Happy Thursday, everyone! Today, we're looking at 1933's The Invisible Man, directed by James Whale and starring Claude Rains. So let's watch the trailer.
The first major production based on the H. G. Wells novel, this is fairly close to the plot of the novel as Griffin (Claude Rains), already invisible due to his experimentations, settles into a small village inn as he tries to reverse the procedure. And man, Rains is really good as Griffin, who was obviously already a jerk before he made himself invisible, gets progressively worse and more arrogant as he gets confronted by people going, "Dude, you're weird and are you robbing us?" "Did you kill that guy?" "What's with the obviously fake nose and glasses?"
So hell, let's talk about the supporting cast.
No wait, that's Gloira Stuart in Titanic. Where she famously describes herself as a dish back in the day. Well, let's be frank, she wasn't lying.
Gloria Stuart, sadly, doesn't really get a lot to do in this part that was added in for the movie. She's just there to be a supporting woman and her character simply isn't very interesting. But it is kind of cool that she was one of the last of the Universal Monster actors, passing away in 2010. (I think the last one might be Ricou Browning, who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon underwater; the woman who swam for Julia Adams, Ginger Stanley, just passed away last month.)
Better served is Una O'Connor, the fabulous Irish character actor who gets to play Jenny Hall, owner of the inn that Griffin is staying in. She's onto him pretty early on, really seeing that's weird and obsessive and wanting him our of her place. She's a lot of fun in this.
Then there is E. E. Clive, a Welsh actor with a long career of playing authority types of all sorts in British productions (he apparently had a real talent for regional accents). He gets a lot of mileage out of his talent for reaction shots in this one as he sees Griffin unmask himself.
And that, my friends, is when we need to get to.
90 years old, and that effect still works amazingly well. Rains is still there, just with his head below a thin wireframe that he is unwrapping the bandages around, and they had to do some minor editing to make it cleaner. It's an amazing piece of work.
It's not a perfect movie, I think. For one thing, it feels weirdly long even though it is supposedly only 70 minutes. But it's a very solid start to the whole series in all its odd permutations. Next time, we'll dig into 1940's The Invisible Man Returns. Which, hey, Vincent Price!
Sadly, The Invisible Man Returns isn't streaming anywhere. Check and see if your local library has the excellent Universal monsters collection of the movies.
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