Frank Griffin (Jon Hall) finds his print shop invaded by Nazis and Japanese agents (Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Peter Lorre) who demand that he turn over the secret formula for invisibility devised by his grandfather, the original Invisible Man. Instead, Frank escapes and signs over the formula to the U.S. government after Pearl Harbor, on one condition – that only Frank be permitted to use the invisibility serum. Frank parachutes into Germany to meet with a German spy (Ilona Massey), who promises she can get Frank a book of German operatives.
Maybe I’m just a sucker for (no pun intended) transparently propagandistic WWII films, but there is something infectiously gee-whiz about an invisible American parachuting behind enemy lines to bust up the Axis. In short, I really enjoyed Invisible Agent more than I thought I would, especially given the mileage-may-vary quality of these later Universal Monsters movies. But this movie ticks a lot of boxes for me, almost like an invisible Rocketeer – which readers of this blog should know is a major gold star in my book. There are, for me, few cinematic pleasures more pure than seeing an enthusiastically patriotic American get the better of Nazis who end up defeating themselves through their own hubris. It’s almost like Captain America in Casablanca.
As the eponymous invisible agent, Jon Hall is square-jawed and serviceable, the kind of newsreel hero you really don’t see any more. As an Invisible Man, however, Frank Griffin isn’t any sort of monstrous menace; there is no danger that his serum will drive him mad, brushed away by his claim that only he knows the potency of the formula. This deck-clearing moment allows Invisible Agent to be something closer to The Invisible Woman than The Invisible Man, opening the door for this Griffin to slapstick his way through Nazi Germany. He douses goons in hollandaise and sets his own Reichstag fire by igniting the curtains in Nazi HQ. It’s played for laughs and thrills, but there is rarely any danger to or from our invisible agent.
Even his “appearance,” doused in cold cream rather than swathed in bandages, elicits a hearty chuckle. I’ve been repeatedly impressed by the special effects in these Invisible Man movies, proving that they are almost more the star of the franchise than any invisible protagonist him-or-herself. The cold cream gag works, both as a punchline and as a screen trick to see the unseeable, but I was more taken by the sequence directly before, in which Frank Griffin lathers up in the bathtub. We can see his hands covered in soap, and his legs come into view as he scrubs them – truly effective stuff, even if the DVD transfer makes the seams a bit visible. The aforementioned parachute sequence, too, is fairly incredible, as Griffin disrobes mid-air, dropping his clothes as he drops out of sight.
Invisible Agent truly stands out for its villains, though, played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Peter Lorre – two performers who, let’s be honest, are so much better than the fourth Invisible Man film ought to deserve. I’ve been lukewarm on Hardwicke in The Invisible Man Returns and The Ghost of Frankenstein, but those films didn’t quite give him much to do. As Conrad Stauffer, though, Hardwicke sinks his teeth into the clipped disdain and opportunistic deception of a top-ranking Nazi. The performance is an exercise in restraint – less is more – and Hardwicke conjures up the image of a screen villain who’d be just as comfortable in the heightened reality of an Indiana Jones film. Likewise for Peter Lorre, one of my all-time favorite actors. By 1942, Lorre had carved out an odd niche for himself playing Japanese characters, particularly the detective Mr. Moto in an eight-film series. Lorre plays Baron Ikito without the aid of any discomfiting yellowface makeup, though one wonders why this Japanese villain has an Austrian accent. Still, Lorre is at his creepy best in a role that leans into the icky stereotypes of the Japanese as sadistic torturers, and he sends a real chill up your spine in the moments before he erupts into shocking violence.
Invisible Agent feels like a one-off in a franchise of one-offs, never quite coming to the level of The Invisible Man and its frantic mad monster. At the same time, though, it never quite feels as though it needs to meet the high bar set by Claude Rains. Instead it’s a flag-waving model of its time, taking the concept of a Universal Classic Monster and doing something sideways with it – and you know I’m always keen on mash-ups and genre-bending. I liked it better than I thought I would, and it’s only too bad that we didn’t get more like this – can you imagine Wolf Man of Berlin or Frankenstein vs. The Axis? (Sidebar: maybe that’s why God invented comic books; cf. The Creature Commandos, etc.)
Next week for See-Thru Thursday, we’ll see – or not, as the case may be – The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944), starring Jon Hall. But for bonus invisible shenanigans, Silly Sunday revisits the franchise for Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Arthur Franz.
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