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Already I’ve sat through Edgar Ulmer‘s Strange Illusion (screening at Doc Films Sunday at 7) twice and still can’t remember anything about it. Or hardly anything: one very odd-looking actor (presumably Jimmy Lydon, from review summaries I’ve read), an elaborately gated estate entrance, and some of the most ludicrously awful back-screen projection I’ve ever been witness to … except I adore that out-of-sync matting, as antidote to our official (as in “oppressive”) realist paradigm, arguably one of the “minor glories” that Sarris would call our attention to.
I’m also a bit of a contrarian—or maybe just out of it—on the Texas state fairgrounds twins of 1960, The Amazing Transparent Man (November 23) and Beyond the Time Barrier (November 30—and why isn’t Doc screening them back-to-back?). Beyond usually gets the critical thumbs-up, for its putatively “imaginative” dollar-store sets, while Transparent is more often dissed for being too straightforward, too doggedly matter-of-fact. Like anyone else’s movie about a guy who’s supposed to be invisible, the camera stalking a vacancy as if somebody or something were actually there. Pure, elemental Dada—gotta love the damn stuff.
