Past Misdeeds: The Power (1968)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only the most basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Professor Jim Tanner (George Hamilton) is the scientist in charge of a project researching pain to make NASA's astronauts more durable. During a meeting that is supposed to introduce their new government contact, Arthur Nordlund (Michael Rennie), to the team, notorious crackpot Professor Hallson (Arthur O'Connell) gets a wee bit hysterical about the results of some intelligence tests he made with the members of the group. It looks like one of the scientists has climbed some additional steps on the evolutionary letter, and has an improbable IQ as well as the obvious perks that go with something like that, like mind control and telekinetic powers (of course). The other scientists, including Tanner and his girlfriend Professor Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette), are more than just a little sceptical concerning their colleague's ideas, but when Hallson convinces everyone to concentrate on rotating a piece of paper with the power of their minds, and the thing actually begins to rotate, they are proven wrong. Looks like one of them really must be the homo superior.

That very same night, the mysterious mutant kills Hallson with his or her mental powers. The scientist only leaves behind a note with the name "Adam Hart" on it, a name his wife (Yvonne De Carlo) will later remember to have something to do with her husband's childhood. While he's at it, the guy who definitely isn't Professor X casts enough doubt on Tanner for the police to see the scientist as the main suspect for the Hallson's murder. Hart (to go with that name for him), seemingly having a rather unhealthy sense of humour, then proceeds to turn Tanner's very real academic credentials into fakes, which costs the Professor his job pretty quickly. Not satisfied with that, Hart then tries to kill Tanner (in what may very well be the film's weirdest scene) with the help of a carousel.

Somehow, Tanner manages to survive the mutant's attack. The events have made it quite clear to him that he can't expect help from anyone, and that he certainly can't trust his colleagues anymore, for one of them must be his hidden enemy. So the scientist sets upon the only course still open to him: trying to find Hart's trace in Hallson's hometown. Obviously, dangers to life and sanity, and Aldo Ray await him.

Byron Haskin's George Pal-produced The Power is a surprisingly peculiar tale that uses its SF thriller plot to create a film that unites elements of the pre-70s conspiracy thriller with scenes of a gleefully bizarre nature, and a generally pessimistic view of human nature, resulting in something halfway between Alfred Hitchcock and an acid trip.

Casting George Hamilton of all people as a scientist of some renown may sound more bizarre than clever, but his special brand of absent-minded vacuity works here as well as it would later do in Curtis Harrington's The Dead Don't Die, presenting the character as someone in whose shoes most every viewer would be able to feel comfortable, even if said viewer is less pretty and well-groomed. As we all know, this sort of thriller works well with an everyman character for audience identification in the lead role, and if Hitchcock could cast Cary Grant accordingly, Haskins could do the same with George Hamilton.

Haskin's direction is interesting, but also a bit all over the place. The Power's main draft is the Hitchcockian thriller - some scenes seem to directly and deliberately echo The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest, especially, and a many of the film's techniques for creating suspense are taken directly from Hitchcock's playbook - yet Haskin also has a tendency to include moments of broadest-stroke satire that always threaten to turn into melodramatic horror, and scenes that are mock-surrealist enough to belong into an Italian film from the 70s (see especially Hart's fun fair attempt at killing our hero or the very strange final confrontation between hero and villain). However, there are also moments of truly disquieting nuance to be found here, like the moment when Yvonne De Carlo's "funny"-drunk and oversexed middle-aged woman begins to show the cracks that Hart's powers have left in her mind, or the emotionless, matter-of-fact way Aldo Ray's character discusses that he's been on the lookout for people asking for Hart so that he can kill them for these last ten years. These moments also go a long way to demonstrate how important a good supporting cast is to a) make a film better and b) help someone with a limited acting range like Hamilton look good. These performances and what they stand for are also where the film's rather pessimistic and paranoid stance regarding human nature can be seen most clearly. In The Power's world, every character has mental breaking points and cracks that make it easy for them to be dominated by someone like Hart; everyone is corruptible and nobody is save from harm from the people surrounding him. This is not a position the film ever states outright, yet it is hidden in plain sight in every scene right until the end when a big question mark half-heartedly pretends to be a happy ending.

Less good than the supporting cast are the film's special effects, or rather, their execution is more ropey than you'd expect from a film made in 1968. Unfortunately, the effects in the film's grand finale are its weakest, with some very cartoony animation, a rotating skeleton and George Hamilton's floating head standing in for a mental duel that would have worked better if the actors had just stared at each other while Miklós Rózsa's dramatic music played. In The Power's case, we call them "special" effects for a reason.


Fortunately, a handful of badly executed special effects in conceptually interesting scenes is not enough to drag down a film as interesting and peculiar as The Power is. As a matter of fact, this is exactly the sort of imperfection that makes a film even more itself by revealing a humanity you don't usually encounter in things that are perfect.