The Invisible Man Returns

The Invisible Man became one of Universal's stable of horror characters, joining Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy. I'm looking at the DVDs in the Universal Legacy Collection devoted to the Wells character. But it wasn't a quick thing. The second Universal film featuring the character didn't arrive until 1940, when Vincent Price put on the bandages in The Invisible Man Returns.

This is a pretty good film, and addresses some of the problems that the original film had. Cecil Kellaway is excellent as the detective looking to track down Price, and he seems to have seen the first film, as he uses smoke machines to make Price visible. They still hadn't thought of using dogs or paint, though.

Price is the wrongly convicted man of a murder, and is hours away from his hanging. His friend, Dr. Griffin (John Sutton), visits him and gives him a dose of the drug his cousin Jack Griffin, had developed. This is the tenuous connection to the first film, and for some reason the drug is now called duocaine.

Price escapes and seeks to find the real killer. Given the paucity of characters, it's not hard to figure out that his cousin, Cedric Hardwicke, is the man. With the help of Griffin and his fiancee, Nan Grey, Price tries to capture and force a confession out of Hardwicke before he succumbs to what destroyed Griffin--madness.

Special effects had advanced some since 1933. In 1940, it was possible to show Price's figure shrouded in smoke, a neat detail. The matte process was still used for those shots when he is partially clothed, and at times the edges of the matte are exposed, but it's still effective. Of course, once again we are forced to confront the nudity the main character must endure--it's hard not to imagine him running around the woods in bare feet, or climbing a tree with his ball sack swinging.

This time the title character is supposed to be sympathetic. There's a touching scene near the end when he needs to take the clothes from a scarecrow, and talks to him as if he was real. As with the first film, Price is only revealed in a hospital bed, but his fate is much more happy.

One of the screenwriters was Kurt Siodmak, a Universal regular who created the Wolf Man character. Also in the cast is Alan Napier, later Alfred of Batman, this time playing a drunken mine superintendent. This is a fun vintage horror film.