The Invisible Man (1933) Movie Review

We all know that necessity is the mother of invention, but there is an Spanish expression that roughly translates to ‘laziness is the mother of all vices’ (the closest English equivalent I can think of is ‘idle hands are the devil’s playground’). I would say that the link between invention and laziness is largely computer-generated; that’s why a near-100 year-old movie such as The Invisible Man looks better than any modern CGI extravaganza, and it does so because it’s all there — even when it isn’t. Jorge Luis Borges once wrote about all the trouble that H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man has to go to (wigs, dark glasses, fake noses and beards, etc.) so that people can’t see that they can’t see him. Director James Whale went to similar great lengths to make sure we can see that there is someone we can’t see, and the sheer mechanical ingenuity devoted to making the titular character a tangible physical presence reminds me of the biblical admonition that “ye shall know them by their fruits;” Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) certainly puts the phrase ‘conspicuous by his absence’ in an entirely different perspective. The flawlessness of the whole enterprise is made even more impressive when we consider that it was achieved with wires that had to be kept out of the shot because the technology to digitally delete them obviously didn’t exist yet. Other optical effects, involving the Invisible Man himself as opposed to his interactions with other people and objects, are less convincing, and at the same time aren’t — that is to say, they aren’t any less convincing than today’s green screens, motion capture, and other assorted VFX. The other major factor that sells the film is Rains’s performance. He evidently can’t emote (we only see his face until the very last shot, and even then in the stillness of death), but he more than makes up for that, first with body language — a category wherein I feel compelled to include the sight of Griffin’s autonomous pants skipping down a country road —, and later with his disembodied voice, which he twists and contorts to fully convey the extent of the character’s madness.