The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933)

Scientist Griffin has dreams of being ranked with the greats of science. In order to achieve this goal, he has developed a solution that has rendered him invisible.

Determined to undo its effects, he has gone into exile to find a cure. What he does not realise is that one of the ingredients he used is driving him mad.

When his improvised lab is compromised by nosy village people, he declares war on the countryside.

Will the Invisible Man be cured? Or defeated?

There are some movies that deserve to be seen on the big screen. The Invisible Man is one of those movies that I have been looking forward to seeing, but I wanted to wait until I could see it on the big screen.

My local arthouse held a festival of classic Universal horror movies earlier this month, which gave me an opportunity to finally check it out.

Directed by James Whale following his work on 1931's Frankenstein, The Invisible Man is a delight.

In contrast to the gothic fairy tale of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man is more of a darkly humorous thriller, with plenty of screen time given to incidental characters (the villagers in Ipping and local bobbies) and Griffin's various escapades on his unsuspecting victims.

The filmmakers seem to recognise how cliche and dull the heroes are, and focus the action on Griffin’s rampage across the countryside. It is hard not to view the film as a farce, with scenes of Griffin befuddling a sleepy local policeman, or throwing money out into the street like an invisible Robin Hood. One of the highlights of my screening was the sequence in which a screaming woman is chased down a street by an empty pair of trousers singing nursery rhymes. My audience were roaring.

A lot of the film’s success is based on Claude Rains’ performance. Only glimpsed in the final moments, Rains’ voice is the only thing giving the viewer a sense of the character’s oscillating character, from a malicious prankster to megalomaniac. 

Released in the midst of the Great Depression, it was hard not to watch The Invisible Man through the prism of the current crisis. Griffin is motivated by hubris, but also a desire for economic advancement. He wants to be lauded as a great scientist, but his deranged talk of selling his invention for military use makes clear that he is more interested in profiting from his invention than its uses.

I did not even think about The Invisible Man of 2020, and I am struggling to think of ways to write about both of them. They just take the concept of an invisible man and spin it out into completely different works. The original is funnier and more eccentric, while the 2020 version boasts better characterisation.

One thought I had was the way the film frames Griffin’s abilities - in the original, his rampage feels like a dark power fantasy - there are lashings of horror amid the farce and black comedy, but the film balances both the threat the Invisible Man poses and the fantasy of being him. The 2020 iteration is more explicit in showing the consequences of this power fantasy.

The 1933 version of The Invisible Man is pretty short - it is basically the barest bones of the Welles story, and combined with the tone it is more of a breezy romp than the other Universal monster movies of the time (Bride is very funny, but packs more pathos in the Monster’s story).

Fast and fun, The Invisible Man is a great movie. Nothing much more to say than that.