The Invisible Boy (Pan Productions, MGM, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home early from work and joined me for the next two films in Turner Classic Movies’ invisibility cycle, The Invisible Boy (1957) and Invisible Invaders (1959). The Invisible Boy was concocted by producer Nicholas Nayfack and writer Cyril Hume, who had previously worked together on MGM’s big-budget science-fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956), to reuse the prop of “Robby the Robot” built for that movie. It’s based on a 1956 short story called “The Brain Child” by Edmund Cooper, though the story apparently didn’t contain a robot character. The central human being is 10-year-old Timmie Marinoe (Richard Eyer, fresh from playing Gary Cooper’s younger son in the 1956 Civil War Western Friendly Persuasion, with Anthony Perkins, of all people, as Eyer’s older brother!), who feels “invisible” at home because his parents, physicist Dr. Tom Marinoe (Philip Abbott) and Tom’s wife Mary (Diane Brewster) ignore him. Tom Marinoe is in charge of the world’s largest supercomputer (and one of the most fun parts of the movie is seeing how filmmakers in 1957 envisioned the computers of the future; like the one in Desk Set, also from 1957, it looks incredibly retro in terms of how we think of computers today!), which is kept behind locked walls in a military-style bunker to make sure that the people who in Hume’s script called “our friends from beyond the [North] Pole” – i.e., the Soviet Union – don’t steal the secrets and build a supercomputer of their own. Timmie visits the supercomputer with his dad and it hypnotizes him and makes him a whiz at chess – a game he’s previously been unable to master, but with the computer’s knowledge at his disposal he’s able to checkmate dad in six moves. It also gives him the smarts to repair Robby the Robot, which was brought back from the future by a now-deceased scientist who’d invented a time-travel machine.

As a prank, Timmie asks Robby to make him invisible, and he spends part of the movie running around the Marinoe home playing poltergeist and loudly slurping his soup at the dinner table just as he’d done when he was visible. Fortunately, Timmie’s clothes disappear along with him, so he doesn’t have to run around the house naked; also the soup he eats becomes invisible as soon as it enters his body, rather than remaining visible until he digests it as in Wells’ novel and the 1933 film. I had remembered The Invisible Boy as light-hearted science-fiction fare for children, but the second half becomes surprisingly dark as the computer decides it no longer has any need for the human race, so it’s going to take over the universe and annihilate all biological life forms. The conceit of a supercomputer deciding it no longer needs people was actually a common one in 1950’s science-fiction; in Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void a computer is programmed to contain all of human knowledge, and it orders its creators literally to worship it. (There was a joke in the sci-fi world about a computer that would be programmed to contain all human knowledge, and then the scientists who ran the project would ask it all the questions humans had been debating for millennia. The first question they asked the computer was, “Is there a God?” – and the computer answered, “There is now.”) In The Invisible Boy the computer also has been programmed to contain all human knowledge, only as Tom Marinoe discovered by looking through its punch-cards, it has managed to hack itself seven times in 29 years and override the programming that was designed to keep it from getting too big for its britches. The one thing the computer needs is the code to unlock all its functions, which Tom Marinoe is the only person who knows (he’s placed a copy in a safe-deposit box that’s to be opened only after his death under highly secure circumstances), and the computer seeks to get it from him by using Robby to lure Timmie aboard a spaceship and then kill him slowly and torturously unless Tom gives up the code.

Only Robby, still containing remnants of its original programming not to harm people or put them at risk, refuses to kill Timmie, and though dad asks Timmie to stay on the spacecraft until it automatically returns to Earth a year later, Timmie is impatient to be reunited with his parents and uses an escape glider to get out of the ship and come back to Earth far sooner than that. Ultimately the Marinoes are reunited and Tom sets about to build a new supercomputer that won’t get out of hand the way the first one did. In that regard The Invisible Boy is the progenitor for later science-fiction tales about computers that conquer the human race, including the films Colossus: The Forbin Project and Demon Seed (in which the supercomputer literally rapes the wife of its creator) as well as the Matrix series. As a whole The Invisible Boy doesn’t come off; the domestic comedy of the first half and the horror of the out-of-control computer calmly ordering the total destruction of humanity in the second really don’t mesh that well. The action climax seems perfunctory and the final return-to-domesticity scene comes off as fake and unconvincing. Also, as Charles noted, the boy’s invisibility isn’t that important a plot point and really doesn’t relate to anything else in the film. What appealed to moviegoers in 1957 was a second chance to see Robby the Robot in action, and that’s still why anyone would sit through The Invisible Boy today.