D: Byron Haskin. S: John Gay. Novel: Frank M. Robinson. P: George Pal. Cast: George Hamilton, Michael Rennie, Suzanne Pleshette, Richard Carlson, Yvonne De Carlo, Earl Holliman. US dist (DVD): Warner Archive Collection.

Telekinesis, a popular topic in written SF, has met with only limited success when brought to the screen. While the idea of the mind as a psychic dynamo, able to project its will at a distance, is certainly rich with promise, only a handful of films have managed to capture that crucial sense of mystery, that dark sense of otherness, which such a mind must necessarily possess. Part of the reason is that cinema is not especially well-suited to visualising subtle abstractions; it’s hard for a camera to probe the depths of the human mind, and dramatise its findings.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to approach this subject: low-key and eerie, with an emphasis on mood and atmosphere – or big and loud, with a full-scale blitzkrieg of special effects. (It’s a rare film which strikes a successful balance between the two, though Cronenberg’s Scanners [1981] comes close.) Earlier productions, more cautious with their budgets, took the former approach; but with steady improvements in effects technology, it was inevitable that the psychological would give ground to the pyrotechnical. With few exceptions, telekinetic thrillers post-Carrie (1976) have focused increasingly on the external, at the expense of the internal: whether or not this is a positive progression is a matter of taste, though it’s worth noting that ideas are not always best served by spectacle.

Perhaps unexpectedly, given producer George Pal’s track record with large-scale FX vehicles like The War of the Worlds (1953), The Power elects for the low-key route: it’s a science fiction thriller about a hunt for a Nietzschian super-villain with lethal psychic powers, a fine pulp-SF notion sadly let down by pedestrian handling from director Byron Haskin and screenwriter John Gay (adapting, and apparently oversimplifying, a source novel by Frank M. Robinson). Yet for all the film’s failings and missed opportunities, it remains quite good fun. The quality of its ideas survives the production team’s best efforts to stifle them, and Pal’s decision to hire fellow Hungarian Miklos Rosza as composer was a masterstroke: Rosza’s score (heavy on the cimbalom) is urgent, hypnotic and effectively nerve-jangling, lending The Power an unsettling mood it would otherwise lack.

Biochemist Jim Tanner (Hamilton) heads a research project testing the extremes of human endurance, gathering data which is hoped to benefit the space programme. But a casual analysis of personal psychometric data, submitted anonymously by the research team, reveals that one of the scientists is a mental superman, possessed of an intellect far outstripping that of his colleagues – so far in advance of the accepted maxima of human intelligence (it is implied) as to represent some new paradigm of far-future evolutionary advancement. The plot takes a bit of a leap at this point to suggest that such a man must necessarily boast telekinetic powers (though exactly how the average psychometric test would measure this isn’t made clear): and indeed, during an impromptu experiment with the assembled boffins, one of them successfully causes a scrap of paper to rotate like a whirligig atop a pencil, simply by using the power of his mind… But who could it be? When Tanner’s colleagues start turning up dead, it’s clear that the psychokinetic mastermind is removing anyone who threatens his position, one by one; and when Tanner gets too close, he finds himself an outcast, his career ruined and earmarked by the cops as a suspect for the killings. He has just one clue to the superman’s identity: the name “Adam Hart”…

Though the presence of steely-eyed Michael Rennie in the cast list shouldn’t make Hamilton’s final discovery that much of a surprise, the film yet manages to conceal a couple of interesting twists, and the telekinetic climax (anticipating the far more splattery “scan-off” duel in Scanners) between rival supermen delivers a gratifying punch. Hamilton’s dogged investigation into the shadowy Adam Hart is reasonably intriguing, though developed with an insufficient appreciation for mystery; for example, Hart’s ability to conceal his identity by clouding the minds of his inferiors, causing them to recall contradictory facial appearances, is little more than a throwaway detail, and should definitely have been explored in greater depth. (Although an initially-puzzling interlude in which Hamilton gatecrashes a hotel conference and is mistaken for an old friend by one of the delegates, a complete stranger, might actually be a rather clever nod by the screenwriter to one of his later plot revelations.)

Technical credits, beyond Rosza’s contribution, are uniformly mediocre. The visual style is drably unimaginative, with flat direction, flat lighting and flatter production design combining to produce the anonymous feel of a TV show (“mature” situations notwithstanding). The hallucinatory episodes (wherein the villain causes his victims to experience various psychic delusions) are reasonably diverting, but fail to deliver much beyond a mild surrealistic frisson. And the ultimate goal of the villain seems vague and unambitious, given his apparent brilliance. Still, it passes the time quite pleasingly, by and large, and while The Power can’t really hold a candle to the better examples of the genre (Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned [1960] and Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch [1978]), it remains an interesting failure; its ideas will linger in the mind long after the sight of George Hamilton’s quizzical phiz has faded.