My extended Golden Age kick continues with this supernatural Noir thriller starring none other than Lon Chaney Jr! Notorious criminal Charles "The Butcher" Benton is executed for a violent robbery, taking the secret of the stolen cash to his grave, but the intervention of a well-meaning scientist brings him back to life, stronger, tougher and completely Indestructible! More of a detective story, and a riff on Frankenstein, Indestructible Man has plenty of great fodder for pulp and Golden Age supers games. A mute, bulletproof, revenant criminal is a brilliant antagonist for just about any hero, as he looks like anyone else, but can't be stopped. Probably the best element of The Bucther's character is that he isn't on a rampage, he wants his money, his girl and to get revenge on the three people who turned States' Evidence against him, but the only people that get hurt are the ones that get in his way. It reminds me of classic monster villains like the Glob or Missing Link; there's a pathos and tragedy to the character that is endearing.
Facing down The Butcher is police Lieutenant Dick Chasen (no, really), the kind of no-nonsense detective Noir is famous for, with a drinking problem and high-waisted trousers. Not all that distant from, say, The Spirit, The Shadow, Phantom Reporter or even early Batman, when you get down to it. A mute, bulletproof criminal bent on revenge would make for a challenging antagonist for any character without a lot of powers, and opens the door for scientific and/or magical solution, as well as mundane ones; in the film, The Butcher is taken out by a massive electrical current. Perhaps "evil Luke Cage" isn't the best concept for a recurring or ongoing villain, but various takes on Frankenstein's Monster are already prevalent in comics, so one more can't really hurt. Man, I really want to run a Golden Age campaign now, I should finally buy that copy of Pulp Alley.
If you're not a regular viewer of classic films, Indestructible Man may be a tad difficult to digest, not just with the acting and cheap camera work typical of this kind of matinee fare, but in some of the ways they tend to date. For example, the film ends with Chasen proposing to his girlfriend, after having gotten her fired from her job so that she has to say 'yes' or lose housing; yikes. Seeing Police arm themselves up with BARs and Flame throwers is fun, but in this age of militarised police, there is an undercurrent of discomfort, especially as the plan from the beginning is to kill a man. The idea of a character's only power being invulnerability to harm is pretty interesting to me, I have such a character in my Equalisers team, and I'll explore it more down the track with a book I'll talk about here, but it's interesting to think that it's usually a secondary power, or part of a suite.
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