slumps over next to the animals. In long shot, a couple of men in hazmat suits come out and carry the limp body into the cabin.

We quickly find out that neither the sheep or the man are dead, but temporarily paralyzed. Alex Marsh (John Agar) and his assistant Carlos (John Alonzo) quickly revive the farmer, who seems pretty good natured considering his close call. He tells them that he was fully conscious, but couldn't move a muscle. Naturally curious, he asks Dr. Marsh what's going on. Marsh brushes him off with the standard "it's classified government work" line.

Oh well, all's well that ends well. Uh huh. I realize it's 1962 and all that, but Marsh seems pretty cavalier about security and accident precautions at his lab. Back at the Research Institute in L.A., we're introduced to the head honcho, elderly, wheelchair-bound Dr. Ramsey (Roy Gordon), and the other two members of an awkward love triangle, Ramsey's attractive assistant Carol Wilson (Paula Raymond), and researcher Tom Holland (Stephen Dunne), who is competing with Marsh for Carol's affections.

After the accident with the farmer, Carol is worried about her boyfriend (and rightly so). But like all obsessed B movie scientists, Marsh is way too involved in his work to see the warning signs. He breathlessly tells his colleagues that he's on the verge of a breakthrough that will tip the balance of world power and potentially make nuclear war obsolete. He's almost perfected combining an hypnotic agent with a paralyzing nerve gas. Even after the armies and population of the enemy country recover from the gas, they'll still be in an hypnotic state that the occupiers can take advantage of.

Carol protests that Alex's work is immoral and dangerous. She cautions him that his mentor Dr. Ramsey ended up in a wheelchair by not taking sufficient precautions in his work. "That was years ago, they weren't as careful back then," Alex responds glibly. Famous last words!

Those aren't visions of sugarplums dancing
in Alex Marsh's head.

Back at the remote desert location, Marsh's assistant is worried too. The mice they work with keep ending up dead. Obsessed with creating a weapon that might put an end to war, he dismisses Carlos' concerns just as casually. The good doctor should have listened to Carol and Carlos, or at least called in OSHA to inspect his lab, because that night, tragedy strikes. Exhausted by all the long days he's put in, Marsh falls asleep at a table. As he wakes up and stretches out his arm, he accidentally knocks a beaker over, and some of the gas escapes. Choking, he tries to stop it up, but it's too late.

He collapses on a cot with images of lab equipment swirling around his head (we see this through a simple double exposure process). When he wakes up, he has a huge hangover. Carlos shows up at the lab, remarking how it looks like Marsh has been out in the sun all weekend. Marsh tells him about the accident, and speculates that he's not dead because of the immunity he's built up by being exposed to very low doses over months of work. Carlos is adamant that they report the accident. When the obsessed Alex grabs his assistant by the arm, he discovers a new "superpower" -- the ability to kill by mere touch (aka "Hand of Death").

Pop quiz: which is Dr. Marsh after the accident,
and which is The Thing from the Fantastic Four?

Dr. Alex Marsh stands at that crucial juncture that all potential superheroes and supervillains face-- do I use my powers for good or evil? This being a very low budget sci-fi movie from the early '60s, he takes a third path-- that of a B movie monster. The death of his assistant was clearly an accident, and there's still time to redeem himself, but Marsh's brain must have also been affected, because he proceeds to soak the lab and body with gasoline and light a match to it all. He drives off as the lab goes up in flames. (Okay, so I acknowledge that using this particular power for good might present challenges, but considering that everything that he touches blackens and dies, he might at least be fun at barbecues!)

Over the course of next 40 minutes or so, a desperate Marsh inadvertently kills some innocent bystanders, seeks an antidote from his colleagues at the Institute, swells up to hideous proportions (with his skin turning black and cracked like a man covered by cooling lava), terrorizes his girlfriend Carol, and generally makes a mess of things. (The next victim after Carlos is a gas attendant played by Joe Besser, whose biggest claim to fame was joining the Three Stooges for a number of shorts in the late '50s.)

Two scenes particularly stand out. In one scene Marsh, now bloated and hideous, stumbles along a beach just outside of Los Angeles. In the foreground we see a little boy playing, as the creature comes ever closer. Marsh topples over in a faint, and the boy (played by Butch Patrick, who would later earn notoriety as Eddie in The Munsters TV show) ambles over to see what's going on. More curious than frightened, the boy tentatively reaches out to the unconscious thing, but is called home by his mother just in the nick of time (see the clip below). (The scene is reminiscent of the innocent girl playing with Karloff's monster in the original Frankenstein, although the outcome is happier in Hand of Death.)

A frightened Carol (Paula Raymond) tries to calm down
the monstrous thing that her boyfriend has become.

In the other effective scene, Marsh finds the beach house of his colleague and romantic rival Tom, where Carol just happens to be staying. Terrified, she hides in a closet as the grunting, moaning monster-man pounds at the door. After a few seconds, a misshapen silhouette appears at one window, and then another.

Here's something else that's amazing-- after doing this blog for over a year and a half (and posting dozens of times), this is the first time I've mentioned the sturdy, dependable B movie actor John Agar. In my post on The Colossus of New York I wrote that it seemed like supporting actor Robert Hutton was in half of all the B sci-fi movies made in the '50s and early '60s. If Hutton was in half of all those films, Agar was in the other half. John's short marriage to Shirley Temple after WWII earned him a quick contract with David O. Selznick. He started out playing supporting roles in a number of A-list John Wayne movies, then quickly settled into B westerns and sci-fi programmers (and of course TV).

Genial and unassuming, John is the face of '50s sci-fi for many fans like me. In the '60s and '70s, he showed up again and again on TV courtesy of the various "Creature Feature"-type movie packages, and provided hours of good, cheap thrills:  Revenge of the Creature (1955), Tarantula (1955), The Mole People (1956), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957), Attack of the Puppet People (1958), Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)… and the list goes on.

John was one of those rare actors who didn't mind being associated with low-budget sci-fi:

I don't resent being identified with B science fiction movies at all. Why should I? Even though they were not considered top of the line, for those people that like sci-fi, I guess they were fun. My whole feeling about working as an actor is, if I give anybody any enjoyment, I'm doing my job, and that's what counts.  (IMDb.)

Beautiful Paula Raymond had a long and rewarding career, mainly in TV. Her biggest sci-fi role was in one of my all-time favorites, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), playing a typical role for the time, an attractive female scientist / assistant.

Director Gene Nelson enjoyed a very interesting career in front of as well as behind the camera. I cover him in more depth in my post on The Atomic Man (1955).

Once thought to be lost, Hand of Death was unavailable for decades on TV or video. It shows its ultra-low budget in more ways than one, but it's interesting for a couple of well-staged scenes, the effective monster makeup, and some "cameos" by folks like Joe Besser and Butch Patrick. It's available on DVD-R from a number of sites specializing in hard-to-find horror and sci-fi-- here's one.


Davey (Butch Patrick) has a close encounter with the thing that used to be Alex Marsh (John Agar):

Slip Slidin' in Time

The Atomic Man (aka Timeslip; 1955)

With the ongoing Japanese nuclear crisis, radioactivity is once again front-and-center in the news and in the public mind throughout the world. We root for the courageous Japanese people and the heroic workers risking their lives to stabilize the crippled reactors, while at the same time wondering, "can it happen here?" And we hope that out of tragedy a new understanding and a healthy prudence emerge concerning technologies that can be very beneficial, yet very dangerous when best laid plans go awry. Such thoughts and anxieties inevitably seep into the broader popular culture.

NPR recently ran a piece about nuclear anxieties as reflected in movies over the decades: "Movie Mutants Give a Face to Our Nuclear Fears." The piece quotes historian Bill Tsutsui as saying that in the wake of the United States' atomic bombings of Japan at the end of WWII and the H-bomb tests in the Pacific in the 1950s, the public at large did not understand nuclear power or radiation: "Radiation needed a face in the 1950s, and the giant ants in Them! and the monster in Godzilla provided a horrible external representation of what that could be."

Another, more modest sci-fi thriller that tried to put a "face" on radiation in the '50s is The Atomic Man, from UK's Merton Park Studios. The film delivers its screwy, nuclear-powered plot inside of a mystery-thriller wrapper. Add to the mix a hard-boiled, wisecracking reporter lifted straight out of a 1930s crime potboiler, and you've got one of the decade's more unusual, if not particularly spectacular, B sci-fi thrillers.

Mike Delaney (Gene Nelson) is a down-on-his-luck reporter (is there any other kind?) who's gotten on his boss' bad side and been assigned to cover the opening of a clinic. Nosing around the magazine offices, he spies a fellow reporter's photo of a mystery man who's been shot and fished out of the harbor more dead than alive. The man in the photo is surrounded by a weird glow, which no one can explain. Naturally, he senses a big story.

On the operating table, the mystery man's heart stops, and the medical team is unable to revive him. As they prepare to clean up, the supposed dead man's eyes open wide, terrifying a nurse. Now, not only is he a mystery, he's a medical miracle as well.

Meanwhile, the ever curious Delaney is sure he's seen the man before. He searches the magazine's photo library and comes up with a dead-on match for the gunshot victim-- a photo of famous nuclear physicist Stephen Rayner (Peter Arne), better known as "the Isotope Man." With his photographer assistant and girlfriend Jill Rabowski (Faith Domergue) in tow, he contacts the police with his find. They agree that the victim is the spitting image of Rayner. There's only one problem-- when the police and Delaney visit the London institute where Rayner is supposed to be working, they find that the scientist is quite well and mystified by his resemblance to the hospitalized man. However, Delaney is still suspicious-- the man claiming to be Rayner has a couple of bandages on his face. His explanation that he was rear-ended in an automobile accident and he went through the windshield doesn't sound quite right…

Even though he's been canned from the magazine, Delaney is convinced he's onto the scoop of the century. The Rayner double recovering in the hospital gives strange, seemingly incoherent answers when the doctors and the reporter try to interview him. Suspecting a brain injury, the doctor orders an X-ray, which is completely clouded, as if another radiation source were interfering with the equipment. Delaney becomes convinced that the man's symptoms and the strange cloudiness of his photos and X-rays point to radioactive contamination. A radioactive man who looks exactly like a world-renowned nuclear physicist can't be a coincidence!

"Pile On!" A technician fires up the nuclear reactor.

Now doubly suspicious of the man claiming to be Rayner, Delaney trips him up with a question about the real Rayner's past. Additional clues gleaned from Rayner's double lead Delaney and Jill to a South American company that supplies a good portion of the world's tungsten and a shadowy man named Vasquo (Vic Perry). Delaney learns that Rayner was working on creating elements (tungsten?) in the lab using atomic power. Putting two and two together, he begins to realize the depths of a conspiracy that not only endangers Rayner's lab and its work, but possibly the whole of London itself!

The clever sci-fi hook in all of this is a side plot involving a very unique form of time travel. It seems that the real Rayner, whom Delaney describes as a "living A-bomb," owes his life to years of exposure to radioactivity (?!) After another fruitless interview at the hospital where Rayner responds to questions with nonsensical answers, Jill observes that "it's as if he's answering our questions before we've even asked them!" Delaney proves that is exactly what is happening by playing back a tape of the conversation and having Jill read the questions exactly 7.5 seconds before they were asked-- the amount of time Rayner was clinically dead on the operating table. Rayner is living 7.5 seconds ahead of the rest of the world!

Delaney manages to consult with top scientists, including a "psycho-neurologist" (Dr. Marks, played by uncredited Carl Jaffe with a heavy accent). The good doctor treats us to one of the more unusual scientific theories expounded in a B movie of the '50s -- something about Rayner's radioactive state keeping his brain alive while his heart stopped, and his brain whipsawing into the future as he was brought back from clinical death (see the clip below).

The crackpot science underlying much of The Atomic Man -- especially the notion of a nuclear scientist being routinely exposed to high doses of radiation in his work and surviving -- is a mark of the naive 1950s. After all, this was a time of open-air H-bomb tests presided over by military brass and scientists who clearly did not yet grasp the extent and the danger of fallout. Come to think of it, maybe naive scientists of that era really did expose themselves to vast amounts of radiation, knowingly or unknowingly!

Several reviewers have faulted Atomic Man for not making more of Rayner's intriguing time-slip. To me, the plot device is a sort of Hitchcockian MacGuffin that baffles the protagonists and ratchets up the suspense, preventing them from discovering the conspiracy until it's almost too late. While certainly not up to the level of even average Hitchcock, Atomic Man is still fast-paced and reasonably well-acted. As for Gene Nelson's anachronistic wisecracking reporter complete with rumpled porkpie hat-- you can either accept it as an homage to a classic 1930s-era character, or let it ruin the movie for you (I recommend the former). For me, Nelson's performance added much needed life and humor to the film.

Nelson began his performing career as a dancer, touring with the Sonja Henie ice show before joining the army in World War II. The peak of his acting career was the role of lasso-twirling cowboy Will Parker in Oklahoma! (1955). After that he concentrated on directing films and TV, working up to the late 1970s on series like Fantasy Island and Quincey, M.E. He died in 1996.

Faith Domergue is well-known to fans for her roles in two sci-fi classics made around the same time as The Atomic Man: This Island Earth (1955) and It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955). Like many actors and actresses of the era who didn't quite make it on the big screen, she went on to guest star in quite a few TV shows in the 1960s. Outside of sci-fi fandom, she's best known for her affair with a much older Howard Hughes, who lured her away from Warner Bros. and signed her to his RKO Studios in the early 1940s. Faith's affair with the multi-millionaire is given a few minutes of screen time in Martin Scorcese's biopic The Aviator (2004; Kelli Garner plays Faith).

All-in-all, The Atomic Man is a neat, noirish thriller with a unique sci-fi subplot. The film can be viewed online at the Internet Archive; a DVD-R copy is available from Sinister Cinema.

Dr. Marks carefully explains how atomic scientist Rayner managed to slip 7.5 seconds ahead in time (take notes-- there will be a quiz later):