The Man Who Wasn’t There (1983) Paramount/Action-Comedy RT: 111 minutes Rated R (language, violence, full frontal nudity, sexual content) Director: Bruce Malmuth Screenplay: Stanford Sherman Music: Miles Goodman Cinematography: Frederick Moore Release date: August 12, 1983 (US) Cast: Steve Guttenberg, Jeffrey Tambor, Art Hindle, Morgan Hart, Lisa Langlois, William Forsythe, Bruce Malmuth, Ivan Naranjo, Clement St. George, Vincent Baggetta, Charlie Brill, Michael Ensign, Richard Paul. Box Office: $2.4M (US)
Rating: ** ½
The Man Who Wasn’t There, an action-comedy caper starring Steve Guttenberg (Police Academy 1-4) as a State Department employee who comes into possession of an invisibility formula, was originally released in 3D. It was one of several in ’83. Other titles included Jaws 3D, Amityville 3D, Spacehunter, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn and Treasure of the Four Crowns. Oddly enough, it was the best of them which isn’t saying much considering the rest are total crap.
The short-lived 3D craze of the early 80s produced many bad movies, mainly because the emphasis was on stuff flying off the screen right into the audience’s faces. Decent screenplays (nor anything that typically constitutes good cinema) didn’t factor in. The Man Who Wasn’t There tries to provide a good framework for the 3D effects; the result is a watchable movie that doesn’t work as well without the 3D (I’ll explain later).
Guttenberg is Sam Cooper, a low-level State Department employee who seems to get all the crappy assignments. It’s his wedding day and his current assignment, hosting a cheap reception for the leaders of Third World countries, is preventing him from getting to the altar on time. When he finally makes it to the hotel where the wedding (to a major Queen Bitch) is scheduled to take place, he needs a quick change of clothes before walking down the aisle. While waiting for his clothes, he hears a voice in the room asking if they are alone. Sam thinks it’s a joke until somebody he can’t see punches him in the gut. Before he knows what’s going on, a gang of thugs burst into the room and start tearing up the place. Knives are thrown and a naked man materializes with two knives sticking out of his back.
The thugs are looking for a mysterious sphere-shaped thing that contains vials of a strange blue liquid. The liquid is a formula that makes anybody who drinks it invisible. After the gang leaves (without finding the sphere), the police and members of the wedding party break through the door and see Sam leaning over the dead body with the knives in his hands. Realizing it looks like he just committed murder, Sam makes a run for it.
The only who believes in Sam’s innocence is Cindy (Langlois, Class of 1984), the younger sister of Sam’s fiancee Amanda (Hart). Once they realize what Sam has in his possession, the two of them must outrun international spies, corrupt government officials, murderous thugs and the police as they attempt to locate a man named “Runkleman” who will know what to do with the formula. The thugs report to a mysterious invisible leader called “Ten Duyck” who kills anybody that fails him by throwing them off balconies or out of windows. So far, not too bad. It sounds pretty entertaining, right?
The Man Who Wasn’t There is a reasonably entertaining action-comedy, but it’s not without its flaws. For one thing, the special effects are pretty bad. You can see wires attached to objects that move around the room when being handled by invisible characters. In addition, the scenes that worked in 3D look pretty bad in the regular 2D format. When the villain throws somebody to their death, the scenes of them falling to the ground look really fake. It looks like they were superimposed into the scene by way of trick photography. It’s my guess the makers couldn’t get permission to film inside the Capitol or the Washington Monument and had to fake it as best they could.
In any event, there’s something about these old 3D movies that make watching them in 2D a real experience. It’s very easy to spot scenes where something was supposed to come at the audience. It’s kind of funny to see it happen sans 3D effects. Most of the time, the objects fly to the left or right of the screen. Then there’s the question of subject matter. Does invisibility really lend itself to 3D? Yes and no. Yes, in that objects float around by themselves and make their way to that point just a few inches from the viewer’s nose. No, in that if something is invisible, there’s nothing to come at the viewer.
In addition, the invisibility isn’t handled that well. I’ll give you a perfect example. In one scene, Sam accompanies Cindy to work at an all-girls private school. Naturally, Sam decides to take advantage of his invisibility to visit the girls’ locker room and watch the girls take showers. Sam walks right into the shower room so wouldn’t it have made sense to see a wet outline of his figure when the water hit his body? Or at least have the steam reveal his form? If he is capable of touching and moving objects while invisible, this implies there’s still a tangible form to him. He also drinks some soda while invisible. Shouldn’t we able to see the liquid go down his throat and sit in his stomach? The movie doesn’t play by the accepted rules of science, especially those concerning the theory of invisibility. I’m not an expert on biology, physics or any branch of science, but it seems only logical that the aforementioned things should have been considered while the screenplay was being written. But here I go again, applying traditional logic to a movie that’s meant as dopey summer entertainment and nothing more, so let’s explore this flick as entertainment and forget about the scientific inaccuracies.
I’m not sure what audience the filmmakers had in mind for The Man Who Wasn’t There. Its R-rating keeps it off limits to children and younger teens, but the humor is often too juvenile for adult audiences. In one scene, a group of distinguished-looking, dirty old men watch Cindy have sex with invisible Sam through their telescopes. They are supposedly an astronomical society, but the only bodies they observe are in the bedrooms of the apartments across the way. This is the type of situation you’d expect to find in a Porky’s-type movie. It’s aimed at the same people who line up for every horny teenager movie that comes out. Between that and the shower scene, it sounds like a sleazy comedy except it’s not. It’s a spy caper of sorts with Sam trying to keep the formula out of the Russians’ hands. It’s 1983 and the Cold War is going strong, so the Russians are automatically the villains. The baddie from the USSR is even named Boris (Tambor, Saturday the 14th).
That brings up another interesting point. Since The Man Who Wasn’t There was made before everybody got all politically correct, there are plenty of offensive ethnic stereotypes- e.g. Arabs, Indians, Native Americans, Africans, Latin Americans, and blacks- running around. It’s like a Mel Brooks movie gone crazy!
Directed by Bruce Malmuth (Hard to Kill), The Man Who Wasn’t There definitely runs a bit too long. At nearly two hours, it wears out its welcome about 20 minutes before the closing credits roll. The action scenes are pretty well done and some of the material in this movie is funny, but it doesn’t turn out as well as one would like. It was actually a pretty clever idea, but Malmuth fails to maintain a consistent tone. The results are uneven. The plot contains a lot of half-done ideas such as Sam being falsely accused of murder. This element appears to be completely forgotten about by the midway point. It’s less of a script than it is a patchwork quilt.
Guttenberg makes an okay leading man; he has a certain charm and wit about him, something that would serve him well in the first four Police Academy movies. Tambor really hams it up as the Russian bad guy who loves to complain about the American capitalist system as he drives around in a luxury car listening to cassette tapes of music from his homeland. He might have been a partial inspiration for the character of Borat. Langlois is a cute girl with a goodly amount of talent; she fares well as Sam’s sidekick/love interest.
Overall, The Man Who Wasn’t There (not to be confused with the 2001 Coen brothers movie of the same name) is a reasonably entertaining flick. It may be far from perfect, but at least it makes an honest attempt to be a real movie instead of an excuse to throw more stuff at the audience.
