“An invisible man can rule the world. Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go. He can hear every secret. He can rob, and rape, and kill!”
This is another of the movies I'd not seen prior to starting this series, and it’s my first real disappointment.
I was quite surprised by how close this movie is to it’s source material. Unlike the other movies so far, this one is adapted directly from the book instead of a play, and has more use and variety of locations. James Whale, with much greater freedom post-Frankenstein, makes great use of the exteriors, especially the blizzards that become central to the story.
It begins at the same point as the book, with a bandaged stranger taking a room above a village pub to carry out his mysterious experiments. Unlike the book however, the Invisible Man (here named Jack Griffin) explains his back story through expositional speeches rather than the flashback to his original experiments. Griffin’s madness is changed to a result of the substances he used to become invisible rather than a psychological one, which makes the character a little two-dimensional.
“The Invisible Man” pushes the comedy element to the forefront more than any of the movies I’ve seen in this series so far, not entirely successfully. It’s a tough balancing act to have comedy in a horror movie, too much and the movie becomes silly, not enough and it feels out of place. The tone swings wildly between depicting Griffin as a cold murderous schemer and raving lunatic at the drop of a hat.
Unlike the other movies so far, this has a monster (here it’s in a moral sense) that requires a primarily vocal performance rather than a physical one. Claude Rains has a great voice, conveying intelligence and menace, but his continual r-r-r-r-rolling of his “R”’s and insane laugh border on the ridiculous. He comes across as a combination of The Joker and Dick Dastardly.
The supporting characters in these movies are also a problem. None receive any substantial screen time (even an added fiancé for Griffin) and as a result you never feel sympathy for any of them. As has become usual, the villagers in this movie are an idiot mob that alternate between angry and terrified. A particular mention has to go Una O’Conner’s performance as the landlady of the pub, which mostly consists of panicked screeching and hand-waving. I guess this may have been funny in 1933 (James Whale certainly found her hilarious), but it’s nails-on-a-blackboard annoying now.
It’s not at all bad by any means. The invisibility effects are still impressive today, the story moves at a brisk pace and is fairly faithful to the original book. But given combination of the classic source material and James Whale’s name on the credits, I can’t help but feel this was a missed opportunity.
Next to be exhumed: Karloff shows you can’t keep a good corpse down in “The Bride of Frankenstein”!
