The Body Disappears (Warner Bros., 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 27) I put on Turner Classic Movies and caught three out of the six films they were showing on the subject of invisibility. They began the cycle with James Whale’s classic 1933 version of H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man and then the quite good 1953 spoof, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (about a prizefighter who uses the invisibility formula to make himself disappear so he can catch the gangsters who wanted him to throw a fight … or else), and they ended it with a truly terrible movie, The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), a film shot back-to-back with another awful sci-fi cheapie, Beyond the Time Barrier, in two weeks total in a Texas studio and directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (ah, how the mighty had fallen!). In between they showed the three films I actually watched, including a Warner Bros. comedy from 1941 called The Body Disappears that was actually by quite a wide margin the best of the movies I saw last night. It’s essentially a screwball comedy about a rich young man named Peter DeHaven (Jeffrey Lynn) who gets royally plastered at his bachelor party on the eve of his scheduled wedding. The bride is Christine Lunceford (Marguerite Chapman), who’s supposedly from another 1-percent family but they’re actually broke. The bachelor party is crashed by Robert Strock (Craig Stevens), who insists that Christine is his “girl” and she should be marrying him instead of that other guy. Strock is there to beat Peter up, but Peter’s friends intervene and keep Strock from being able to land a punch on him. As a prank, Peter’s friends decide to take him to the local medical college and lay him out on a slab in their dissecting room, pinning a lily to his chest with a note explaining what they’ve done.

Meanwhile, a teacher at the medical college, Professor Shotesbury (Edward Everett Horton), is conducting experiments in bringing the dead back to life. He’s already succeeded with a monkey named Charlie, and as his first subject he wants to kill his Black servant Willie (Willie Best, who usually played the typical dumb Black stereotype – in fact he was originally billed as “Sleep ‘n’ Eat” until Bob Hope, an anti-racist before anti-racism was cool, interceded with the studios and got Best billed under his real name – but here he gets to stretch out at least a bit and show some dry wit) so he can bring him back to life. Willie not-so-politely declines, and Shotesbury then hits on the idea of raiding the college morgue to get someone who’s already died, albeit recently, as his test subject. Naturally he grabs Peter even though Peter, when he comes to, protests that he’s not really dead. There’s some bizarre slapstick as Shotesbury and Willie try to maneuver the corpse out of the dissecting room and onto a gurney so they can take it home. When Peter revives Shotesbury is convinced that his life-reanimating serum actually works, though it has a side effect of rendering its user invisible. The Body Disappears is closer in mood to Universal’s comedy The Invisible Woman (made in 1940, a year earlier) than to any of the more serious Invisible Man films in Universal’s cycle. There are a lot of jokes about Peter DeHaven’s need to go about naked so no one can see him – the scenes in which he’s partially dressed were done the same way Universal’s effects crew did (wrapping the actor in black velvet and having him wear his clothes over it so the black would be clear in the black-and-white negative), but Warners’ effects technician, Edwin DuPar, didn’t do the process work anywhere nearly as well as Universal’s John P. Fulton did and there are plenty of the tell-tale lines around Jeffrey Lynn’s body that indicate badly matched composite shots.

When Peter arrives at the home of Christine still invisible, he brings a small suitcase containing his clothes and the suitcase ascends the big stairs of the Lunceford home apparently floating in mid-air. While Edward Everett Horton as the dotty scientist at the root of the action isn’t as convincingly droll as John Barrymore was in The Invisible Woman, he’s fine and so is Jane Wyman as Shotesbury’s daughter Joan. The gimmick is that Peter falls in love with Joan after he overhears a conversation between Christine and Strock in which she reveals that Strock is the man she really loves and she was only going to marry Peter for his money. Jane Wyman looks oddly hard-edged and it’s hard to match this workmanlike performance from the finely honed work she’d turn in later in her better-known films, but she’s effective. The plot involves Shotesbury getting sent to a mental institution by a friend and fellow professor who saw him chasing after his invisible monkey and the other members of the faculty board, then having Peter and Joan sneak him the invisibility formula so he can escape and give Peter the antidote before the time window closes and Peter becomes invisible for the rest of his life. The final shot shows Willie Best sitting on a needle attached to a syringe containing the formula, so he becomes invisible, too – meaning no fewer than four characters (including Wyman’s female lead) spent at least some of this film without being seen. The Body Disappears is well directed by D. Ross Lederman (a journeyman “B” director who has one genuine classic on his résumé, the 1932 pro-Native Western End of the Trail starring Tim McCoy, which is basically Dances With Wolves 48 years early) from a script by W. Scott Darling and Erna (not Emma!) Lazarus, and it’s a fun little comic romp and well worth seeing.