#733 – The Mechanical Man (1921)

The Mechanical Man (1921)

Film review #733

Director: André Deed

SYNOPSIS: A scientist creates a mechanical humanoid that is controlled remotely. A criminal manages to get a hold of the blueprints and creates a mechanical man to launch a crimewave…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: The Mechanical Man (L’Uomo Maccanico) is a 1921 Italian sci-fi film. The plot concerns a scientist who creates a large mechanical man who is controlled remotely. A criminal gang led by Mado tries to steal the plans, but are arrested. Mado escapes and manages to blackmail the scientist’s daughter for the blueprints, creating her own mechanical man to unleash a crimewave. The most important thing to know about this film that while it originally ran for about eighty minutes, most of the film is lost, and only twenty six minutes survives to be viewed today. The missing footage is from mostly the beginning, but also bits throughout, which makes the surviving footage make not a lot of sense, so that’s something to bear in mind. The mechanical man itself is a huge costume obviously with a person wearing it which might not look like much today, but is fairly impressive for the time, accompanied by some scenes of it tearing through walls and such to demonstrate it’s power. It’s not the first film to feature such a mechanical man; the most famous prior one probably being The Master Mystery from 1917 starring Harry Houdini. This is also before the term “robot” was a thing. It’s also pretty funny seeing the ‘robot’ being remote controlled by a device that occupies an entire wall.

There’s a good amount of things going on throughout this film: different crimes that the mechanical man gets involved in, the criminal Mado, plenty of action sequences, and a finale involving two of the mechanical men fighting it out, it’s plenty entertaining. Unfortunately, the story with only the surviving scenes is very confusing, and is near impossible to follow, so expecting a typical full feature is not fair from the remaining scraps. Overall it’s an incomplete experience that has a few bits of novel creativity and action that might be worth taking a peek at.