(But he never showed up!)

I should have known, based on this line in the song, that there is really not much to say about this movie. It's fine, even good, which means there isn't that much to make fun of. In some ways it's still kind of scary. An invisible psychopath really would be a problem! But I can't say I really enjoyed the movie. I'll get to why at the end of the recap.

I’ve never read the H. G. Wells story on which this movie is based, so I came into it not knowing what to expect. I'm planning to read the story - at some point, when I have my reading mojo back - and see how closely the movie hews to it.

The Invisible Man - 1933

★★★

Starring:

Claude Rains (Griffin, or “The Invisible One” as he’s listed in the credits)

Gloria Stuart (Flora Cranley)

William Harrigan (Dr. Arthur Kemp)

Henry Travers (Dr. Crenley)

Recap

A man walks through a blizzard, trying to get to a town called Iring. In a tavern called the Lion’s Head, men in bowler hats play darts and listen to bad jokes in bad English accents (we’re talking Eliza Doolittle here). Another man in a bowler hat pretends to play a player piano.

The man from the blizzard walks in and we get our first real look at him. He’s wrapped in bandages and wearing goggles on his face! Everyone stares and backs away. The bandaged man wants a room with a fire and a private sitting room, and after giving him a little bit of runaround, the mistress of the inn takes him behind the counter into the back of the tavern.

This is weird: a bunch of dour-looking woman with scarves over their heads sit around a table tucked into the turn of the stairway, drinking beer. I guess this is some kind of gender-segregated drinking situation because there were no women in the front room. They don’t seem to be enjoying themselves nearly as much as the men were.

The stranger demands food, and after it’s brought he demands to be left alone, but the stupid maid forgot to put the mustard on the tray and the innkeeper, Mrs. Hall, brings it back up. The stranger immediately covers the lower part of his face with a napkin. After she nervously leaves, he drops it and we see that, where he’s unwrapped his bandages, he is INVISIBLE!!!!

We switch locales, to a very fancy house where a man in a lab coat has various odd-looking instruments spread across a table. This is Dr. Crenley. Dr. Crenley looks incredibly familiar, and that’s because he’s fucking Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life.

You’d think if he were rich enough to live in this mansion, he could afford a lab and not have to do his experiments in the sitting room. You’d also think he could afford a fourth wall to enclose the room, but you’d be wrong.

The doctor’s daughter, Flora, is worried about a man named Griffin - obviously her boyfriend but also her dad’s employee. He’s been missing for a while, off doing some kind of secret experiment of his own. Another doctor, Kemp, comes in to disparage Griffin for being a shitty employee. I get the feeling he doesn’t like Griffin and wants Flora for himself. Don’t date your boss’s daughter, guys, it’s gross.

Flora hides in a massive flower arrangement to discuss her fears with Kemp. Kemp lays into Griffin some more, calling him a bad scientist who messes with things men should not, and also a bad boyfriend for deserting her. Then he starts “explaining how he feels” to her. What a dick. Flora is not into him at all.

Obviously Griffin is the man in bandages, and wow is he an asshole. He shouts at the Mrs. Hall and knocks a tray out of her hands, then throws his chemicals at the wall. And he hasn’t even paid for his room! Mr. Hall justifiably tries to throw him out, and Griffin whines that he’s working on a very important experiment and came here for peace and quiet. Dude, no one cares. They don’t have to let you ruin their best sitting room with your chemicals while not getting paid just because you claim it’s life and death. I’m starting to feel some sympathy for Dr. Kemp.

Also, Griffin’s hair is poking out of his bandages. Why is his hair visible?? Does he look like a levitating toupee when he takes the bandages off?

When whining and begging don’t work, Griffin ATTACKS MR. HALL AND THROWS HIM DOWN THE STAIRS holy shit. This guy is the worst.

The police are called and a mob forms. Griffin screams at them that everything would have been fine if they’d JUST LEAVE HIM ALONE and then he starts taking off his bandages and laughing at them as they run.

Downstairs, the constable says, quite calmly, “He’s invisible. That’s what’s the matter with him.” Well said, sir! The constable decides to go back upstairs and arrest Griffin before he takes all his clothes off and they can’t find him. This is also good thinking. But they’re too late. Griffin is naked and invisible. He monologues about his secret chemical, then he FUCKING STRANGLES THE CONSTABLE. (The constable does not die.)

Next he runs downstairs and trashes the bar, goes out into the street and steals a bicycle, falls off of it and throws it at the people chasing him. HOLY SHIT HE KNOCKED OVER A PRAM AND THE BABY FELL OUT. What the fuck is wrong with this dude?

Drs. Crenley and Kemp are in Griffin’s abandoned lab, trying to figure out what he was up to. Their convo provides some handy exposition: Griffin was working on something he kept uncharacteristically secret, and the day before he disappeared, Kemp saw him packing all his mysterious instruments into crates.

Dr. Crenley finds a list of chemicals, which ends with monocaine. And what is monocaine, you ask? A very terrible drug made from a flower that “sucks the color” out of everything around it. They tried to use it to bleach fabric but it destroyed the fabric. That sounds less like a drug and more like an industrial solvent. They also, for no discernible reason, injected it under the skin of a dog. It turned the dog white as a statue - and made it turn crazy. I guess that explains why Dr. Griffin is such an asshole. But I bet he was kind of an asshole before, too, and Kemp was the only one who noticed. He’s probably been a sociopath the whole time.

Crenley decides he’ll go to the police and tell them that Griffin has disappeared, but swears Kemp to secrecy about everything else. Kemp goes home to his own fancy mansion, where that evening he’s sitting in his favorite (presumably) chair, smoking a pipe, and simultaneously reading a newspaper and listening to the radio, as you do. He has a photo of Crenley’s daughter on the wall which is pretty fucking creepy. Did they used to date or is he just a stalker? The French doors behind him open and of course here comes fucking Griffin.

But before Griffin can do anything, a news report comes on the radio. A remote village is suffering under the mass delusion that an invisible man is living among them. Griffin puts down his newspaper. He’s figured it out! But at that moment Griffin snaps off the radio and intones, “Everyone deserves the fate that’s coming to them. Panic, death, and things worse than death!” Okay then. Then he tells Kemp not to be afraid, lol.

Griffin makes Kemp provide more bandages and dark glasses so that he can “dress” again, while periodically threatening Kemp’s life. Griffin then explains how he’s been working on this experiment for five years, and had snuck off so that no one would notice him fading away. He was trying to work on an antidote in the Lion’s Head, but those country idiots wouldn’t let him work in peace so now he’s going to go on a murder spree instead. Okay then. Griffin wants Kemp to be his sidekick. And they have to go back to the Lion’s Head to get Griffin’s notebooks, which he stupidly left behind while he was too busy knocking over baby carriages.

Meanwhile, back at the inn, the head constable (not the smart constable from before - this is his boss) is having a hearing and talking to all the people who were assaulted by the invisible man, in an effort to prove it was a hoax. Kemp and Griffin pull up to the inn. Griffin is naked again. He’s going to sneak into the inn, get the notebooks, and pass them out the window to Kemp. He pulls this off successfully, but can’t just leave quietly. He has to throw the meeting downstairs into chaos by breaking yet more glasses and throwing ink in the head constable’s face. Classic Griffin. Oh and also he throttles the head constable and hits him over the head with a stool. This time he actually kills the guy. Maybe the village constable will get promoted.

Crenley is outside the police station when a newsboy runs down the street shouting about the invisible man news. So now Crenley has figured it out, too.

Back at Kemp’s house, Griffin explains all the things he can’t do while he’s invisible. This includes standing in the rain, or soot or fog, because his outline will show up. It also includes going outside less than thirty minutes after he’s eaten because the food is visible in his stomach until it’s been digested!! Wait, I have questions. Why thirty minutes? If food is visible in his stomach, shouldn’t poop be visible in his intestines?

The police are assembling ten thousand volunteers to search for the invisible man, which sounds like kind of a huge waste of public funds. They’re going to look for his tracks. We see a montage of people listening to a news broadcast warning the public. For some reason the announcer has a terrible French accent. Everyone panics, locking and barricading themselves inside.

After checking that Griffin is asleep, Kemp calls Crenley with the news that Griffin is the invisible man. Crenley tells Kemp to keep Griffin there until morning, when Crenley will come over, and not to call the police! Flora overhears the call and begs her father to tell him what’s going on with Griffin.

Random people call the police tip line with suggestions for how to catch him: throw ink on him, wait till it’s frosty and you can see his breath, etc. Problem solvers! Kemp also calls the police, against orders, but they say they don’t have enough men right now to be able to surround the house because they're all out hunting randomly in the dark right now. They’ll show up eventually. Excellent policing, guys.

Flora is convinced that She Can Fix Him and runs off to Kemp’s house to persuade the homicidal maniac that he should help the people trying to stop him. Griffin seems to have forgotten about Flora’s existence until he sees her, but he wants to meet with her alone and of course Flora agrees. He says he would have come to her immediately if he weren’t invisible but we know that’s a lie because he didn't even remember she existed. He also tells her that he did it all for her! He’ll be rich and famous and powerful and then he’ll come back to her. Flora begs him to let her father help him find an antidote, but Griffin is way too excited about his new power.

Oh, here are the police! Surprisingly Griffin sends Flora away, against her wishes, instead of taking her hostage. So much for his brilliance. The police link hands and make a chain around the house. Griffin goes out through the window in Kemp’s study, promising Kemp that he'll return the following night at exactly 10pm to kill Kemp for calling the police. Strangely specific but okay.

Griffin breaks through the line of police pretty easily by grabbing one of them by the legs and yanking him out of the chain, ripping the dude’s pants off at the same time. He puts the pants on and runs down the street singing.

Kemp is increasingly paranoid about Griffin’s threat, and the police figure out that Crenley knows who the invisible man, and that it’s probably his other, mysteriously missing assistant, so now that cat's out of the bag. Dr. Crenley is a son of a bitch for trying to cover for Griffin, by the way, and I'm now convinced that Dr. Kemp is the only decent person in this whole operation. Was I supposed to be rooting for him the whole time?

Meanwhile Griffin runs amok, trolling police officers, stealing money from a bank, DERAILING A TRAIN. Holy shit.

The inspector or whoever is now in charge of this investigation tells the press that they have one hope to catch him, but he can’t say what it is because for all he knows the invisible man is in the room right now.

The plan is a net. These city police really should hire that village constable, I bet he had this idea days ago.

Thanks to Griffin’s promise to return and kill Kemp at exactly 10pm, the police know when and where he’ll be so they can toss their net on him. For his safety, Kemp will actually be at the police station. But that’s not enough for Kemp! What if Griffin kills the police and then comes after Kemp? So the inspector comes up with a needlessly elaborate plan for Kemp to go to the police station, then sneak out through a hidden exit dressed as a police officer so that Griffin won’t recognize him, then get into his car and drive far away into the country. So much for discretion. What do you want to bet Griffin is in the room right now hearing all of this?

In addition to the net they’ve got spray guns with ink in them just like the guy on the phone suggested. Seriously everyone is smarter than these city cops.

So Kemp goes through the whole charade of going to the police station and changing, then he has the police drop him off at his own house at ten minutes to ten so he can get his car?? What the fuck why would you do that? And what do you know, Griffin is in the back seat. As the bells are ringing ten o’clock, he pulls Kemp out of the car, hog ties him, and throws him back in. Apparently he wants to kill Kemp by staging an accident. Seems unnecessarily complicated but okay. He pushes Kemp’s car, with Kemp in it, off a cliff where it immediately bursts into flame. RIP Kemp. You were right about Griffin all along. If only you'd been smart enough to avoid the exact place and time that he promised to kill you.

Having completely eluded the police and their ingenious net, Griffin sneaks into a barn to sleep in some hay. In the morning the farmer hears him snoring and runs to the police to report "breathing" in his barn. And - a miracle! It’s snowing! He won’t be able to hide. They set out to the barn and set it on fire to flush him out. There’s only one door to the barn, so it’s clear when he comes out and tracks footprints across the snow. The police shoot him!

He’s not dead, though. He’s in the hospital, dying. The doctor says that as he dies, the effect of the drug will wear off and Griffin will be visible again. How does he know?? He’s tells Crenly that Griffin has been calling out Flora's name. Gee, how sweet. Crenley fetches Flora so she can say good-bye to him.

Griffin dies, and as the doctor predicted, he becomes visible again. The end!

Thoughts:

Here's the problem I have with this movie: They never gave me a single reason to like Griffin, or to root for his redemption. We only ever knew him as an evil bastard. Therefore we have no idea why Flora loves him, so I don't care about that either. In fact I'm kind of mad that not once in her conversations with Griffin did she ever tell him that it was wrong to murder people or that she was a little upset about it. She barely spoke at all; mostly he talked at her. And Dr. Kemp implies that Griffin was always a jerk. So we have no reason to believe that Griffin possesses, or ever possessed, any goodness.

But then they try to make the ending sad, lingering on the shot of his corpse as though it's a tragedy that he died, when actually it was the best possible outcome given the problem at hand.

I'm confused about how the movie wants me to feel. And it's not as though the movie is intentionally provoking the question Is he a hero or a villain? He's definitely the villain. Every single thing he does or says is villainous. But the movie keeps trying to treat him as the hero. It doesn't make any sense.

Maybe H. G. Wells is less confused about it, and I'll understand it once I read the story.