Monster March: Invisible Woman (1940)

In the words of Monty Python, “And now for something completely different.” We’ve spent the last week looking at the Universal Classic Monsters, so for Sundays let’s do something a little silly. Silly Sundays, if you will. With the monster archetypes pretty firmly entrenched by 1940, the studio was free to get a little more creative with the formula (though, as was often the case, they tended to opt for light remakes that didn’t do much in the way of innovation). Enter The Invisible Woman, having little to do with 1933’s Invisible Man. Nor is it much of a monster movie at all – instead, it’s a slapstick comedy, amusing if a little lame.

Department store model Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce) answers an ad in the newspaper from Professor Gibbs (John Barrymore), who offers to make his next test subject invisible. While the professor’s financier and spendthrift playboy Dick Russell (John Howard) begins to fall in love with the unseen test subject, gangster in exile Blackie Cole (Oscar Homolka) gets wind of the professor’s device and sends a trio of goons to steal the secret of invisibility.

 

Within five minutes of The Invisible Woman, you know you’re in for something radically different from any of the Universal Monster movies that preceded it. (Indeed, I’m not even sure we should consider this an Invisible Man movie, but Universal does, so into Monster March it goes.) As the film opens, Dick Russell’s butler (played by Charlie Ruggles) trips headlong over a messy staircase and pulls a pratfall right there in the foyer. It’s a gag that recurs several times, each tumble more forceful than the one preceding it, but it sets the tone quite effectively. While there was some humor – grim though it may have been – in the earlier Universal Monster movies, The Invisible Woman isn’t ashamed to go for the punchline.

 

As far as comedy goes, The Invisible Woman isn’t anything innovative. There aren’t really any jokes that you haven’t heard before (except maybe the one about the gangster named Foghorn with the high-pitched voice). Watching a whole month’s worth of monster movies might make The Invisible Woman seem funnier than it is, but it’s a far cry from screwball greats like Bringing Up Baby or anything the Marx Brothers would have put out. Still, the atmosphere is diverting enough, and there are a few genuine chuckles to be had within the film. It’s the kind of good clean fun you saw all over the 1940s, light and inoffensive – though modern audiences may be surprised just how much fuss is made over the fact that a truly invisible woman is entirely undressed. (Indeed, that minor detail seems to be the whole reason Professor Gibbs has a female assistant, played by Margaret Hamilton – so that Kitty has someone to whom she can pass her clothing without the slightest hint of impropriety.)

 

If Universal had the lock on monster movies, Warner Bros. certainly cornered the market on gangster films. (Maybe next year, it’ll be Mobster March here at The Cinema King?) It’s therefore a little intriguing to see the two genres stitched together in The Invisible Woman; where the monster angle of the film is pretty watered down, the gangster subplot is certainly more Some Like It Hot than Angels with Dirty Faces. Oscar Homolka and his gang are hardly menacing, to the point that one of them is quite literally played by one of the Three Stooges, Shemp Howard. Shemp aside, they’re all straight out of central casting, and while there’s nothing thematically unified about gangsters and invisible women, it’s an effective shorthand for villainy in a genre that usually needs to distance the eponymous “monster” from the true fiends.

 

Perhaps more so than The Invisible Man, The Invisible Woman captures how much fun it might be to become truly invisible. Claude Rains whooped and cackled with glee, it’s true, but it’s hard to imagine anyone in the audience envying Jack Griffin. Kitty Carroll, on the other hand, is legitimately likeable in her desire to be invisible because she uses her invisibility for good. There’s a fair bit of mischief in the way she settles the score with her truly awful boss Mr. Growley (Charles Lane), and who among us hasn’t desperately wanted to tear down that loathsome old time clock at work? Fortunately for Kitty, there’s no specter of imminent madness looming over her invisibility, as Claude Rains and Vincent Price before her endured. It’s all in good fun.

 

The Invisible Woman is not rated. Directed by A. Edward Sutherland. Written by Robert Lees, Fred Rinaldo, Gertrude Purcell, Curt Siodmak, and Joe May. Starring Virginia Bruce, John Barrymore, John Howard, Charlie Ruggles, and Oscar Homolka. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Hand (1940) starring Tom Tyler and Dick Foran.

Next week, we get even sillier with one of the true classics of the monster genre and perhaps of all comedy films writ large. Did someone say “Chiiiiiiiiiiiick”? It’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Glenn Strange.