(1961)

Starring Ron Randell, Debra Paget, Elaine Stewart, Steve Mitchell; dir: Allan Dwan

This two dimensional comic book has enough laffs – and great cars! – to make it fun, but it is pulp. (In this post-Tarantino world, terms like ‘pulp’ and ‘B-movie’ have elided into a generalised form of slumming, which is unfortunate, as mere cheapness can result in both the lizard-brain clichés trotted out here or an ingenuity-within-constraints-of-a-low-budget gem like Murder By Contract)

Basically, The Most Dangerous Man Alive is an updated Frankenstein, and this is what makes it interesting (there’s even an ‘Igor’ at the controls of the electrical apparatus at one point). The set-up sees hood Eddie Candell (Aussie Ron Randell, in a euphonious döppelganger that seems to have influenced him to change the pronunciation of his own name, which originally rhymed with ‘candle’) escaping from jail into the desert where a nuclear test morphs him into a ‘man of steel’.

The film is framed by the repetition of a line by the ubiquitous boffin-in-a-lab-coat who reminds us to pay homage to ‘the laws of nature’. "We have seen the dark side of the moon", he adds, to underline the sense of no going back in post-nuclear America. As the original Frankenstein lamented secular science’s ascension after the Death of God, so here the angst is moral. Science in the atomic age has once again out-stripped humankind’s calculus of reason and ethics, and is embodied in an indestructible gangster.

Or is he? As in the original Frankenstein, Crandell is often portrayed as a sympathy figure, a victim of the science that has created him against his wishes, intent being a crucial determinant in this liberal-humanist universe.

Naturally the love of a good woman brokers his inevitable undoing, in what amounts virtually to a tug-of-love between Elaine Stewart’s Carla and the agencies of institutional America, which briefly try to salvage the threatening force’s inner humanity before accepting that only the National Guard (replete with flamethrowers!) can provide the answer. A pile of dust (pardon the symbolism) is the inevitable result.

The Most Dangerous Man Alive actually looks better on the small screen, where its over-lit TV production values belong. Typical of low budget movies, it gets away with more, and there is a surprising abundance of lascivious nightwear from both Paget and Stewart, the flipside of which is an unpleasantly vivid near-rape scene later.

At the climax of this, his last film (actually completed in 1958), elderly swashbuckler Dwan throws all discipline to the four winds in a location identical to Border Incident ‘s ‘Valley of the Vultures’, where the film’s genre discipline collapses into a smorgasbord of Western, military and even 'ant movies' that culminates in immolation a la a poor man’s White Heat ("you can’t stop me", mumbles Candell/Randell in the flames).

Is it any wonder then that Wim Wenders, in his 1982 critique of filmmaking, The State of Things, would have a (fictional) film crew in Mexico remaking no less singular a flick than... The Most Dangerous Man Alive?