The Invisible Man, like Dracula and Frankenstein, is based off a novel, this time by H.G. Wells. That novel is not a horror novel per se but as we'll get to, the common assignment of The Invisible Man and its sequels to the horror genre is somewhat erroneous.
It's worth noting that the Invisible Man and Mummy franchises are only connected by the Abbott and Costello movies, which is a bit of cheating on my behalf as clearly Abbott and Costello do not play the same characters between films. Arguably, one could say that the Invisible Man's appearance at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein counts, but I'll get to that.
(Part One of this Retrospective, Part Two, Part Three)
(Part One of this Retrospective, Part Two, Part Three)
The Invisible Man (1933):
Watching the first entry of a Universal series is always interesting because so often are one's expectations subverted. It's baffling to think about Dracula creating a franchise. Frankenstein is more believable in that regard, and that The Wolf Man received no sequels besides Larry Talbot's appearances in the monster rallies is flat out depressing. The Invisible Man and its sequels are movies which I've never been involved with, or even really that interested in, despite my enjoyment of the H.G. Wells novel which this movie is based on, but I have always heard that compared to flicks like The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Man is quite good and deserves its place in the "canon." My feelings are mixed, as I find it difficult to either praise or drag the film in the end.
We open in the middle of a snow-storm as a man covered head to toe in coats and bandages barges into the Lion's Head Inn. He quickly proves himself to be a generally rude bloke, violently demanding a room and total privacy. Once he is decently settled we come to a scene introducing Dr. Cranley and his daughter Flora, who is engaged to one of the doctor's students, Jack Griffin. Flora and Griffin's friend Dr. Kemp are concerned about Griffin, who has been missing for some time. Back at the inn, the verbal viciousness of the stranger--Griffin, of course--becomes physical and in a pique of frenzy Griffin reveals that a drug of his creation has made him invisible. When the townsfolk confront Griffin, exposing his invisibility, he loses all of his control, and tracks down and forces Kemp to become his assistant in an attempt to do nothing short of taking over the British Empire, if not the whole world! Griffin commits crimes both serious and silly for the rest of the movie's runtime until at last he is caught up with and slain.
This movie gets off on the wrong foot, even if it jumps back briefly now and again to the right one. Maybe it's because I've been essentially binging these films, but I am getting a little sick of the obsession with obnoxious and/or superstitious peasants. The fact that they are Silly Dickensian Brits in this venture doesn't help matters (though Racial Stereotype Romani Folk are not much better), nor does the fact that Screamy Lady from Bride of Frankenstein is among them, once again screaming in a way that not even the shallowest of shallow preteens would find amusing. So much of this interrupts the genuinely well-made moments; the shots of the tavern patrons laughing and talking with one another, playing darts, and drinking help us forget that there's a weirdo out in the snow, which helps us feel the shock the crowd does when said weirdo bursts in all dramatic-like. And while we are dazzled by the special effects--and we will be throughout the entirety of the film, because Jesus these are amazing--it's sad to see that they're put to use to Griffin playing ring around the rosy with the villagers while laughing like the Joker, which is hardly the peak of Mind-Warping Horror. It could be argued that since this is still early in the film this is meant to build up Griffin's descent into madness and true evil--but that brings to my main criticism, which is the movie's sometimes ludicrous tone problem.
Because later in the movie, Griffin is still being silly! Yes, he kills people, and there's even a reference to an offscreen "train incident" (Griffin talks early on about wrecking a train). But the murders pass so quickly, and the "train incident"'s offscreen nature make them seem almost insultingly hollow, moreso than even a lot of slasher films. It's impossible not to laugh at Griffin skipping down the street wearing naught but a pair of pants, terrorizing some old farm lady, because this is supposed to be happening in close sequence with the train incident, which, if it was the wrecking of a passenger train (this is why we should see it), probably killed dozens and injured hundreds in a best case scenario. If they couldn't present such horrible incidents in full onscreen because of censors or a limitation of budget, they should have cut them from the script.
That having been said, this movie is not a trainwreck. (Ha.) Despite my frustrations I tried watching it as a horror film, and when I found myself unable to solve the problem that I just don't find someone being invisible scary in and of itself, I tried to look for other ways the horror shines through. And I realized ultimately that despite the general glossing-over of the domestics about Griffin, like his relationship with Flora, we are meant to identify with Flora, her father, and Kemp. Griffin was important to them, and to see his decline from their eyes would be genuinely horrifying. The film spends precious little time with this angle, but it is deepened slightly by the fact that Dr. Cranley and Kemp determine that one of the key ingredients in Griffin's invisibility formula is monocaine, an extremely unstable drug pulled off the market years ago. In a sense, then, it's almost like watching a family grieve someone succumbing to meth addiction, except it's just one hit that's needed to start the irreversible descent into decay. Suggesting that Griffin was a relatively reasonable bloke before he became gripped by his experiments helps give him a tragic element--a victim of his own arrogance, definitely, if he was willing to use a drug that he seemingly knew might fuck him up, but a victim all the same.
That in and of itself should be enough to save the film from my hate, but as it's worth repeating, the special effects used in The Invisible Man should be mandatory studying at any film school for people thinking of working in the SFX field. If you can't do chroma keying or double exposure at least as good as these people got it in 1933, maybe think of doing something else. Adding to the awesome visual effects is Claude Rains' acting. He was superb as Sir John Talbot in The Wolf Man, but The Invisible Man is his movie. Not only does he physically act well in the scenes he appears but his voice is marvelous and sells the character perfectly. Some have said Rains should have done radio dramas, and what leads me to agree is the shocking closeness between his voice and that of Geoffrey Beevers, who played one of the versions of the Master on the original Doctor Who series, who reprises the role in some of Doctor Who's Big Finish audio dramas. Beevers' performance for Big Finish has made him one of my favorite actors ever, and so Rains' similarity to Beevers greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the film. While I can't love it wholeheartedly, this movie is good if nothing else for the Invisible Man himself. And given that he's, y'know, the title figure, that means the movie generally succeeds at what it was created to do.
The Invisible Man Returns (1940):
Like its predecessor, The Invisible Man Returns is also a mixed bag--a film full of moments both good and bad. Both fortunately and unfortunately, the good and bad elements are subdued, making the good moments no longer "great," and the bad elements no longer "really bad." This leaves us with a serviceable sci-fi thriller that will leave a lot of people asleep.
Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe (played by Vincent Price) is sentenced to hang for the death of his brother Michael. However, he's not lost quite yet--a secret injection of invisibility serum by Dr. Frank Griffin, Jack Griffin's younger brother, allows Geoffrey to sneak out of his cell, with the intent being to administer the cure before he goes permanently insane as Frank's brother did. The problem is: Frank hasn't invented the cure yet. Aiding them is Geoffrey's fiancee Helen, who is disgusted by Geoffrey's invisibility, which doesn't put her in good hands when the formula starts making him distrust those around him. Complicating matters further is the fact that Geoffrey soon forgets about the cure and becomes dangerously obsessed with using his newfound power to exact revenge for his sentence...as well as possibly take over the world.
First the good: I jumped on how the real horror of The Invisible Man was not his unnatural appearance, or even his ability to get away with any crime, but his decline into madness. Rather than poke at such a theme, The Invisible Man Returns makes it the central conflict, and to good effect. It allows the film to do what any sequel should: expand on its predecessor. Speaking of things being used to good effect, the movie also toys around with the invisibility effects, which vary in degree of impressiveness. Like all Universal sequels, there's a lot of recycled material, but because even Universal wouldn't stoop so low as to steal scenes from a seven-year-old film, most of what we see is fresh. There's a great shot where a cop literally smokes Geoffrey out with his cigar, with the smoke pooling around the outline of his invisible body. Similarly, the lengthy sequence where Geoffrey bedevils a thug to extract the identity of the real murderer does make the film at least somewhat worth it. Plus, they even get around the inevitable nudity jokes about an Invisible Man (who obviously can't wear clothes if he wants to be invisible), which are pretty bold for what I've seen from '40s films. That's not to say that they're really that controversial or funny.
What's interesting to me about The Invisible Man Returns is that it shows to me why the Invisible Man, despite having five films to his credit by the time of the making of House of Frankenstein, never showed up in any of the monster rallies. While the original film was played for horror, this one works much better as a revenge thriller. I suspect we'll see the full blossoming of this assertion in Invisible Agent, which as far as I know makes no effort to work as a horror film at all.
Obligatory title nitpick: the Invisible Man does not Return in this film, the original one, anyway. He is still dead, and will be for the remainder of the films. Meaning it will presumably be difficult for him to get Revenge in four years too!
Obligatory continuity nitpick: who is the Invisible Man at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein? The fact that he is voiced by Vincent Price seems to suggest that he is Geoffrey Radcliffe, but--spoiler alert--Geoffrey is cured of his invisibility at the end of this film so he can have a happy ending, and one would presume the pain invisibility inflicted on him would make him unwilling to become invisible again just to torment two bunglers! Ignoring a silly Real World explanation like, "Vincent Price was probably the most convenient ex-Invisible Man to put in the cameo and they were also probably not worried about continuity in a comedy film," we can either presume that Geoffrey had a relapse and went crazy again, choosing to fuck with two people he never met, or this is the Invisible Man of The Invisible Man's Revenge impersonating the voice of his predecessor.
The Invisible Woman (1940):
...honestly, what the fuck?
If The Invisible Man started on the wrong foot, then The Invisible Woman had the proper foot amputated. We open with an atrociously stupid sequence of stiff slapstick hijinks with a butler which you'll swiftly notice become extremely awkward if you cover your ears to drown out the ostensibly whacky music. This long-suffering butler (whose actor cannot joke to save his life), works for Dick Russell, playboy extraordinaire. Russell has wasted his fortune on girls and booze, but also on bankrolling/investing in a scientist named Professor Gibbs, who believes he has discovered the secret of invisibility. (There's no mention of the Griffins, meaning this movie shares continuity merely by the title.) After introducing Russell to be our main character we ditch him almost entirely to follow Gibbs as he recruits a model named Kitty Carroll to be our titular Invisible Woman. Both Kitty and Gibbs use her invisibility for a variety of ends, including taking revenge on "Growly Growley," Kitty's abusive boss, and thwarting a mobster plot to steal and sell the invisibility formula. During this time we get supposedly funny invisibility gags that we've seen before, always crowned with repetitious and dull jokes that boil down to "oh my god she is invisible." These are broken up by a new type of invisibility scene--the sexy invisibility scene! Yeah, you never got to see Claude Rains or Vincent Price try on pantyhose while invisible. This sort of sleaziness is the kind I'd expect from a Doris Wishman film, not a fucking 1940s Invisible Man movie. Dick Russell comes back to the movie so that we can shove a romance plot into this and Jesus Christ just let it end. I can't even get into this movie's climax, which involves a callback to a scene which reveals the invisibility formula has a negative reaction with alcohol. Somehow this leads to--I think--a twist where Kitty can become invisible whenever she gets drunk, which helps her regain invisibility after being caught by the mobsters. And this leads into an even dumber ending involving an invisible baby and OH MY GOD
Bereft of nearly any redeeming quality (containing not a single joke that did anything more that slightly alter my breathing rhythm), The Invisible Woman is hopefully the worst Invisible Man movie of the bunch, and easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. I'm not kidding here, folks--this movie was torture. For comparison, two of my other least favorite movies are Night of Horror, a movie in which virtually nothing happens, and Humongous, a movie which spends 90% of the visual space of its runtime in total pitch blackness. Both of those movies, however, are merely boring, whereas this one is offensive. Though it contains significantly less sexism than I was expected, and never gets racist, ableist, homophobic, or generally hateful or meanspirited, it is so unspeakably dumb and lazy that it shames even Dracula. And at times, it contains the boredom of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Don't get a movie that can do both. Boredom plus lazy, stupid comedy is a death sentence for a film in my judgment. There's no use telling me "it was another time" as far as the comedy is concerned: I've seen enough movies to know that this sort of shit would be dated and flat even when it was released. Universal spent nearly $300,000 on this in 1940, which comes out to about $5,000,000 today. Not a single fucking penny of that was justified. I apologize for being brief with the review for The Invisible Woman, but my desire to never remember this film's existence leads me to such brevity; I would say that one would have to watch it for oneself to understand just how bad this movie's plot, acting, and comedy are, but no. Never, ever watch this lousy excuse for a movie.
Invisible Agent (1942):
I was sweating when I started Invisible Agent, fearing a repeat of its predecessor. I couldn't imagine them trying to do something that stupid twice, but mercifully, Invisible Agent is only a comedy in that it is a World War II propaganda film, which has obligatory funny bits leveled against Nazis. While it generally stays within the propaganda mold, being flat but occasionally entertaining, and only sometimes annoying, it doubles in its own way as a superhero film, making it at the very least a fun way to spend eighty minutes.
We open to an American city, in the print shop of Frank Raymond, ne Griffin--nephew, son, or grandson of "Frank Griffin Sr." (The movie itself expresses ambiguity in this relationship, as if unsure how much time has passed since The Invisible Man Returns.) A group of Nazis, led by Peter Lorre (who seems to be intended to be Japanese, reflecting his playing of detective Mr. Moto), confront Griffin Jr. and demand the location of the invisibility formula. He manages to overcome them and escape, and the incident causes the U.S. government to urge Frank to give them the formula, in case they need it for an emergency. "There's no emergency that could necessitate such a thing," Frank assures them, but then, without warning--Pearl Harbor! Suddenly Frank is the first man to sign up for the invisibility program, and he becomes the Invisible Agent. From there we see him fight and sneak his way into Germany, where he befriends Maria Sorenson, wife of a Nazi officer, who is nonetheless opposed to the Nazis. Maria is having several key Nazi officers over for dinner, and Frank takes this as an opportunity to spy on them, and stop some of their schemes.
Really, it was cathartic to get a film of this quality after one as awful as The Invisible Woman. While it's not great--it's a propaganda film, after all--it still manages to hold one's attention. Jon Hall does a good job as Frank Raymond/Griffin, so it will be fun for him to come back, albeit as a different character, in The Invisible Man's Revenge. Peter Lorre holds up his reputation--this is my first movie with him and it was a good show of his talents. He manages to give a relatively dignified white-guy-as-Asian-guy performance by 1940s standards--his natural features made it unnecessary to put him in the usual yellowface makeup of the time, and he doesn't speak with an affected accent, nor does he speak in broken English. The only thing that happens that's stereotypical is when he commits seppuku, but even then, Japanese soldiers and agents did commit seppuku during World War II. The performance he gives, especially in the opening scene, comes across sometimes as something akin to if Marlon Brando showed up in a Bert I. Gordon film. Kinda nice when it's not just stiff guys in suits reciting lines at each other, isn't it? The pants of nearly everyone within five hundred miles of Lorre come off, because he acts them off of those people. I should actually see one of his good movies, I suppose.
Rest assured, the bulk of Invisible Agent is mostly stiff people in various tight clothes reciting lines at each other. It doesn't matter--there's not poorly framed butler slapstick! Joking aside, there are some interesting thematic things of note here. Namely, the only people who end up viewing invisibility as a bad, scary thing as the bad guys. When Frank meets Germans who aren't sympathetic to the Nazis, they call his invisibility wonderful. What's more is that Frank Griffin Jr. was able to work out the old insanity-causing kinks in his forefathers' formulae. This really cements my suspicion that the Invisible Man films are only horror films by distorted reputation only--they are sci-fi thrillers, when they aren't diving into the horrific deeps of humor. Invisible Agent is especially interesting because it shows a Griffin taking back the evil of his predecessors and making it into a force of good. Invisible Men before him wanted to become dictators, but he uses their means to crush dictators. Despite its overall ordinariness, Invisible Agent may resonate with modern viewers most strongly, least of all because of the ongoing popularity of superhero films. After all, would a great deal of us not use the power of invisibility, if we had it, to deck Nazis in the face? Now more than ever do we need the work of Dr. Griffin...
The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944):
We have one more look back at a serious entry in the Invisible Man series before returning to comic relief. I have hopes that Abbott and Costello will be at least a little better than Kitty Carroll and Professor Gibbs, even if I still proceed with trepidation.
On a chilly night, a rude, disturbed man comes into an old tailor shop to buy a suit and hat. He seems paranoid, claiming he doesn't want to be spied on--though he regains control of himself. When he leaves, the tailor goes through his pockets, finding a newspaper article identifying his customer as Robert Griffin, an escaped mental patient! However, Griffin doesn't appear overly crazy, or at least, he has good reasons for his madness: he is a victim of his old friends, Jasper and Irene, who screwed him out of a fortune in diamonds in Africa a few years ago, by knocking him over the head sending him to the mental institution. In doing so, they also cut him off from his girlfriend, their daughter Julie. After nearly drowning and being saved by an annoying comic relief hobo named Herbert, Griffin finds himself in the strange company of Dr. Peter Drury (John Carradine) who wants to turn a man invisible to become famous--he's already succeeded with a parrot and a dog. Griffin agrees, and when the formula succeeds, he forces Jasper to sign over all of his property to him, and tries to interfere in Julie's new relationship with reporter Mark Foster. When it transpires that the only way to become visible again is with a full-body blood transfusion, he drains Drury's blood, despite the doctor's warning that he will lose his visibility again after a short while. When Herbert learns that Griffin has regained visibility he demands money, but Griffin abuses him before finally paying him off. This turns out to be a eucatastrophe of Tolkienesque proportions when Herbert (the beaten, discarded Gollum of this story, allowed to live against his would-be killer's better judgment) helps stop Griffin from stealing Mark's blood when his invisibility fails again. Griffin can't be allowed to live for his hubris and thus Drury's dog tears his throat out. The moral seems to be that this was the intervention of God himself...oh, we are so far from Claude Rains.
The Invisible Man's Revenge is...disappointing. By now the wonder of invisibility effects have worn off and they are used so sparingly and weakly here that they fail to hold our attention. The movie drags, and it doesn't help that one of the things it borrows from its progenitor is the breaking of tone. Both The Invisible Man and its fourth sequel will show us (or more usually tell us about) the power of invisibility used for mayhem and murder, and then show us (more usually than telling us about) the power of invisibility used for practical jokes and other such flimsy forms of comic relief. There's very little gravity in the film to begin with due to its plodding pace, and when these whiplash moments break it up it derails the movie more and more, until the "he tampered in God's domain" ending feels like a slap in the face. If it had been twenty minutes shorter and faster, we would have something on par at least with The Invisible Man Returns. I can say at least that I didn't hate the film, but it was a mediocre effort at best, a sign that Universal was stuck in the rut. It's too bad that they couldn't inject it with some of the spare craziness from House of Frankenstein two doors over.
I don't know what else to say. A member of the Griffin family becomes invisible and takes revenge on those who wronged him. There is nothing to add to that, save for the odd fact that Robert is not overtly connected to the Griffin family we've been generally following so far. In fact, it's specified that he has no family, which I presume means that if he is a relative, Frank Raymond was killed by the Nazis or something. So another Griffin from a good movie bites the dust. C'est la vie...speaking of Frank Raymond, I guess I could also add that Jon Hall does a decent job in this one. He is much better in Invisible Agent as a cocky, invincible Invisible Man--vengeful, sinister Robert Griffin is a bit beyond his acting range. Perhaps if they had ever decided to try for something like House of the Invisible Man or The Invisible Man's Ghost or whatever, we could have seen him try again.
Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951):
And so the largely unpredictable Invisible Man series draws to a close with its obligatory comedy nightcap. My fears were unjustified--this is by far no repeat of The Invisible Woman. While Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man will slip out of my memory in a matter of days, if not hours, it still has a few moments that make it salvageable.
Bud and Lou's characters, this time, are named Bud and Lou. They are recent graduates of a prestigious detective agency and soon open their own practice--their first client is escaped boxer Tommy Nelson, accused of murdering his manager. With the help of the detectives Tommy reunites with his fiancee Helen (the second love interest named Helen featured in the series now) and her uncle, Dr. Gray; the doctor has recreated Jack Griffin's invisibility serum, insanity side effects and all, and Tommy intends to use it to find the real murder. Though they're initially interested in the reward offered for Tommy's capture, they soon side with the Invisible Man, leading inevitably to Lou's own career as a boxer, and a match with the presciently-named champion Rocky. Of course, all is mended--the real killer is caught, and Tommy is made visible again via blood transplant from Lou, who gains some of the invisibility serum in term. Except the serum wears on and off again at random, and also apparently turns his legs around backwards, condemning him to a long life of great pain and inconvenience. Finis.
Pffft...a better title would be Abbott and Costello Meet an Invisible Man. What a ripoff--no Claude Rains, no Vincent Price, not even Jon Hall! And for what lousy excuse, that they actually had careers that were leading them places in a way totally unlike Abbott and Costello? I kid. While it's definitely a step down from Meet Frankenstein, this movie still has a few laughs, even if it's clear that Bud and Lou are sort of going through the motions at this point. Plus the two apparently lack some of their former mobility--shots of Lou crawling under things are sped up, and it's hard to tell if they're trying to play the effect for laughs or if Lou Costello legitimately couldn't crawl at a reasonable speed at his age. I can't be too harsh, though. We'll see where I stand when I see the pair again in four years' time...
Most of what I laughed at was Abbott and Costello's mimery when it to interacting with the invisibility man. All the effect bits with floating books and cigarettes and whatnot is hat eighteen years old by this point, but once again, the professionalism of the pair sells a lot of gags that The Invisible Woman absolutely couldn't. Similarly--and tellingly--the puns and one-liners based around eyes and seeing and not seeing and how weird and shocking invisibility is and all that brainless, skim-at-the-top horseshit that Invisible Woman tried to foist on us is kept to a distinct minimum. Though they pushed their way through a lot of awful scripts in their time, it seems as if Costello and Abbott had at least some standards.
It's also interesting to me that this movie maintains actual continuity. Not only do they mention Jack Griffin by name, but they show a picture of Claude Rains to back this up! This is actually meant to be a sequel to the 1933 film, while Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein seemed to operate in its own universe, barely mentioning any plot details from the original Dracula and Frankenstein (certainly nothing of the sequels) and restoring Larry Talbot's lycanthropy after it was removed in the film that came before. I suppose, though, that fewer people would have seen The Invisible Man, while Frankenstein and Dracula were beloved and memorized the world over. There would be greater need to establish the concept before getting on with the whackiness.
Again, I will not remember this movie or any of its scenes or lines in just a little while, and it's not a worthy end to the series, but it is relatively inoffensive and it did not overly bore me (even if I have to dock points for all the time we have to spend looking at 45-year-old Lou Costello's nearly nude body). Once more I will settle for pale mediocrity to escape the sad depths that this series fell to.
Next time, we wrap things up once and for all with a look back at the Mummy!
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Image Sources: Wikipedia, Classic Movie Posters, Universal Horror Wiki
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