Invisible Man, The (1933)

invisibleman

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
Produced by Carl Laemmle, Jr.

As you may have noticed, this is the first review in the “Evidence of Things Not Seen” Video Binge; I figured, if you’re going to do invisibility movies, you have to start with the grandpappy. And in addition to my usual informative and entertaining commentary, you might also discover why this movie almost may have deserved a remake like Hollow Man.

Given that this is one of the Universal adaptations, in the tradition of Dracula and Frankenstein, it’s surprising how faithful it attempts to be to the H.G. Wells novel (much better, for instance, than Dracula — and we won’t even speak of Frankenstein as being an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel). That’s good, because we get at least a glimpse (so to speak) of what really makes the novel, one of Well’s slightest, still worth reading: its wit.

“How much garlic did you put in this linguini?!”

We open, as in the novel, at a lower-class pub in a working-class English town, where a mysterious stranger shows up in a blizzard, unseasonably seeking a room. Naturally, his wrapped and goggled visage, revealing only his nose, causes quite a bit of stir when once he leaves the room with his hostess; Was he in an accident? Is he a criminal evading the law? Or, for that matter, is he a criminal who was in an accident? (This is, you recall, a pub before sports TV was a possibility; there’s no built-in entertainment.) Who is this mysterious man?

By way of answer, we cut directly to a chemical lab, where the older Dr. Cranley (Henry Travers, best known as Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life) and the younger Dr. Kemp (William Harrigan) conveniently expositionize on how the third scientist, one Jack Griffin, has now been missing for close to a month. Naturally, Cranley’s daughter Flora (Gloria Stuart, who more recently played old Rose in Titanic) was in love with Griffin, and naturally Kemp was his rival for her affections. Isn’t that the way it is in every laboratory?

Alas, our dimwits at the pub are ignorant of this, and so live in tolerance of their lodger until the hostess finally gets fed up with his surly manners and the big ol’ chemistry set he plays with in his rooms (“1001 Fun Experiments!”). And when the lodger knocks the innkeeper down the stairs, the police and the boys from the pub come up to teach him a lesson –

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“As God is my witness, I only wanted to take a little off the nose.”

– and here’s where we get the scene that everyone remembers, and that every subsequent invisibility movie has had to reference: The lodger removes his false nose and his concealing bandages, revealing — nothing! There’s nothing there! My heavens, it’s an invisible man! And it’s Claude Rains!

Stripping to his invisible birthday suit, Griffin knocks his pursuers and capers off into the street, playing pranks on passersby with the help of lots ‘n’ lots of piano wire. (A side note: despite the fact that the entire invisibility thing is based on Griffin running around in the buff, not a soul brings up any of the obvious bawdy possibilities. Nothing! Not even, “Poor blighter, runnin’ around in the winter, naked as the day ‘e was born.” Not a thing. I mean, if I were making this movie, that would probably be my tagline: “He’s invisible — undetectable — but only when he’s NAKED!!!!” But those were more innocent, more decorous, more cognitively dissonant days.)

In the meantime, Cranley and Kemp discover a fragment of a chemical ingredient list from Griffin’s destroyed files, and the last on the list is a rare drug called “monocane.” This gives Cranley pause, because although it’s well-known as a bleaching agent (hmm), it’s lesser-known property is that it drives its consumer COMPLETELY INSANE!

“Hoots, mon, whaur’s ma heid?”

In other words, you’re not going to find it on your HMO’s drug formulary.

Well. Kemp goes home that evening, and while sitting around reading the paper, he notices a strange draft… then a disembodied voice…

Yes, Griffin is completely off the deep end, and he wants to recruit Kemp to be his right-hand man as he wages an invisible reign of terror! You know, murders, train wrecks, New Coke, that kind of thing. Apparently his breed of insanity is one which causes him in effect to say, “I plan to commit the kinds of atrocities which any other person would try to stop, and I’m going to trust you and tell you all about them!” But first, he wants to get his notebooks, which he inadvertently left behind in his lodgings; they supposedly hold the key to an antidote, so that he can slip in and out of invisibility at his leisure. And he needs Kemp’s help there.

“They simply shoehorned me into the plot? Oh, how could they? How could they?!”

What ensues is naturally a whole bunch of invisible falderall, followed soon thereafter by his promised reign of terror!, as well as a number of lame attempts to catch him. Along the way, Kemp simpers and pleads with the police to protect him, and Flora does… very little.

If you’ve read the book, you recognize the broad outlines of the plot intact here. Notably different is the inclusion of a love interest so obligatory and perfunctory that her presence is head-cockingly absurd. I mean, she does nothing! The love triangle is sketched in in the opening scenes, then never referred to again. Kemp’s part is much beefed up from the novel, but not necessarily to great advantage, as the movie Kemp is a rather useless man, given more to whining and whimpering than any form of constructive action.

In fact, the biggest deficiency in the story is that there just plain ain’t a protagonist. Griffin’s not terribly sympathetic, Kemp is less a commendable figure here than he is in the novel (where he only shows up halfway through), Cranley and his daughter are both fifth wheels, and in the denouement the reign of terror! is brought to a close by a whole bunch of nameless bobbies and an Amish-looking farmer. (All right, they can’t both be fifth, can they? So Cranley is fifth, and Flora, who is even more irrelevant, is sixth. Okay?)

This being black-n-white film stock, we’re without the all-important Clue of the Yellow Snow.

The inclusion of the psychologically-damaging effects of monocane are an innovation over the novel, where Griffin’s megalomania is apparently an outgrowth of his native personality combined with his unusual circumstances. My guess is that the filmmakers in this case were trying to soften Griffin and make him more sympathetic because, shucks, it’s not HIS fault he wants to hurt people and rule the world. But it still doesn’t humanize him enough to give the audience someone to root for.

With the movie being so clearly inferior to the rest of the famous Universal characters, why is The Invisible Man considered part of the same pantheon? It’s the special effects, baby! The image of the bandaged, goggled Invisible Man is still a striking one, and both it and the matte effects for the unwrapping have become as identifiable symbols for invisibility as the square cranium is for Frankenstein’s monster. Not only that, but until recently, those effects (along with the requisite piano wire) have still been the standard for conveying invisibility.

“Until recently,” of course, means until the advent of the current crop of CGI cinema. Which is why I made the remark, waaaay back, that Hollow Man may really be the remake that The Invisible Man deserves. Oodles of people complained that Hollow Man was a not-terribly-compelling story whose only raison d’etre is it’s new ‘n’ improved invisibility effects; those same people would to well to remember that the original was in much the same boat.