Timeslip

When nuclear scientist, Dr. Stephen Rayner (Peter Arne) seems to return from the dead after being murdered, the mystery begins. Reporter, Mike Delaney (Gene Nelson) and his photographer girlfriend, Jill Robowski (Faith Domergue) are on the case.

THE ATOMIC MAN is one of the lesser-known of the 1950s sci-fi films. As such, it has a nice Cold War / espionage angle to it. It also has Dr. Rayner suffering from a rather novel side effect of his inexplicable resurrection. This doesn't emerge until after the halfway mark.

Mr. Nelson and Ms. Domergue play their roles in similar fashion to those fast-talking reporters from the 1930s-40s, complete with unhelpful cops and a screaming boss!

Not a bad movie for a Saturday afternoon...

This early Merton Park production is no relation to the children's TV sci-fi adventure of the same name made fifteen years later. The sci-fi component is novel but ends up taking a back seat to a conventional Cold War thriller about saboteurs, atmospherically photographed by A. T. Dinsdale and briskly directed by Ken Hughes, soon to graduate to 'A' features.

Gene Nelson makes a whimsical hero, while Faith Domergue, newly returned from Metaluna, is here buttoned up in an overcoat against the London cold. Also in an overcoat, plus a trilby, rather than playing one of the scientists Joseph Tomelty is here unusually cast as the inspector following the case.

With a title like "The Atomic Man" and it being in the public domain, I sure had my doubts about this one. You'd think, being made in the 1950s that it was some sort of space monster film or perhaps a film about communism--but it isn't. It's actually a very well written and taut sc-fi mystery--with a strong emphasis on mystery. And, it's very much worth your time.

The film begins with a guy being left for dead--and thrown in the river. He's rescued and on the brink of death--and the doctors expect to lose him...which they do TEMPORARILY. While they are operating on him, his heart stops and they give up the surgery--and suddenly, he spontaneously begins breathing and begins a slow recovery! When he awakens, he's an oddity. He looks like a famous scientist--but the scientist is accounted for and is certainly NOT near death. And, he talks strangely...very strangely. How does all this fit into the total picture--that's the mystery. To try to sort all this out is a pushy reporter--the sort of guy who was almost a cliché in the 1930s in films. Yet, somehow Gene Nelson manages to make it work--along with his girlfriend (Faith Domergue).

Now that I mentioned Nelson and Domergue, that brings up the production itself. Despite these two American actors in the major roles, the rest of the film is very British--made by Brits, filmed in Britain and with British extras. The reason was that in the 1950s and 60, many European film companies brought in Americans to star in their films--figuring it would help box office appeal (especially in the States). Well, in this case it sure worked well because the plot was intelligent, well written and a nice production all around--so nice, I was very tempted to give this little film a 9! My advice is to download (for free and perfectly legal) the film from archive.org--a site often linked to film listings on IMDb or from Amazon (which IS linked to IMDb). Well worth your time and full of wonderful suspense--especially at the end.

Ken Hughes directed five feature films and two short films in 1955, and this is one of the features. It is a superior B picture with the female B star, Faith Domergue, she of the big soulful brown eyes. The story and screenplay are by Charles Eric Maine, and he has written a good yarn. Some of the ideas for the technical background are mentioned in passing, and they concern a scientist named Stephen Rayner who works for the Atomic Energy authorities. He has learned how to achieve the alchemical transmutation of elements in order to produce tungsten in the laboratory from cheap materials. This threatens the interests of the United Tungsten Corporation of Argentina, which controls two thirds of the world's tungsten supply, so they have another scientist's face transformed by plastic surgery to replace Rayner, and the film starts with Rayner being shot one night and falling into the Thames. He miraculously survives but is in a coma for some time while everyone is trying to figure out what happened. After he is identified, the police are puzzled because his employers say he is at work in his lab. Something strange has also happened to him because he has undergone a slight forward time-shift of 7.5 seconds due to exposure to radiation, so he answers questions put to him before they are asked. When the police and others finally figure out why his interviews don't make any sense, because the answer to each question is really to one that will be asked next, they then begin to piece together his story. The film is very intriguing and entertaining, despite being low budget. The hints of escaped corrupt Nazis in Argentina who will kill anyone who gets in their way were well understood in 1955, only ten years after the War. The film's original release title was TIMESLIP, and it is under that title that the DVD is now once again available. As another reviewer says, this is not really a sci fi film but is an industrial espionage thriller with some intriguing sci fi background elements which are significantly under-developed. Both the timeslip angle and the tungsten angle could have been much better developed and turned into a much stronger film. As it is, the film is rather mediocre.

What a surprise this british science fiction thriller from a non sci-fi specialist. Ken Hughes was not Val Guest nor Terence Fisher in that domain. The idea is pretty good, pretty exciting, but the treatment is a bit ankward, talkative, something is a bit wrong but it's OK. It remains a worth watching UK science fiction thriller, that also would have perfectly fit to Byyron Haskin. Faith Domergue is rather wooden in this feature where she doesn't seem to be that concerned, as also were those US actors and actresses who worked overseas, in UK, with movies precisely directed by the likes of Fisher, Guest or Hughes.