Roger Corman's X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

As the film progresses, Xavier has moved through an entire cycle of time, from The Golden Age of innocence through evergrowing experience and back again to innocence.
--Paul Willemen, Roger Corman (Edinburgh Film Festival, 1970).

Dr. Xavier invents a formula to see through things, an invention not intended to make him powerful but to help people by making more accurate diagnoses of their problems -- the first thing he does is to save the life of a child by stopping an operation that might have killed her.  But he fights with the medical establishment and becomes a sideshow attraction and then a faith healer and tries to raise money for more research by using his powers in Las Vegas to win at blackjack.  Gradually his powers overwhelm him until he can only see the center of the universe and, at the instigation of an itinerant preach, plucks out his eyes.

This imaginative film reminds me not only of other "mad scientist" films -- such as James Whale's The Invisible Man (1933) -- but also of Robert Silverberg's book Dying Inside, where the ability to read minds becomes a curse as it gets more and more out of control; Silverberg's book came out in 1972 and Silverberg might even have seen Corman's film.  Dr. Xavier gets to see women under their clothes -- doing effectively what devices advertised in the backs of comic books could not do -- but only briefly, until he begins to see through their skin. When Dr. Xavier says to a colleague that soon he will be able to see everything the colleague replies that only the Gods see everything; Xavier replies that he "is closing in on the Gods."  Interesting to note here the use of God in the plural, indicative of Corman's classical interests (see, especially, Atlas, 1960).

Corman's use of color in this film is impressive, both in the mundane  daily colors and the psychedelic colors seen by Xavier (played with impressive intensity by Ray Milland); X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is something of a precursor to Corman's The Trip,(1967), where the insights of acid are more benign that Xavier's formula.  One of the reasons Corman could be so prolific (four films in 1962, three in 1963) was because of his continuing use of casts and crew, especially cinematographer Floyd Crosby and art director Daniel Haller.