Review: The Invisible Man (1933)

The Invisible Man (1933)

Approved by the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America

Score: 3 out of 5

Having just moved to Boston, a natural destination for a horror fan like myself has been the city of Salem, Massachusetts about 40 minutes north. I have indeed, like a dirty tourist, partaken in many of the attractions that have made Salem famous, but one place I imagine will be a repeat destination for me is the Cinema Salem, a three-screen movie theater that not only hosts the annual Salem Horror Fest but also, this October, is running many classic Universal monster movies all month long. For my first movie there, I decided to check out The Invisible Man, the most famous adaptation of H. G. Wells' 1897 novel, and I was not expecting the movie I got. Don't get me wrong, it was a good movie, albeit an uneven one. But if your understanding of the Universal Monsters is that they're slow, dry, classy, and old-fashioned, you'll be as surprised as I was at just how wild and funny this movie can get. What would've been just a passable horror movie is elevated by Claude Rains as an outstanding villain who may be literally invisible but still finds a way to hog the screen at every opportunity, one who singlehandedly made this film a classic and part of the horror canon through his sheer presence. It has a lot of rough spots, but I still do not regret going out of my way to see this in a theater.

The film opens in an inn in the small English village of Iping, where Jack Griffin, a man clad head to toe in a trench coat, hat, gloves, bandages, and dark goggles, arrives in the middle of a blizzard. We soon find out that he is a scientist who performed a procedure on himself that turned him invisible, and shortly after that, we find out that this procedure drove him murderously insane as he came to realize that he could now commit any crime and get away with it because nobody will even know how to find him, let alone arrest him. Immediately, we get a sense of what kind of man Griffin is as he attacks the inn's owner for trying to get him to pay his rent, then leading the police on a merry chase when they step into try and evict him, his crimes only escalating from there.

Rains plays Griffin as a troll, somebody for whom the ultimate real-world anonymity has enabled him to let out his inner jerk, and he relishes it. He frequently drops one-liners as he harasses, assaults, and eventually outright murders the people who cross his path, and packs an evil laugh with the best of them. At times, the film veers almost into horror-comedy as it showcases the more mischievous side of Griffin's crime spree, such that I'm not surprised that some of the sequels to this that Universal made in the '40s would be straight-up comedies. That said, Rains still played Griffin as a fundamentally vile person, one who forces his former colleague Dr. Kemp to act as his accomplice knowing he can't do anything about it, kills scores of people in one of the highest body counts of any Universal monster movie, and clearly seems conflicted at points about his descent into villainy only for his power to seduce him back into it -- perhaps best demonstrated in a scene where he talks to his fiancée Flora about how he wishes to one day cure himself, only to slip into ranting about how he could then sell the secret of his invisibility to the world's armies, or perhaps even raise one such army himself and take over the world. The Invisible Man may be the most comedic of Universal's "classic" monsters, but the film never forgets that he's a monster. What's more, while the seams may now be visible on the special effects and chromakey that they used back in the day to create the effect of Griffin's invisibility, a lot of it still works surprisingly well. Already, as I dip my toes into the classic Universal horror movies, I've started to notice why the monsters have always been at the center of the nostalgia, discourse, and marketing surrounding them, and it's because they and the actors playing them are usually by far the most memorable parts of their movies.

It's fortunate, too, because I've also started to notice a recurring flaw in the Universal monster movies: that the parts not directly connected to the monster usually aren't nearly as memorable. I've barely even talked about Griffin's fellow scientists, and that's because they were only interesting insofar as they were connected to him, which made Kemp the most interesting non-villainous character in the film by default simply because of how Griffin uses and torments him. Flora, a character original to the movie who wasn't in the book, felt almost completely extraneous and had next to nothing to do in the plot, feeling like she was thrown in simply because the producers felt that there needed to be at least one token female presence and love story in the film. When the film was focused on Griffin, it was genuinely compelling, whether it was building tension (such as in the opening scenes at the inn, or Kemp's interactions with Griffin) or in the more madcap scenes of Griffin's mayhem. However, when the film diverted its attention from him to the scientists and police officers searching for him, it quickly started to drag. This was a pretty short movie at only 70 minutes, but it still felt like it had a lot of flab and pacing issues.

The Bottom Line

The monster is the reason why people remember this movie, and what a monster he is. Claude Rains and the effects team took what could've easily been a cheap and disposable adaptation and made something truly memorable out of it, even if the rest of the film doesn't entirely hold up today. I still think the 2020 version is a far better movie, but this was still an enjoyable, entertaining, and surprisingly wild time.