Pondering The Invsible Man 
Now first off, I have to admit to having watched this on Svengoolie's MetTV horror showcase, probably not the best venue for any classic film. With that out of the way, it just didn't work all that well with me, and worse, it had quite a few dull, unimaginative stretches with mediocre dialogue and not very good acting. It featured strong production values, far bertter than average for Uni, a wonderful, thundering voice performance from Claude Rains that was at times quite frightening in itself. The early town and tavern scenes were the best, offering the viewer a nice picture of village life in the England of eighty years ago. There were many comic moments in this part of the film, and most worked nicely, didn't feel stale or dated. And best of all the special effects,--Griffin's invisibility, how it was handled in the film--were admirable and impressive even by today's standards.
The second half of the film was, for me, quite frankly, more melodramatic than frightening. In other words, the plot ran its course. End of story. Once one realizes who Griffin is and what he's up tp were's little in the way of surprise in the film. The invisibility "gimmick" sells the movie, and because it was so well handled I can't say that the film failed to deliver. It did deliver. What it lacked for me were a number of things that prevented me from getting engaged in the movie as a whole. First off, there was no one to root for. The Inivsible Man is not a sympathetic figure, is a bully from his entrance at the Lion's Head Inn. His secretiveness, unlike that of, say, Henry Frankenstein, fails to make the viewer care for him beause of the wretched way he treats people. When Henry hurts others, it's a mistake, while when Griffin hurts others, it's intentional. Okay, it's the monocane that caused this, not something deep down in Griffith's character. This makes Griffin somewhat of a Jekyll and Hyde figure, but he's mostly Hyde in the film, with only a few hints of the Jekyll that might have been early on.
The murders turned me against Griffin,--which was, I would imagine (and hope) intentional, and this turned me against the notion he could or should be "saved"--and his tormenting of his rival in love, Kemp, was sadistic in the extreme, and it got worse as time went on. This aspect of the movie was made worse still by the unsympathetic playing of William Harrigan as Kemp. What we have in this part of the picture is its loathsome (albeit tragic) title character tormenting a supporting character who is himself unpleasantly played. Once again, the brilliant special effects kept my interest, and here the dialogue was somewhat above average. The manhunt for the freezing and increasingly crazed Griffin featured some humor, some of it good, but this also detracted from the film's pace. I got no sense of the narrative drve, the terror, that was so much a factor of the hunting down of the monster by the torch bearing villagers in the 1931 Frankenstein.
I still have much fondness for the movie as a whole, as it was so brilliantly made by director James Whale and his associates, notably John Fulton. Claude Rains probably made a stronger impression as Griffin than the initially slated for the role Boris Karloff, as Rains, short as he was (irrelevant in the movie anyway) had classical training in the theater, and as a result he had an authoritative voice, and Karloff didn't. It was fun seeing Henry (Clarence the Angel) Travers long before It's a Wonderful Life, yet I can't help but wonder if the role of Girffin's senior colleage might have been more effective if played by an actor more along the lines of Edward Van Sloan, or anyone with a strong, authoritative presence. Gloria Stuart was eye candy and not much more, though she was given little to do but look beautiful in every scene in which she appeared, and in this she succeeded.
The movie made me wonder about horror in general (and I do think of The Inivsible Man as a horror even as it's closer to proto-science fiction, due to the way it was made, and by whom), and the role emotion and identification plays in horror. To the extent that I came to a conclusion it was that without strong emotional identiication even a horror movie suffers. Horror plays on our emotions, and the exploration of emotion in The Invisible Man was slight. There wasn't a lot of it. The most affect was shown by Una O'Connor as the hysterical shirieking old biddy of a wife of the inn-keeper in the early scenes, after which there was some maniacal cackling coming from Giriffin as he "disrobed". After that it was a sort of suspenseful crime picture with a neat ending. There was very little in the way of passion in the film, though, unless one counts Griffin's megalomania as passion. For me this was a central weakness in the picture,--unsympathetic title character with not much of an excuse for being the monster he becomes, dull supporting characters, and not much in the way of focus as to what's happening to whom.
All of this aside, I still think The Invisible Man is a very good movie, and it's certainly a classic, but it's not one of my favorite Universal classics, even from the Laemmle era. I much prefer the 1931 Dracula and Frankenstein, Karl Freund's fever dreamy The Mummy, and even the sometimes irritatingly Campy Bride Of Frankenstein. As to James Whale's pictures in particular, I prefer his Old Dark House, which, for all its strangeness, does elicit some real sympathy for its main characters, and near the end we get to understand something of the deep connection between demented pyromaniac Saul and Morgan the butler.
The second half of the film was, for me, quite frankly, more melodramatic than frightening. In other words, the plot ran its course. End of story. Once one realizes who Griffin is and what he's up tp were's little in the way of surprise in the film. The invisibility "gimmick" sells the movie, and because it was so well handled I can't say that the film failed to deliver. It did deliver. What it lacked for me were a number of things that prevented me from getting engaged in the movie as a whole. First off, there was no one to root for. The Inivsible Man is not a sympathetic figure, is a bully from his entrance at the Lion's Head Inn. His secretiveness, unlike that of, say, Henry Frankenstein, fails to make the viewer care for him beause of the wretched way he treats people. When Henry hurts others, it's a mistake, while when Griffin hurts others, it's intentional. Okay, it's the monocane that caused this, not something deep down in Griffith's character. This makes Griffin somewhat of a Jekyll and Hyde figure, but he's mostly Hyde in the film, with only a few hints of the Jekyll that might have been early on.
The murders turned me against Griffin,--which was, I would imagine (and hope) intentional, and this turned me against the notion he could or should be "saved"--and his tormenting of his rival in love, Kemp, was sadistic in the extreme, and it got worse as time went on. This aspect of the movie was made worse still by the unsympathetic playing of William Harrigan as Kemp. What we have in this part of the picture is its loathsome (albeit tragic) title character tormenting a supporting character who is himself unpleasantly played. Once again, the brilliant special effects kept my interest, and here the dialogue was somewhat above average. The manhunt for the freezing and increasingly crazed Griffin featured some humor, some of it good, but this also detracted from the film's pace. I got no sense of the narrative drve, the terror, that was so much a factor of the hunting down of the monster by the torch bearing villagers in the 1931 Frankenstein.
I still have much fondness for the movie as a whole, as it was so brilliantly made by director James Whale and his associates, notably John Fulton. Claude Rains probably made a stronger impression as Griffin than the initially slated for the role Boris Karloff, as Rains, short as he was (irrelevant in the movie anyway) had classical training in the theater, and as a result he had an authoritative voice, and Karloff didn't. It was fun seeing Henry (Clarence the Angel) Travers long before It's a Wonderful Life, yet I can't help but wonder if the role of Girffin's senior colleage might have been more effective if played by an actor more along the lines of Edward Van Sloan, or anyone with a strong, authoritative presence. Gloria Stuart was eye candy and not much more, though she was given little to do but look beautiful in every scene in which she appeared, and in this she succeeded.
The movie made me wonder about horror in general (and I do think of The Inivsible Man as a horror even as it's closer to proto-science fiction, due to the way it was made, and by whom), and the role emotion and identification plays in horror. To the extent that I came to a conclusion it was that without strong emotional identiication even a horror movie suffers. Horror plays on our emotions, and the exploration of emotion in The Invisible Man was slight. There wasn't a lot of it. The most affect was shown by Una O'Connor as the hysterical shirieking old biddy of a wife of the inn-keeper in the early scenes, after which there was some maniacal cackling coming from Giriffin as he "disrobed". After that it was a sort of suspenseful crime picture with a neat ending. There was very little in the way of passion in the film, though, unless one counts Griffin's megalomania as passion. For me this was a central weakness in the picture,--unsympathetic title character with not much of an excuse for being the monster he becomes, dull supporting characters, and not much in the way of focus as to what's happening to whom.
All of this aside, I still think The Invisible Man is a very good movie, and it's certainly a classic, but it's not one of my favorite Universal classics, even from the Laemmle era. I much prefer the 1931 Dracula and Frankenstein, Karl Freund's fever dreamy The Mummy, and even the sometimes irritatingly Campy Bride Of Frankenstein. As to James Whale's pictures in particular, I prefer his Old Dark House, which, for all its strangeness, does elicit some real sympathy for its main characters, and near the end we get to understand something of the deep connection between demented pyromaniac Saul and Morgan the butler.
