A stranger has come to the tiny English village of Iping.
Wrapped in bandages, the man demands a room at the inn, but it isn't long before his strange
requests and gruff manner fall afoul of the locals.
When the innkeepers try to kick him out for failing to pay his due, the man reveals his
true diabolical nature, that he is, within the bandages, clothes, and wig, completely invisible.
What follows is a reign of terror, as the man seeks to revenge himself upon the world.
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With that out of the way, let's get back to the subject at hand.
Despite the initial boom of 1929 and 1930, Hollywood began to feel the economic effects
of the Great Depression by the end of 1931.
Theaters that had very recently been packed with audiences seeking an escape were now
struggling to fill even a handful of seats.
As a result, studios that had borrowed heavily to make the transition to sound were failing
to pay their debts, and one such studio, Universal Pictures, was facing potential bankruptcy,
even as it had found enormous success in iconic horror films like Dracula and Frankenstein.
Hoping to ride this success to profitability, the new head of the studio, Carl Laemmle, Jr.,
purchased the rights to H.G. Wells' 1897 novel The Invisible Man for ten thousand dollars,
after rival studio MGM passed on it due to concerns about the special effects.
Universal Pictures saw it as another potential monster movie tentpole, but at first, all
the studio seemed interested in was the title and the ability to attach Wells' name to it.
Thirteen different writers created scripts for the movie adaptation, but the vast majority
of them had little--if anything--to do with Wells' novel.
A lot of them took more cues from Philip Wylie's more recent novel, The Murderer Invisible,
the film rights to which Universal had also purchased.
At the time, Universal seemed to forget that, in the contract signed with Wells, the author
had been given final script approval for any film created under the banner of The Invisible Man.
To direct the picture, Universal turned to James Whale, the man who had brought them
so much success with Frankenstein and his subsequent horror film, The Old Dark House.
Whale, who had been a theater director in Great Britain before emigrating to the U.S.,
had first struck Hollywood gold with an American film adaptation of his successful stage play,
Journey's End, written by R.C. Sherriff.
Due to his close working relationship with Sherriff, Whale let him take a stab at adapting
The Invisible Man.
Sherriff, unlike most of the previous writers who had attempted it--including Whale himself--chose
to stick fairly close to Wells' novel and to all but ignore Wylie's The Murderer Invisible.
Unfortunately, when he asked the studio for a copy of Wells' novel from which to work,
they didn't even have one; he had to purchase it from a secondhand bookstore.
Not only did Whale and Universal approve of Sherriff's eventual script, but so did H.G. Wells,
and so the green light was finally given to produce a film version of The Invisible Man.
For the titular star of the picture, everybody's first choice was Boris Karloff, the man who
had brought life to both Frankenstein's monster and The Mummy.
Unfortunately, due to his success and stardom, Karloff was getting far too expensive for
Universal, which had been tightening its budget wherever possible, and the studio simply couldn't
afford the salary they had contractually agreed to.
Karloff and Whale also had a falling out over personal disputes that effectively ended their
previously successful working relationship.
Whale, then, had to look elsewhere, and when he heard a screen test being played in an
adjacent room, he knew he had his choice.
When he went to the studios with it, though, it took everybody involved a few minutes to
realize he wasn't joking.
The star he had found was a London actor named Claude Rains, whose Hollywood screen test was
so notoriously terrible that nobody--not even Rains--thought he would ever have the chance
to work in film, beyond a small role in a lost British film from 1920 called Build Thy House.
However, Rains was an incredibly well-trained and well-regarded theater actor who had spent
a few years teaching acting at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he'd
had under his tutelage such future acting heavyweights as John Gielgud and Charles Laughton.
Rains was particularly famous for his unique stage voice, which was ironic for a few reasons.
For one, his natural cockney accent was almost incomprehensible.
For another, he'd had to overcome a severe speech impediment in his youth by seeking
out extensive speech therapy, where he learned to roll his "r"s and over-anunciate his syllables.
And lastly, he'd had his vocal cords permanently damaged after being gassed during his service
in World War I, after which he claimed his voice took on the unique tenor he used on stage.
"Suddenly, I realized the power I held, the power to rule, to make the world grovel at my feet."
It was this voice that Whale saw--or rather heard--in Claude Rains' screen test.
Given that the role of the invisible man was one that relied more on voice than on appearance,
Rains' vocal style was key in convincing skeptical studio heads that Rains was the man for the job.
To be fair, Whale had also seen Rains perform on Broadway, so he knew the man had talents
that were ill represented by his disastrous first impression in Hollywood.
Rains, who had been eager to start a career in film, signed on with little preamble, not
even realizing that the role would require him to be masked for basically the entire
performance.
When he did an initial screen test for the part, he did it without the bandages around
his head, and it was news to him when filming was set to begin and he was told how little
his face would actually appear on screen.
Rains was intensely claustrophobic, but he hid this fact from everyone, even as his head
was encased in plaster for one particularly tricky special effect at the end of the film.
For the female lead of the invisible man's fiancée, Flora--a role invented for the film
to give it more traditional appeal and more dramatic weight--Gloria Stuart was hired.
Stuart began her Hollywood career after a makeshift screen test backstage at the end
of her debut performance at Pasadena's Playbox theater, where Universal and Paramount casting
agents used a coin toss to decide which studio would sign her.
She had a few minor roles before appearing in James Whale's The Old Dark House, where
she managed to stand out alongside an ensemble cast that included Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff.
She would go on to have a very successful career until largely retiring from acting
in the mid-forties to become an artist.
She is perhaps most famous now for her return to Hollywood in the 1990's, when she nearly
won an Oscar for her performance in Titanic.
The rest of the cast was filled with hard-working character actors William Harrington as Dr.
Kemp, Henry Travers as Dr. Cranley, and Una O'Connor as the unforgettably batty inn-keeper
Jenny Hall.
There are a few cameos from future stars as well, including Walter Brennan and John Carradine.
The most important man on set was probably the special effects coordinator, John P. Folton,
whose work on The Invisible Man is nothing short of astonishing.
For sequences in which the invisible man, Griffin, is completely invisible, Folton used
thin wires, magnets, and other simple tricks to get objects to move as though on their
own, but the noteworthy stuff happened whenever Griffin had to reveal his invisibility when
partially clothed or covered.
For these moments, Folton used what was known as a traveling matte technique, in which scenes
were shot twice, once without the actor and once with the background and invisible parts
of him covered by jet-black velvet that could be manually removed when the two sequences
were composited together.
This presented a number of incredibly difficult technical challenges.
Rains or his double would have to wear suffocatingly tight gear, usually covering his head entirely
and requiring the use of a loud and cumbersome breathing apparatus that was prone to malfunction.
He would also have to carefully avoid moving his supposedly invisible hands in front of
his visible clothing or do anything similar that could give the trick away, all while
maintaining a slightly exaggerated physical performance.
For many composited sequences, they would have to pour over the footage frame by frame
to clean up mistakes and inconsistencies.
This shot, in particular, was cited by Folton as one of the most difficult shots he would
ever do in his entire career, as it required four different composites all carefully aligned
and mirrored to work together in unison.
There were also a few key action scenes filmed with scale miniatures by Cleo Baker that were
so well-done that Universal would reuse them multiple times in various films.
Baker's miniature work for Hollywood began with 1925's The Lost World and would become
famous in the seventies with the films Earthquake and Airport '77.
The filming was done entirely on sound stages and sets on the Universal backlot, and one
set was badly damaged near the end of filming when some hay caught fire and nearly burned
the whole thing down.
However, despite the setback, the film was set to debut in November of 1933, and Universal
pushed out a heavy marketing campaign.
Unexpectedly, the film wasn't marketed as a horror film, with most of the promotion
highlighting the effects spectacle and romantic angle.
Nevertheless, it was a smash hit upon release, the most financially and critically successful
horror film for the studio since Frankenstein.
"Oh, I see. Pretty good."
It not only spawned a whole new franchise for the studio that would continue for over
a decade, but it also ensured that 1933 would see Universal Pictures finally secure an annual
profit after a couple of years of painful fiscal decline.
It also launched the career of Claude Rains, whose name is now as synonymous with classic
film acting as those of his former student Laurence Olivier.
It also had a profound impact on science-fiction, as the genre had largely fallen out of favor
after the stock market crash of 1929.
The spectacle that early science-fiction films like A Trip to the Moon and Metropolis were
known for was seen as too optimistic and expensive for the Great Depression, but The Invisible Man
demonstrated that there was still a place for it.
Two and a half years after its release, Universal would begin debuting its ultra-successful
Flash Gordon serials, inspired in no small part by the successful use of special effects
in The Invisible Man.
Flash Gordon would become the gold standard for science-fiction film until the golden
age of the early fifties.
I'm sure I'll cover it in a future video someday.
H.G. Wells, though not as down on the film as he was the previous year's
Island of Lost Souls, wasn't much of a fan.
He thought the film made his titular creation too megalomaniacal and ridiculous.
The only bright spot, according to Wells, was the shrieking inn-keeper, which he found
hilarious.
[incomprehensible screaming]
Famously, Wells would decide that, even though film was undoubtedly
the most important artistic medium of the Twentieth Century, his own work could never
really translate to the movies.
With all due respect to the author as one of science-fiction's most important voices,
however, I have to flat-out disagree with him on that one.
Though the Invisible Man is not the first film to feature invisibility, and it most
definitely isn't the last, 1933's The Invisible Man is easily the best.
There have been more modern attempts to dethrone it with Chevy Chase's box office disaster
Memoirs of an Invisible Man and Paul Verhoeven's notably terrible Hollow Man, and there is
a new Universal monster version of The Invisible Man coming out next year from promising sci-fi
director Leigh Whannell.
However, it's hard to imagine that anything could possibly match the magical combination
of H.G. Wells, James Whale, Claude Rains, and Universal Pictures at its horror-fueled peak.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings.
What do you think?
Is The Invisible Man unbeatable, or do you have hopes that next year's remake will top it?
If you're watching this in the future, after that movie's come out, did it?
Let me know in the comments.
In the meantime, don't forget to like and subscribe if you haven't already, and be sure
to check out my website at emagill.com, where you can find written reviews of several sci-fi
classics in both film and literature.
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get early access, vote on future topics, and much more.
Until next time, when we'll find out if thirty really is too old, this is the Unapologetic Geek,
telling you to never be ashamed of what you love, as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"Did you hear about Mrs. Mason's little Willy?"