I watched The Invisible Man (1933) for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and my real takeaway simply is: wow.
I got it from the library to watch with my mom and, as I started it up after I had put my teens to bed, she said to me, "This isn't going to give me nightmares, is it?" I was like, "Mom, I haven't seen this before either. But we've both read the book. And it was made in 1933. How scary can it be? The special effects will probably make us laugh!"
I was half right and half wrong. It wasn't scary in the slightest. But the special effects? They were most impressive and didn't make us laugh once.
The film begins when a mysterious stranger (Claude Rains) all bundled up against the snow arrives in a small English inn and pub.
He asks to rent a room, and to have supper served to him there, which leads to rampant speculation amongst the pub's regulars. We may not have laughed at the movie's special effects, but we definitely laughed a lot while watching this movie! It has lots of humorous parts, especially revolving around the pub's landlord and landlady.
Speaking of the landlady (Una O'Connor), she surprises the stranger at his supper, and he snatches up a napkin to cover his lower face quickly before she can see him.
She finds this most shocking and leaves in a huff. But she would have been much more shocked if he hadn't!
He lowers his napkin after she leaves, revealing to us that... this is the Invisible Man, and boy howdy, is he ever invisible!!!
Now, thanks to the internet and film historians, I know in my head that they achieved this effect by having Claude Rains wear a black body stocking sort of thing with other clothes on top of it and filming him in front of a black cloth, and then they superimposed that over a background. Something like this, yes. But it is still breathtakingly cool!
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Great Britain, a scientist (Henry Travers) and his pretty daughter Flora (Gloria Talbott) are worried because one of his assistants has gone missing, and he was courting Flora, and she thinks he would surely not have left her without saying goodbye, right?
Well, we don't really have to wonder who that assistant is, or why he left so abruptly. He's holed up now in this little inn, working madly away at figuring out how to reverse his condition.
The landlady hates her new lodger because he threatens people if they try to get in his room and even throws things at them, sometimes pushes them down the stairs. Her husband is more concerned about getting a drink quick while his wife isn't looking than he is about pressing charges, though.
The police decide to intervene. They burst into the stranger's room and demand he take off his disguise. So he obliges.
Once again, even when you pause and screencap it, these effects are so incredible!
Bit by bit, he removes all his clothing until he has nothing left but his shirt.
He dances around them mockingly, then slips off the shirt and runs away unseen. Now there's an invisible naked man loose, which terrifies absolutely everyone.
Flora's dad confides in his other assistant, Arthur, about what his protege had been working on and how dangerous some of the substances he'd used could be.
Arthur wants to get together with Flora himself, so he figures it's good riddance to bad rubbish until the Invisible Man shows up in his house and gets comfy there. He's no longer interested in returning to visible form -- he wants to use his invisibility to get rich, to terrorize the authorities, to do whatever he wants to do. He goes on a crime spree with spectacular results, and ends up back at that same inn.
There are a multitude of constables after him by then, and they converge on the inn, trying to capture him somehow. The Invisible Man makes a desperate bid for freedom, and... is it really SPOILAGE if a book is 128 years old and a movie is 92 years old? Well, if it is, skip to the shot of The End and don't read what I write between now and then.
Flora is distraught. They finally find the Invisible Man by tracking his footprints in the snow, and are forced to shoot him before he can kill again. Flora and her father rush to his bedside, for they're pretty sure he is dying.
When he dies, the Invisible Man becomes visible again at last, leaving us with the biggest shock yet: Claude Rains Does Not Have a Mustache!!! I repeat, it's a mustacheless Claude Rains, folks! What?!
It's been a while since I read The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells, but from what I remember, this movie actually sticks really close to what happens in the book. Unlike a lot of horror pictures made from classic books in the 1930s, it doesn't take a few character names and some story beats and make something new up around those, which is really refreshing.
This has been my contribution to the
Early Shadows and Precode Horror Blogathon hosted this week by the Classic Movie Blog Association. Be sure to click on that link or the blogathon button to read the other contributions by association members!
