Monster March: The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944)

Of all the Universal Classic Monsters, the Invisible Man franchise has often seemed like the franchise without a compass heading. Certainly over the course of five movies, we can say the protagonists all looked alike (or didn’t – but who can tell?), and there’s been a faint thread distantly connecting the films by way of the Griffin family tree. But if these films weren’t all bundled together in a DVD box set, would anyone consider this a franchise? In that sense, The Invisible Man’s Revenge is the logical next step in this increasingly disconnected series, but in all other senses, it’s the all-too-common “final fizzle” for these Universal Monsters.

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.

 

The Invisible Man’s Revenge is not rated. Directed by Ford Beebe. Written by Bertram Millhauser. Starring Jon Hall, Leon Errol, John Carradine, Alan Curtis, Evelyn Ankers, Gale Sondergaard, and Lester Matthews. 

Tune in tomorrow for Franken-Friday, with The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) starring Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951)

Despite having met an invisible man (Vincent Price) in the final frames of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello continued their monster spoofs with an invisible man all their own three years later, in a film that could only be titled Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. Like most of Universal’s Invisible Man franchise, this Meet is a hodgepodge of genres designed to be a life support machine for special effects sequences – and it’s not the comedy duo’s finest hour, either.

Newly graduated from detective school, Bud Alexander and Lou Francis (Abbott and Costello) strike out on their own, but to their bad luck the first case is that of accused murderer and boxer Tommy Nelson (Arthur Franz). Tommy hires the newly-minted detectives before shooting up with the Griffin invisibility serum in hopes of clearing his own name. Bud and Lou have to dodge mobsters and Detective Roberts (William Frawley) until a series of zany shenanigans puts Lou in the boxing ring himself as “Louie the Looper.”

 

After all that Monster March has thrown our way, I’ve come to expect the unexpected from an Invisible Man film. The film begins as a kind of detective noir parody, which suits me just fine – I’d had occasion a few nights earlier to rewatch The Maltese Falcon for the umpteenth time, and it seemed to me that Abbott and Costello were about to add a dose of monster mischief to the noir formula. With the addition of gangsters, however, we verge into Some Like It Hot territory (though Meets predates Hot by eight years), but before long we’re in a full-on boxing picture. (Barton Fink, eat your heart out.) If anyone had “underdog sports movie” in your Universal Monsters bingo, mark that square – the rest of us are stunned.

 

In the way that most of the latter-day Universal Monsters movies are retreads of previous iterations of the same story, this Invisible Man bears more than a few similarities to The Invisible Man Returns (1940), which starred Vincent Price in a mystery about an invisible man proving his innocence. Indeed, several of the special effects shots from that film – like the disappearing guinea pig and the Invisible Man traipsing through the woods – have been repurposed and recycled here. Audiences at the time might not have recognized the scenes eleven years later, but I suppose that’s why God invented critics like me. Then again, audiences certainly should have recognized the fact that a photograph of Claude Rains hangs prominently in this film’s laboratory; I certainly did, and it was akin to spotting a Stan Lee cameo in a Marvel film, the kind of throwback reference I’ve wanted from these films all along. It’s surprising that it took until 1948 for the franchise to stop taking itself so seriously and start to wink at the audience.

 

Three years may not seem like a long time, but it must have been for Abbott and Costello. The idea of casting the 54-year-old Abbott and 45-year-old Costello as greenhorn detectives is frankly preposterous without assuming that these are two men in a midlife crisis looking for their career’s second act. It’s such a struggle that the two have to be pitted against an endearingly aggravated William Frawley, ten years their senior, to make them look young and goofy. Their comedy is a bit slower, too – though when it’s fast, it’s fun, as when they trot out an old vaudeville sleight-of-hand gag passing dollar bills from hand to hand. On the whole, however, many of the gags stretch out a little too long, as in an extended sequence in which Costello struggles to order food and eat it without the intervention of invisible man Tommy Nelson.

 

This is to say nothing of the film’s third act, which becomes almost entirely a boxing picture. As one who isn’t quite a connoisseur myself, I can’t say whether this plays better for someone who likes boxing movies, but for me I found it unsurprising and dull. At first, it seems a clever premise, watching Costello swing at his opponent while the invisible man does all the heavy hitting, but then it keeps going, and going, and going. By the time the fight ends – as inevitably you might expect it to end – the gag has long since stopped being funny, if ever it actually was. Then follows a kind of epilogue, a coda in which a blood transfusion accidentally renders Costello invisible; it’s the sort of joke you might expect more of the movie to engage, since Meet Frankenstein made Costello’s brain pivotal to the Monster’s plot. Here, though, it’s a throwaway gag or two, riffing on the “invisibility=nudity” punchlines of Invisible Woman. 

 

By the time you get to the epilogue, one feels as though the writers – and there are an astonishing five of them – have run out of ways to thread the jokes together, resorting instead to coupling them like train cars. (To say nothing of how the invisibility effects are noticeably poorer, as if the budget had well and truly run dry.) The comedic fruit of Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man is low-hanging, and the script plucks it all in the hopes that some of it won’t be rotten. To be fair, this Invisible Man isn’t rotten, but it’s a far cry from the timeless comedic genius of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Like most Invisible Man movies, though, this one just doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. 

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man is not rated. Directed by Charles Lamont. Written by Hugh Wedlock Jr., Howard Snyder, Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo, and John Grant. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Arthur Franz, Nancy Guild, Gavin Muir, Sheldon Leonard, and William Frawley. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Ghost (1944) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week for Silly Sunday, we’ll wrap things up when Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1954), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Eddie Parker.

Monster March: Invisible Agent (1942)

Is the Invisible Man series the franchise without a clue? Is it even a franchise at all? Is it fair to consider this a Universal Monsters series? The answer to all three questions is, I think, “Yes.” If we’re thinking about the Universal Classic Monsters as the first cinematic universe, The Invisible Man would be akin to an Iron Man franchise in which Tony Stark’s brother gives the suit away, while an unrelated inventor makes an iron suit, before Tony’s grandson builds his own suit. (Next week, to push the analogy, an entirely unrelated Stark is given the suit by another disconnected inventor.) Can you hinge a franchise on iconography alone?

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.)

 

The Invisible Agent is not rated. Directed by Edwin L. Marin. Written by Curtis Siodmak. Starring Jon Hall, Ilona Massey, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Peter Lorre, and J. Edward Bromberg. 

Tune in tomorrow for Franken-Friday, with Son of Frankenstein (1939) starring Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi.

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.

Monster March: The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

The Invisible Man Returns is something of a misnomer. The eponymous Invisible Man doesn’t actually return in this film; instead, we meet his visible brother, who shares the invisibility serum with a third man. More deceptive, though, is the promise that The Invisible Man Returns will be just as good as The Invisible Man. While the Universal Monsters had a series of winners in Frankenstein sequels, The Invisible Man Returns is a tragic snooze, retreading too much of its predecessor’s ground while squandering the perfectly good Vincent Price.

Geoffrey Radcliffe (Vincent Price) is sentenced to death for murdering his brother, despite his vehement protestations of innocence. While his cousin Richard Cobb (Cedric Hardwicke) consoles his fiancée Helen (Nan Grey), Geoffrey receives a visit in prison from Dr. Frank Griffin (John Sutton), the brother of the infamous and invisible Jack Griffin. Frank gives Geoffrey an injection of the same serum that turned Jack invisible, giving Geoffrey time to escape prison – and hopefully, before the serum’s madness kicks in, clear his name.

 

Just about the only place where The Invisible Man Returns transcends the original is, rightly enough, in its special effects. Seven years after the original Invisible Man dazzled us with effects that still hold up, Invisible Man Returns wisely ups the ante with a number of exceptional invisibility sequences, even when we consider the fact that this movie is more than eighty years old. Chiefly, Returns sets a number of its invisible-man shenanigans in broad daylight, including one mesmerizing sequence in which the invisible Geoffrey borrows clothing from a nearby scarecrow. Other shots are a little less technically sophisticated, including moving shrubbery and floating tree branches, but director Joe May also gets a few good kicks in when we glimpse this film’s Invisible Man amid smoke and rain – two conditions Jack Griffin took great care to avoid.

 

Aside from the special effects, the key to any good Invisible Man film is the voice of the titular man. Since we can’t, obviously, see the man, his performance relies so much on the voice alone. Claude Rains was a masterful choice, his precise mannerisms giving way to delightful fits of madness. In Returns, we have an equal auditory treasure in Vincent Price (though, at 29, his voice doesn’t have all the character and flavor you might be expecting). Whether cradling his beloved or toasting his own megalomania, even behind bandages and a heavy dressing gown, Price is fantastically equipped for the part. In short, Price is a hoot, all the more so in a potentially thankless role where he’s unseen until the very final moments of the film.

 

If you feel like you’ve read that sentence before, don’t be alarmed. The ending to The Invisible Man Returns is indeed nearly identical to the ending of The Invisible Man. In fact, a great deal of this sequel bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1933 original. There’s a healthy bit of narrative invention in the addition of a procedural plot in which Geoffrey sets out to prove his innocence, but it also ends up creating the same climax – an all-hands manhunt set in inclement weather. There’s a standout second act set in Richard Cobb’s mansion, a kind of closed-door mystery in which Geoffrey could be anywhere (or nowhere), and as the police go from room to room in search of their invisibly quarry, Cedric Hardwicke gets to slip from sanity into nail-biting paranoia.

 

Unfortunately, though, the successful moments in The Invisible Man Returns are few and far between. Unlike its predecessor, there is never really any doubt that Geoffrey will overcome his madness long enough to identify the real killer. (Indeed, you might even say that the onset of madness helps, as he assumes a kind of master criminal mentality in order to unravel the mystery.) While Geoffrey (and Price) do seem to be having a great deal of fun with their newfound ability, that revelry doesn’t always translate to the audience as it did in the original Invisible Man. Instead, at times the hijinks feel like distractions on the way to solving the murder – which, I might add, it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out who among the cast is suspiciously uninterested in the matter of Geoffrey’s innocence.

 

At 81 minutes long, The Invisible Man Returns is a bit too similar to its forbearer, overlong and unable to conceal the acts of light plagiarism. I suppose that I wanted Vincent Price to be more like Claude Rains or even (and more to the point) more like the Vincent Price of the 1960s. We do see some of that in the film, but – appropriately enough – the really good stuff is for the most part out of sight. Geoffrey Radcliffe is, for example, no Dr. Phibes, nor is he even quite Jack Griffin. More importantly, though, The Invisible Man Returns is no Invisible Man. Despite its few moments of fun, anyone can see that. 

The Invisible Man Returns is not rated. Directed by Joe May. Written by Lester Cole, Curt Siodmak, and Joe May. Starring Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Vincent Price, Nan Grey, John Sutton, Cecil Kellaway, and Alan Napier.

Tune in tomorrow for Franken-Friday, with Bride of Frankenstein (1935) starring Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, and Elsa Lanchester.

Next week for See-Thru Thursday, parachute behind enemy lines with the Invisible Agent (1942), starring Jon Hall, Peter Lorre, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

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.

Monster March: The Invisible Man (1933)

Monster March gallops on with See-Thru Thursday, and The Invisible Man is something unique in the Universal Monsters pantheon. He’s not a creature or a supernatural being, nor does he have a lair, a costume, or even a particularly distinctive physical feature (aside, perhaps, from his bandages). What he does have on his side, however, is horror legend James Whale, a surprisingly nimble special effects crew, and a shockingly violent debut film.

Covered head to toe in bandages and overcoat, Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) takes up a room at the Lion’s Head tavern, where his innkeepers discover that their new lodger is actually an invisible man. Griffin flees, abandoning his scientific work to reverse his invisibility, and sets about seeking revenge instead – particularly on fellow scientist Arthur Kemp (William Harrigan).

 

The Invisible Man has the unique honor of being the fifth and final Universal Monsters film to be released before the Hays Code was enforced, beginning in 1934. (We’ll see next Friday whether the Hays Code had much effect on the first monster sequel, 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein.) Among its monstrous predecessors, The Invisible Man is by far the most violent. Frankenstein may have it beat for gruesome subject material, but The Invisible Man, while not overtly gory, is garish and unflinching in its brutality. Within the body of the film, Griffin bludgeons a policeman to death, derails a train, and murders a man by driving his car off a cliff – and all of this is shown in clear detail on the screen! Moreover, each sequence is scored by the gleeful laughter and grim humor of the titular Invisible Man, juxtaposing terror with sardonic cheer to brilliant horrific effect. Where each preceding monster had some redeeming quality about him, the Invisible Man revels in the violence he’s all too happy to wreak.

 

So very much of The Invisible Man works because of Claude Rains’s go-for-broke vocal performance. Selected for the role after Boris Karloff’s contractual pay fell through, Rains was evidently a favored choice for Whale because of his crisp delivery, and in terms of elocution Rains is a champion. More victorious, though, is the way Rains is able to fluctuate between cold rationality and mad misanthropy, hooting and cackling as he goes. It’s no wonder that Mark Hamill has admitted he drew a great deal of inspiration for his Joker voice, making this performance a bit of a Rosetta Stone for Hamill’s Batman work. Completely unseen until the literal final frame of the film, Rains is nevertheless commanding, compelling you to hang on his every word. It’s a shame, then, that Rains, like Lugosi, would never truly return to the role, though Rains enjoyed a much more extensive career in Hollywood than Lugosi ever did.

 

It’s a good thing Rains is so first-class as Dr. Griffin, because the rest of the cast is serviceable at best. Gloria Stuart has a role that amounts to an extended cameo as Griffin’s fiancée Flora, who nominally incites the action of the film by announcing her paramour’s disappearance but never fully selling her affection for him. William Harrigan, too, is largely indistinguishable as Arthur Kemp, to the point where I had legitimate difficulty picking him out of crowd scenes. Elsewhere in the film, Henry Travers puts in a memorable turn as Flora’s father, though I can’t be sure if he’s exceptional here or if I simply recognize (and will always love) him from It’s a Wonderful Life. If there is a scene-stealer in the bunch, it’s Una O’Connor, whose shrieking innkeeper is both hysteric and hysterical, hollering her way through the film’s first act. It’s certainly one of those performances that leaves you wanting more.

 

After Rains, though, the star of the film is its special effects team. Even by 2020 standards, the 1933 special effects are fairly stellar. Sure, you can see the seams and strings on a 4K television today, but nevertheless it’s effectively spooky to watch Griffin unravel his bandages to reveal the hollowness underneath. There are several sequences where one senses Whale and his crew are just showing off – as when Griffin removes his bandages and tucks himself into bed. It’s a scene that serves no real purpose in the plot other than to highlight the uncanny special effects of the day, but this sort of narrative indulgence, even in a film that’s a tight 71 minutes, can be pardoned because of how well it works. It’s all well and good to be told that Griffin is invisible, but seeing – or not seeing, as the case may be – is believing.

 

The Universal Monster movies are nominally horror films, though there is seldom anything truly horrific about them, particularly to a desensitized audience in 2021. There’s gothic drama in spades, suspense and chills, but is anyone truly terrified of Frankenstein’s monster or of vampires? (Van Helsing’s admonition, “there are such things,” notwithstanding.) Meanwhile, the Invisible Man is genuinely scary, preying on the visual nature of film to expose the purest terror in cinema – the terror of the unseen. “There is no terror in the bang,” Hitchcock famously said, “only in the anticipation of it.” Likewise, the true terror of The Invisible Man is in not seeing him, not knowing when this otherwise common murderer may wrap his unseen fingers around your throat. The only warning you’ll get is that velvety voice snapping into a snarl before your car plummets off a cliff – that’s the stuff, Bogart might say, nightmares are made of.

 

The Invisible Man is not rated. Directed by James Whale. Written by R.C. Sherriff. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells. Starring Claude Rains, Gloria Stuart, William Harrigan, Henry Travers, and Una O’Connor. 

Tune in tomorrow for Franken-Friday, with Frankenstein (1931) starring Boris Karloff and Colin Clive.

Next week for See-Thru Thursday, The Invisible Man Returns (1940), though he does and doesn’t, starring Vincent Price and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. But for bonus invisible shenanigans, Silly Sunday kicks off with Invisible Woman (1940), starring Virginia Bruce and John Barrymore.