The Invisible Ray (Universal, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I got home in time to watch a film, which turned out to be The Invisible Ray, made at Universal in 1936, directed by Lambert Hillyer from a script by Rain adapter John Colton based on an “original” story by Howard Higgin and Douglas Hodges. The stars were Boris Karloff – billed simply by his last name, in an era in which Universal was promoting him as “Karloff the Uncanny,” as if he actually were a scientifically or supernaturally created monster instead of merely an actor uncommonly good at playing them – and Bela Lugosi. The film was being shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of a night featuring the Karloff/Lugosi films, and the host, Alicia Malone, made an odd comment to the effect that the script cast Karloff as a psychopathic villain and Lugosi in a sympathetic role as the basically good, if tormented, man who tries to stop him. The reason that was an odd comment was that she said they usually weren’t cast that way, but they had been in their very first film together, The Black Cat (1934), in which Karloff was an even more florid villain than he is here and Lugosi a basically decent but discombobulated man who tries to stop his mad schemes. The Invisible Ray also anticipates the recent Black Panther Marvel comic books and movies in that they both posit that in ancient times a meteor landed in the middle of Africa that contained a super-powerful mineral (“Radium X” here, “Vibranium” in Black Panther) that can be used either for good or evil purposes. Karloff plays Dr. Janos Rukh, a super-scientist who lives and works in a crumbling old castle in the Carpathians (the last time Charles and I watched this movie I posted an imdb.com “Trivia” item which noted the irony that Karloff, actually an Englishman named William Henry Pratt, played a Hungarian, while Lugosi, who actually was Hungarian, played a Frenchman). He’s used his own telescope to track the progress of a meteor that left the Andromeda galaxy millions of years before and landed in Africa, and proposes an expedition to find it and recover the super-mineral it contained. There’s a major plot hole in that the animated scene which shows the meteor landing on Earth hitting land on the southwest corner of the continent in modern-day Angola or Namibia, but when the intrepid explorers – including Rukh’s reluctant wife Diana (Frances Drake), Sir Francis Stevens (Walter Kingsford), his wife Lady Arabella – a ditzy mystery writer (Beulah Bondi), and Lady Arabella’s secretary, Ronald Drake (Frank Lawton) – actually land in Africa it’s to the country of Nigeria, over 1,000 miles north of where we saw the meteor hit. Dr. Rukh leaves the camp of the others to go search for the meteor, taking along as his bearers a lot of hot-looking Black men from the casting directories of whom we get to see a lot of yummy topless shots, and he finds it. He dons a protective suit and is lowered into the pit where the meteor is wedged into a stone wall, and he uses archaeological tools to extract it. (This sequence was later used in a 1939 Universal serial, The Phantom Creeps, where Karloff essentially “doubled” for Lugosi since in The Phantom Creeps it was Lugosi’s character who was being lowered into the pit.)

Then he demonstrates the power of Radium X by fashioning a ray from it that literally melts a solid boulder overlooking the camp. Alas, one of his protective gloves tears and allows Rukh to be exposed to the full power of Radium X, which causes his face and arms to glow whenever he’s in the dark. He finds out how deadly this power is when he reaches out to pet his dog, and the dog dies instantly. Meanwhile, Dr. Felix Benet (Bela Lugosi), who’s come along on the trip to continue his researches in “astro-chemistry” and his belief that the rays of the sun can heal anything (he demonstrates this on a severely ill baby whom he cures, much to its mother’s joy), examines Rukh. Benet tells Rukh that the only thing that can keep him alive is a counter-serum made from Radium X the way an actual cure for radium poisoning had (at least according to this film) been made from radium itself. But Rukh has to take the counter-serum as an injection several times a day or his body will literally flame out and he’ll turn into a pile of dust as he dies. (It’s grimly ironic to see Lugosi handle the packet of syringes and ampules he gives Karloff given Lugosi’s own later history of morphine addiction.) In order to make Karloff appear properly fluorescent, Universal makeup genius Jack P. Pierce devised a phosphorescent makeup, but the special-effects cameraman, John P. Fulton (the man who’d made Claude Rains invisible in The Invisible Man), had a better idea. He insisted on doing it with special lighting alone, and it works surprisingly well even though there are moments in which the lights on Karloff’s arms go on or off split seconds either before or after the room lights change positions. Meanwhile, during Rukh’s long absences, his wife Diana has fallen in love with Ronald Drake (and Frank Lawton is surprisingly powerful in the role, especially given his performance in a similar part in James Whale’s Galsworthy adaptation One More River in 1934 – though I liked him better in that than the critics of the time; in my moviemagg post on it I said, “Critics generally praised it except for Frank Lawton, who was considered too young and immature for his role – though I think he’s just right for the part: a more charismatic, sexier performer like Cary Grant or Errol Flynn would have thrown off the balance of the story”). The other members of the expedition decide to go to a scientific conference in Paris to present Radium X to the world, while Rukh becomes more and more bitter about losing both his wife and credit for his discovery. He denounces them as thieves, and after he’s stopped back in Carpathia long enough to cure his mother (Violet Kemble Cooper in a beautifully honed performance) of blindness he suffered during one of Rukh’s father’s experiments – in essence he’s invented laser cataract surgery, and given that in 2023 I had successive laser cataract operations in both eyes and my vision dramatically improved, this part of the movie rang true for me! – he heads for Paris.

Rukh establishes himself in the French capital by renting a room from a Cockney woman – she explains her British accent by saying she moved to Paris with a Frenchman she married, who then died and left her the house – and when Benet announces a major reception after midnight during which he will demonstrate the miracle cures he’s achieved from Radium X, Rukh now is determined to crash the reception. Of course, it’s all a trap to lure Rukh out in the open so they can capture or kill him, especially since he’s already murdered both Sir Francis and Lady Arabella Stevens. Benet is convinced that Sir Francis’s eyes retained an image of the man who murdered him, which he can recover if he can get an ultraviolet camera – which the people just happen to have on the premises. He shoots a plate containing an image of Rukh’s face, which is something of a surprise given that Rukh is supposed to be dead. In fact he murdered a homeless person and then planted his clothes and papers on the body to make it appear Rukh died. But Benet drops and breaks the plate before he can show it to anyone else. Rukh crashes the invitation-only reception by accosting a fellow scientist named Meiklejohn (Frank Reicher) and giving him a knockout drug so he can purloin his invitation. Once inside he rather casually kills Benet with his lethal touch and plans to do the same to Diana, but despite their rather empty marriage (we get the impression that they’ve never had sex with each other, and she married him only because her father was working as Rukh’s assistant and on his deathbed he asked her to do so) he can’t bring himself to kill her. Along the way Diana and Ronald have married each other in the so-called “Church of the Six Saints” in Paris (actually the old set of Nôtre-Dame Cathedral Universal had built 13 years earlier for Lon Chaney’s The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame), and Rukh has used the Radium X ray to melt down each of the six statues along the cathedral’s roof as he’s murdered the corresponding individual. I’m not sure how the filmmakers got the Production Code Administration to agree to a bigamous marriage, even though the parties don’t know they’re bigamists since Diana’s husband faked his own death. I suspect this is what got the Legion of Decency, the enforcement arm of the Roman Catholic Church in America, to slap the film with a “B” rating – “morally objectionable in part for all” – especially since the two leads not only made a bigamous marriage, they did so in a Catholic church. (Actually in a previous viewing Charles spotted a mistake in the wedding scene; they’re supposed to be in a Catholic cathedral but the text of the service, beginning with “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” is from the Protestant Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer.) Realizing that Rukh has become an uncontrollable monster, Rukh’s mother confronts him at the reception and uses her walking stick to smash Rukh’s last remaining supplies of the counter-serum. Without it, Rukh literally bursts into flames, crashes out of a window, and ends up as a pile of dust on the street below.

One enterprising Los Angeles theatre owner decided to add to the realism of this scene by setting off a smoke bomb and flash grenade off at the precise moment Rukh falls through the window, anticipating William Castle’s “Emergo” and “Percepto” gimmicks by over two decades. The Invisible Ray is a great movie, quietly and powerfully understated; as Charles noted, it’s also one without any supernatural elements. It’s pure science fiction, and Hillyer’s direction is quite subtle and restrained, a far cry from the several tops Edgar G. Ulmer went over in the 1934 The Black Cat. The Invisible Ray got Hillyer the chance to direct Dracula’s Daughter, which was originally supposed to star Bela Lugosi repeating his role in Dracula until the “suits” at Universal revamped the project and decided not to have Dracula appear at all. Hillyer would go on to direct the 1943 Batman serial, the first time the Caped Crusader made it onto the big screen and one of the two best Bat-movies ever made (along with Tim Burton’s near-masterpiece from 1989) and would end up in the graveyard of most “B” directors – series television, retiring in 1956 even though he lived until 1969.