The Invisible Man (1933)

Year: 1933

IMDb Rating: N/A/10

Genres: Talk-Show

Directors: James Whale, N/A

Cast: Gloria Stuart, Chelsea Rebecca, James A. Janisse, Henry Travers, Una O'Connor, William Harrigan, Claude Rains, Dudley Digges, Forrester Harvey

The Invisible Man is a 1933 pre-Code American science fiction horror film directed by James Whale loosely based on H. G. Wells's 1897 novel, The Invisible Man, produced by Universal Pictures, and starring Gloria Stuart, Claude Rains and William Harrigan. The film involves a stranger named Dr. Jack Griffin (Rains) who is covered in bandages and has his eyes obscured by dark glasses, the result of a secret experiment that makes him invisible, taking lodging in the village of Iping. Never leaving his quarters, the stranger demands that the staff leave him completely alone until his landlady and the villagers discover he is invisible. Griffin goes to the house of his colleague, Dr. Kemp (William Harrigan) and tells him of his plans to create a reign of terror. His fiancée Flora Cranley (Gloria Stuart), the daughter of his employer Dr. Cranley (Henry Travers), soon learn that Griffin's discovery has driven him insane, leading him to prove his superiority over other people by performing harmless pranks at first and eventually turning to murder. The Invisible Man was in development for Universal as early as 1931 when Richard L. Schayer and Robert Florey suggested that Wells' novel would make a good follow-up to the studio's horror film hit Dracula. Universal opted to make Frankenstein in 1931 instead. This led to several screenplay adaptations being written and a number of potential directors including Florey, E. A. Dupont, Cyril Gardner, and screenwriters John L. Balderston, Preston Sturges, and Garrett Fort all signing on to develop the project intending it to be a film for Boris Karloff. Following Whale's work on The Old Dark House starring Karloff and The Kiss Before the Mirror, Whale signed on and his screenwriting colleague R. C. Sherriff developed a script in London. Production began in June 1933 and ended in August with two months of special effects work done following the end of filming. On the film's release in 1933, it was a great financial success for Universal and received strong reviews from several trade publications, and likewise from The New York Times, which deemed it one of the best films of 1933. The film spawned several sequels that were relatively unrelated to the original film in the 1940s. The film continued to receive praise on re-evaluations by critics such as Carlos Clarens, Jack Sullivan, and Kim Newman, as well as being listed as one of their favorite genre films by filmmakers John Carpenter, Joe Dante, and Ray Harryhausen. In 2008, The Invisible Man was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

A mysterious man, whose head is completely covered in bandages, wants a room. The proprietors of the pub aren't used to making their house an inn during the winter months, but the man insists. They soon come to regret their decision. The man quickly runs out of money, and he has a violent temper besides. Worse still, he seems to be some kind of chemist and has filled his room with messy chemicals, test tubes, beakers and the like. When they try to throw him out, they make a ghastly discovery. Meanwhile, Flora Cranley appeals to her father to do something about the mysterious disappearance of Dr. Griffin, his assistant and her sweetheart. Her father's other assistant, the cowardly Dr. Kemp, is no help. He wants her for himself. Little does Flora guess that the wild tales, from newspapers and radio broadcasts, of an invisible homicidal maniac are stories of Dr. Griffin himself, who has discovered the secret of invisibility and gone mad in the process.