After fighting Nazis, Jon Hall is back as the invisible man. He looks a lot better with a moustache and has the benefit of a supporting cast that includes Evelyn Ankers, John Carradine and Gale Sondegaard.
He’s an amnesiac who has lost five years of memory after being conked on the head during a diamond-hunting expedition to Africa. He comes back and is determined to get money owed him by his fellow expedition members. Hall is a different sort of character in this – nasty and not very sympathetic, so it’s not that weird for his former friends (Sondegaard, Lester Matthews) to conk him on the head and dump him in the river. He winds up in the home of mad scientist John Carradine, working on an invisibility formula, who is dying to test it on some humans. So Hall offers himself up as guinea pig.
Hall’s performance isn’t bad at all – he wasn’t the best actor in the world but honestly he didn’t have much scope with those dashing hero parts he normally played; here he gets to depict an angry anti-hero and it really energises his acting. After three invisible movies with a sympathetic hero, it’s great to see one with a nasty hero again.
Some cool invisible stuff - Hall threatens Matthews with a knife, throws flour on his face to prove is there, and becomes half invisible. It’s also a great idea to have the invisible man require blood in order to be able to become visible - a very effective pinching of the vampire legend. It gives Halls character some real motivation to be evil apart from just going insane. (Hall starts out as a bad egg here so he can’t blame invisibility on making him nasty).
It’s a shame Evelyn Anker’s character isn’t used a bit more – they set up Hall is obsessed with her but could have done more with this. Also Sondegaard and Matthews deserve a bit more darkness and more of a come-uppance – one feels Gale Sondergaard in particular is under-utilized.
But on the sunny side it’s great that Hall is finally defeated by a dog instead of a human – Carradine’s dog, looking for revenge. (You think Anker’s journo boyfriend Alan Curtis is going to do this but he’s unconscious at the end). And it's all fast paced and exciting.
The film uses the class system are motivation – Hall, Carradine and a comic cockney (Leon Errol) are anti-gentry (Carradine partly makes his dog invisible because he was being picked on by the gentry). Although there is this all wise and all knowing knight Leland Hodgson at the end who comes along to pass judgement, like those nobles who appear at the eleventh hour in Shakespeare plays.
No comments:
Post a Comment