Power Corrupts: Universal Monsters Classic ‘The Invisible Man’ at 90

Like most movies, The Invisible Man travelled a long and winding road to the silver screen, and perhaps longer and more winding than most. As biographer James Curtis put it in his book James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters, “The gestation of The Invisible Man was the lengthiest and most convoluted of all of James Whale’s films. It involved four directors, nine writers, six treatments, and ten separate screenplays—all for a film that emerged very much in harmony with the book on which it was based.” It was first suggested as a possible follow-up to Dracula (1931), perhaps as a vehicle for new star Bela Lugosi, but was dropped in favor of Frankenstein (1931) due to the complicated special effects it would require. After Frankenstein was an even bigger success, both director James Whale and star Boris Karloff were immediately attached to The Invisible Man and several writers tried their hands at treatments and screenplays.

Some of those writers included Robert Florey and Garrett Fort, who had written a draft of Frankenstein, John L. Balderston who adapted the British plays of Dracula and Frankenstein for the American stage and later wrote The Mummy, and future Hollywood legends John Huston and Preston Sturges. Whale himself took a crack at a treatment for the film, which mixed what we know of The Invisible Man with elements of Faust, The Phantom of the Opera, and even a touch of Dracula, and had been attached and removed as director twice before seeing it to completion from a script written by his friend R.C. Sherriff. One of the biggest reasons so many versions of the script were written and discarded was that H.G. Wells, who had been very unhappy with Island of Lost Souls (1932), the first adaptation of his novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, had script approval and most simply disgusted him. Sherriff wisely began his screenplay with the novel and slowly branched off in new directions, adding several characters and situations of his own along the way. The final script hews closely to the novel for about the first third before blazing its own, more cinematic second and third acts.

Whale was reluctant to make another monster movie after Frankenstein but the successive box office failures of Impatient Maiden and The Old Dark House (both 1932) left him little choice but to give in to the urgings of Carl Laemmle, Jr. and return to Universal’s most successful filmmaking stable during the Depression years, monster movies. (Before you come after me with torches and pitchforks, The Old Dark House is certainly a horror film, but of a very different type from Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and company). This would become a theme once again two years later when he was eventually lured back once again to direct Bride of Frankenstein, a film he was even more reluctant to make. As with that later film, Whale would make the film on his terms, infusing it with visual flare, a distinctly British flavor, and plenty of humor and sometimes savage wit.

Though attached to star in The Invisible Man since late 1931, in 1933, Boris Karloff broke his contract with Universal over a salary dispute and briefly pursued a freelance career. He returned to the studio when Laemmle realized what an asset Karloff was for Universal to costar with Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat (1934). After Karloff’s departure, which was not entirely unwelcome— Whale did not feel his voice was right for the scientist Dr. Jack Griffin. The director offered the role to Colin Clive who had played the creator of Karloff’s monster in their previous collaboration. Though Clive showed interest, he passed on the part. Whale had met Claude Rains while working in the British theater and was particularly enamored of his voice, obviously the key element of the Dr. Griffin role as he would spend the majority of the film either invisible or covered in bandages. Whale was known to go to bat for actors he felt strongly about including the troubled Colin Clive and non-film actors like Ernest Thesiger. He would do the same for Rains who, though a seasoned stage actor, had never appeared in a film before. Just as Whale had plucked Boris Karloff from relative obscurity and made him a star, Claude Rains would become one of the most respected sought-after character actors in Hollywood. He would go on to appear in some of the greatest movies ever made including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Now, Voyager (1942), Casablanca (1942), and Notorious (1946) not to mention returning to the world of Universal Monsters for the pivotal role of Larry Talbot’s father in The Wolf Man (1941) and the lead role in the studio’s lavish remake of The Phantom of the Opera (1943).

With script and cast in place, Whale and company set out to solve the challenges that having an unseen character at the center of the film’s action would pose. Taking the lead on the special effects for The Invisible Man was John P. Fulton whose innovations set the groundwork for techniques that are used to this day. The film features a combination of simple in-camera tricks (objects moved by wires, articles of clothing over rigid frames, etc.) and more complicated optical innovations. For the process shots in which Griffin is seen partially clothed and partially invisible, Rains was covered in non-reflective black velvet and shot against a backdrop of the same material. The shots were then combined in an optical printer with background plates. It is a technique that continued to be used in various forms for decades. When color became the norm, the black velvet became blue and green screens. Even now in the digital age, the shooting process is similar while the processing of the shots are combined digitally rather than chemically. As remarkable as the special effects of The Invisible Man are, they are entirely employed in the service of the story, verisimilitude, and themes of the film.

The Invisible Man is an expansion of the obsessive scientist ideas Whale first explored in Frankenstein. Griffin’s intentions in the beginning are ambitious but not nefarious. It begins as “a scientific experiment,” an opportunity “to do something no other man in the world had done.” When he first appears in the doorway of the country inn on a snowy night it is to find a place where he can work in peace to discover the antidote to his invisibility. This only changes when he gets a taste of the power being invisible holds. As he tells Dr. Kemp (William Harrigan) later in the film, “The drugs I took seemed to light up my brain. Suddenly I realized the power I held. The power to rule, to make the world grovel at my feet!” He refers here to the one contrivance of the film—monocaine, a drug that Dr. Cranley (Henry Travers) reveals caused madness in laboratory animals. This is not all that far removed from the criminal brain placed in the brain of the Frankenstein monster. Both explain away the evil deeds, perhaps to appease the Hays office*, but in both films, the device is introduced only to be ignored in favor of a more sophisticated examination of human nature. In the case of Frankenstein, it is the mistreatment of the monster that drives him to kill. Here, it was never the potion, it was the power.

The terror Griffin evokes in the townspeople as he escapes from the inn is intoxicating to him. “An invisible man can rule the world!” he declares, “no one will see him come, no one will see him go. He can hear every secret. He can rob and rape and kill!” From this point on, his mission becomes clear. On the way out of the inn, he chokes the constable, strikes the other men who had come to capture him as he leaves the room, knocks over a grandfather clock, and throws beer glasses to the floor. Once in the streets he steals a bicycle, knocks over a baby carriage, and snatches an old man’s hat from his head. All this is mostly playful mischief (baby and carriage notwithstanding) but his “reign of terror,” as Griffin describes it to Kemp, is only beginning.

All told, after the murders, a train derailment, and Kemps fiery end when Griffin sends him and his car careening over a cliff, The Invisible Man boasts the highest death toll of any Universal monster. He feels he is completely invulnerable and declares his domination of not only all men but all nature. “Power I said! Power to walk into the gold vaults of the nations, into the secrets of kings, into the Holy of Holies. Power to make the multitudes run, squealing in terror at the touch of my little invisible finger. Even the moon’s frightened of me, frightened to death. The whole world’s frightened to death.” Here he mocks not only nature, but God when he claims to be able to enter the Holy of Holies—a line that evokes Henry Frankenstein’s declaration, “in the name of God, now I know what it feels like to be God!”

It is important that Griffin delivers this speech affronting nature in the presence of his fiancée, Flora, played by the luminous Gloria Stuart nearly 65 years before her Oscar-nominated performance as the elder Rose in Titanic. It is no coincidence that she is named for one of the most beautiful and pure elements of the natural world. Flora represents the nature that Griffin claims is frightened of him. Griffin’s current state of invisibility is unnatural and draws him toward destruction and evil. This is only countered and tempered when he is in the presence of Flora, who is filled with kindness and goodness. Whale would never be so corny as to state that “the power of love” ultimately redeems Griffin, but it is Flora’s steadfastness and belief in Jack’s goodness that draws him back from darkness, though only in his final moments. Ironically, it is nature and the elements that lead to Griffin’s undoing when his footprints become visible in the snow, and he is gunned down by a police officer. Like Frankenstein before him, Jack Griffin is undone by his own hubris.

It is clear why The Invisible Man remains one of the most beloved monster movies ninety years after its release. Its filmmaking is impeccable, the wit and humor of the script and performances is unparalleled, and its special effects still hold up in this age of computer-generated imagery. But beyond all that, it speaks to our humanity and knows what possibilities may lie within each of us if bestowed with great power. We have all seen absolute power corrupt absolutely. The Invisible Man brings that down from the seats of authority, the realm of kings and presidents, and places it on our level. It looks at us with invisible eyes and asks, “how would you fare in Griffin’s surgical bandages and dark glasses?” Did the potion drive him mad or merely amplify what was already in his heart? I said it before, and I will say it again, it was never the potion, it was the power. How quickly the human heart is corrupted when intoxicated with power.

*Though The Invisible Man is a so-called pre-code film, the Hays office and the Hays Production Code did exist, though not heavily enforced. Still, script approval from the offices was required even during this period.

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