Robert Griffin (Jon Hall) escapes from a mental institution and sets off in search of his old friend Sir Jasper Harrick (Lester Matthews), who left him to die while on African safari. While the now-mad Griffin lobbies for his share of the diamond mines Jasper discovered, Jasper and his wife Lady Irene (Gale Sondergaard) arrange for Griffin to be drugged and thrown in a river. He’s rescued by local swindler Herbert Higgins (Leon Errol) before falling in with Dr. Peter Drury (John Carradine), something of a mad scientist whose newfound invisibility serum may prove to be Griffin’s ticket for revenge.
The Invisible Man was such a strong and auspicious beginning to the franchise, though Claude Rains making one and only one appearance should have been a good indicator that the series would never again reach those heights. Then we had a remake by way of a crime procedural, a slapstick comedy/feminist farce, and a war picture before we got to... whatever The Invisible Man’s Revenge is supposed to be. Is it a revenge tragedy, or is it a descent into madness? Is it your classic “mad scientist” story, or is it another physical comedy kneeslapper? The problem with Revenge is that it tries to be all of these and more, while succeeding at none of them.
For starters, we’re more than a half-hour into the 77-minute runtime before any invisibility shenanigans start up, and before that we’re regaled with a lengthy shaggy-dog tale of diamond mines, legal rights, attempted murder, and African safaris. It is, in short, a set-up that would make The Count of Monte Cristo blush. If this were the tale of an invisible Edmond Dantes, I cannot tell you how there I would be for that movie – after all, that premise is everything I wanted The Invisible Man Returns to be. Instead, Revenge is a bizarre amalgamation of the revenge plot from Returns, the lighthearted dynamic of Invisible Woman, and the “serum makes you mad” premise of the original. Even the most amazing special effect – the use of makeup to render Griffin partially visible – is pilfered wholesale from Invisible Agent.
Historically, I’ve been in favor of these cut-and-paste franchise installments, in which the foregoing chapters are plundered to derive a kind of formula for the next film (see also You Only Live Twice and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales – both, like Revenge, the fifth film in their respective series). The difference in the case of Revenge, however, is one of consistent tone. Revenge never quite knows whether it wants to be horror, tragedy, or comedy; furthermore, the use of the invisibility effect is deployed in a similarly inconsistent manner. Revenge innovates in a few moments when Griffin uses water or milk to make his face partially visible – it’s a neat gag and plenty uncanny, though we’d seen something similar in Invisible Agent with the cold cream. But while these shots are properly unsettling, the film’s ostensible setpiece is outright slapstick comedy, with Griffin aiding Higgins in a round of barroom darts. Higgins and Griffin land bullseye after bullseye with the darts, but it’s wildly out of place in a film where a career criminal is aiding a madman to steal property from the couple who tried to murder him.
Just about the only thing in Revenge that works without reservation is the casting of John Carradine as Dr. Peter Drury. When Griffin first enters Drury’s lab, it’s as though he’s walking into another film altogether – and it’s the film I would much rather have seen. Carradine is wickedly hammy in the mad scientist role, and the idea of this daft eccentric living on the edge of town is precisely the kind of bent reality that the Universal Classic Monsters do best. Carradine would, as we saw yesterday, go on to play Dracula in some of the later Universal features, and it’s little wonder from this performance why the studio would hand over one of its headline creatures to Carradine, who ably dials into the valence Revenge needs to strike to succeed.
It’s a shame, then, that Revenge never quite lives up to Carradine’s performance, just as much as it’s disappointing that the franchise ends on this note. Then again, if an invisible protagonist stars in five films, and no one calls it a franchise, can it really be said to exist? You’d have to see it to believe it.
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