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: 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.