The Invisible Man (Universal, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008, 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Kiss Before the Mirror, Charles and I watched the next James Whale film in sequence and an acknowledged classic, The Invisible Man, based on H. G. Wells’ novel and an extraordinary film that despite some surprising slip-ups from a British director (the pub in Iping where the film begins has an American-style dartboard and barrels reading “Whiskey” and “Rye” – one imdb.com “Goofs” contributor said that in Britain the former drink is called “Whisky,” without the “e,” and “Rye” is not sold under that name), manages to do full justice to the original story and include some quirky bits of wit from Whale and his writer, Journey’s End author R. C. Sherriff, notably the famous scene in which Jack Griffin (Claude Rains), the invisible man, details the difficulties of being invisible: it’s hard to walk down stairs because “we are so used to watching our feet,” he can be seen in fog or smoke “like a bubble,” he can only be invisible while naked (which causes the obvious difficulties on cold nights) and he can’t go out as an invisible man for an hour or so after eating because “the food is visible in me until it is digested.”

I hadn’t realized until this time around how closely Universal and Whale followed the template of Frankenstein in making The Invisible Man, down to the four protagonists: Claude Rains takes Colin Clive’s role as the mad scientist, Gloria Stuart is in Mae Clarke’s place as the woman who loves him but is fearful of the outcome of the research that has caused him to abandon her (and both films have similar scenes in which the protagonists’ hard, bitter voices audibly grow softer when their girlfriends are mentioned, William Harrigan in John Boles’ place as the mad scientist’s best friend and would-be lover of his fiancée, and Henry Travers as the scientist’s older mentor who’s worried about him and the horror he may have unknowingly unleashed through his experiments. Obviously the main difference between Frankenstein and The Invisible Man is that in The Invisible Man the mad scientist and the monster are the same person – which in turn reflects the huge success of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first published in 1886 – 11 years before Wells published The Invisible Man. I’ve long argued that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is in essence the first “just say no to drugs” novel, since it was written when morphine, heroin and cocaine were all still legal and their adverse effects were just starting to come to light. There’s a remarkable passage in the book in which Jekyll, reflecting on his history in a combination confession, autobiography and suicide note, says that had he been in a better frame of mind when he first took his transmogrifying drug it might have turned him into someone purely good instead of someone purely evil – an eerie anticipation of some of the pro-drug literature of the 1960’s, in which would-be LSD users were told to make sure they were in a positive frame of mind when they took the drug so the visions it would induce would be pleasant instead of nightmarish. It’s also reflected in some of the dialogue in The Invisible Man, in which the invisible man declaims that at first he was pursuing the experiment only out of scientific curiosity, but eventually the drugs he took changed his consciousness and led him to a megalomaniac pursuit of power.

I’ve been a fan of the movie The Invisible Man ever since one night in my childhood when I was ready to watch a telecast of one of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies (also from Universal) and she insisted I watch The Invisible Man on another channel. One unusual aspect of The Invisible Man is it stays surprisingly close to the original novel – unlike the film of Frankenstein, which used hardly any of Mary Shelley’s book except the basic premise, the setting and some of the character names. R. C. Sherriff told a story that when he showed up at Universal to write The Invisible Man, he asked for a copy of the H. G. Wells novel he was supposed to be adapting. Universal didn’t have one; all they had were a series of “treatments,” including one set in Czarist Russia and one on Mars. He scoured Hollywood’s second-hand bookshops for a copy of Wells’ novel, found one and realized it would make a great film story on its own without much in the way of adaptation (though one change he made was that in Wells’ novel Jack Griffin was an albino, so he was already short of skin pigment even before he began his researches). James Curtis’s Whale biography contained that story but said the writer was not Sherriff but another writer, John Weld. Curtis also said that H. G. Wells was not only still alive (and working) in 1933 but had a clause in his contract with Universal that gave him approval over the script, so the studio couldn’t deviate much from his story without him using his contractual ability to pull the rights and cancel the film.

Once again Whale shows off his love for the British theatrical tradition in his direction of Claude Rains, who’s swathed in bandages for most of the film except when he actually strips and works as the Invisible Man but still gets chances to overact not only via his delivery of the dialogue but his gestures and body language. According to Curtis, Whale actually wanted Rains in the film from the get-go – Rains had made only one previous film, a British silent called Build Thy House in 1920, and apparently Whale liked the idea of using an obscure actor who hadn’t done much film work so audiences wouldn’t recognize but Universal’s leading horror actor was Boris Karloff and the project was first offered to him. He turned it down, apparently simply because he wanted a rest – he’d wanted to visit his family in Britain, though the trip turned into a working vacation when the Gaumont-British company offered him a custom-made script called The Ghoul – though later Karloff would put out the word that he’d turned down The Invisible Man because he wouldn’t actually be seen on screen until the very end of the film. (It’s an interesting counterpoint to Bela Lugosi’s rejection of the part of Frankenstein’s monster because the character had no dialogue; when Lugosi finally played the monster in the film Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man he was given dialogue, but when preview audiences laughed at the monster speaking his dialogue was cut out and erased from the soundtrack.)

The Invisible Man remains one of the very best films in the horror genre – and in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power and joined Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin in the trio of dictators threatening to take over the world through brute force and sheer strength, Jack Griffin’s dialogue and particularly his insistence that “an invisible man could rule the world” probably rang true to a lot of moviegoers. The Invisible Man is also the sort of movie in which, though there are elaborate special effects (in my previous blog post on this film, (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2008/10/invisible-man-universal-1933.html) I described the technique with which Claude Rains was made to look invisible and handle objects without being seen: “John P. Fulton’s special effects are among the most remarkable ever filmed — they were done by wrapping Rains’ body in black cloth and filming him against a black screen; if Rains were to appear partially dressed in the film sequence, or to take his clothes off, his clothes would be put on over the black wrappings; and if he were to manipulate an object with the final effect being one of him, say, lighting and smoking a cigarette with himself invisible and only the cigarette, the pack it came from, and the match visible on screen, he handled these objects against the black screen. What emerged when this film was processed as negative was a clear strip of film in which only his clothes and the objects he was handling registered; and this strip, a reversal print in which the clothes and objects were darkened into black silhouettes, and the camera negative containing the rest of the scene’s action (including any other actors shown in the final scene) were optically printed together.” And yet, unlike all too many special-effects films today, The Invisible Man is so finely written and well directed one doesn’t notice how cool the effects are; you’re engrossed in the story and it’s only after the movie is over than you start thinking, “How did they do that?”