The Mummy's Curse (1944)

 

Read/Watch 'em In Order # 156

The Universal Monster movies always played fast and loose with its timeline. The final Mummy movie--1944's The Mummy's Curse--might have the oddest time jump of all. It is set 25 years after the previous film. I suppose that means it's set in the far future year of 1969. Obviously, the producers didn't care about that detail. But, when you watch the film, there's nothing really overt about it that says it's NOT set in 1969 other than the car the protagonist is driving. Perhaps the guy just likes antique cars.

Anyway, remember that Kharis, carrying the reincarnated Princess Ananka, sank into a swamp. A quarter century later, Kharis has been recovered from the swamp by a couple of members of  Ananka's cult, strangling some poor shlub when they acquire it. One of the cultists is posing as the assistant to an archeologist named Dr. James Halsey (Dennis Moore). Halsey is in the swamp specifically to recover Kharis and Ananka for a museum. 

One of the things I like about this movie--in fact, about the entire series--is the casualness in which people accept that an undead mummy occasionally walks around and kills people. It's understandable, because after Kharis is reanimated in the first movie, there's plenty of evidence to show that it's true. In this case, the head of a construction crew draining the swamp is skeptical, but Halsey has no problem with the idea.

Anyway, the cultists use Tana leaves to bring Kharis back to life. In the meantime, in a scene that is remarkably creepy for this low budget film, Ananka climbs out of the swamp. She's young again despite having aged rapidly in the last film. She also has amnesia.

Ananka ends up working for Halsey, proving herself to be very knowledgable in all things ancient Egyptian. Kharis starts stalking her. Several people get strangled. Ananka is finally taken by Kharis and brought to the ruins of a monastery the cultists are using as a hideout. One of the cultists brings Halsey's girlfriend along as well. This sets off a "you-betrayed-your-oath-of-secrecy" conga line involving the cultists and Kharis. One cultist backstabs the other. Halsey shows up and gets into a fight with the still-living cultist. Kharis takes a hand in all this and also decides to kill the cultist. In the end, a big chunk of the monastery collapses on the mummy and the cultist. Since that cultist was the last living person to know the secret of the Tana leaves, there's apparently no danger of Kharis being brought back to life again.

Poor Ananka, lying in a mummy case in the monestary, has once again aged back to her normal 3000 years, so she's a goner as well. But Halsey gets his girlfriend for himself and the mummy for his museum. The end.

The low budget often shows in this entry, but despite that, I like it a lot. It's very atmospheric, with Ananka's resurrection from the swamp being particularly striking. Also, shots of the mummy walking up to the monastary ruins look pretty cool. The 60-minute film moves at a brisk pace and tells its story effectively. The Mummy's Curse is definitely a 2nd-tier entry in the Universal Monster canon, but it's still worth watching.

The Mummy's Ghost (1944)

 

                                             

Read/Watch 'em In Order #155

What I love about The Mummy's Ghost (1944) is the casualness with which everyone in a small New England town accepts the idea of undead mummies and Egyptian curses. It's understandable, of course, since they had just had a mummy rampaging through their town not long ago. Now, we get a recap of the first two films via a lecturing college professor. And when Kharis reappears and people start getting strangled to death again, the cops accept that the mummy is back. 

One of those cops is played by Barton Maclane, playing a tough cop in the same hard-boiled manner that he always played tough cops, logically planning a way of trapping a "criminal" who is immune to bullets. I love it. 

As in the previous film, the movie also benefits from the actor playing Kharis' Egyptian "keeper." This time, it's John Carradine, an unfailing professional as an actor who always gave his all in any movie, regardless of that movie's overall quality.

The quality of movie, this time, actually isn't bad. There's a bit of a continuity glitch as the Egyptian cult now seems dedicated to bringing Kharis and Princess Anaka together. This is quite a change in attitude. Remember, after all, that Kharis was cursed to guard Anaka's tomb because his love for her was forbidden. But it does allow this film to go in an unusual direction. Oh, well. The villains in the previous films kept getting distracted from their mission by falling for a pretty girl. Perhaps the cult simply decided that there's no beating True Love. 

After Kharis kills an Egyptologist to get some Tana leaves (the stuff he needs to stay alive), his next mission is to recover Anaka's mummy from a local musuem. But when Carradine's character uses the juice of the Tana leaves to resurrect her, her mummy crumbles into dust. This means, he realizes, that she's been reincarnated into someone else.

That someone else is Amina (Ramsey Ames), who is of Egyptian descent. She's also the girlfriend of the film's bland protagonist, played by Robert Lowery. Eventually, Kharis kidnaps Amina. But when Carradine is about to inject her with Tana juice, he starts to fall for her as well. Seriously, the cult's Human Resources department really needs to put out some guidelines about this sort of thing. Anyway, this situation isn't going to make Kharis happy.

There's a lot of nice touches. The shots of Kharis (played again by Lon Chaney, Jr.) walking up and down elevated railroad tracks to a hideout in an abandoned warehouse look just plain cool. The variation of the usual plot is interesting and the way Amina's hair gradually turns from brunette to grey over the course of the movie is pretty nifty. She is indeed Anaka and she is now rapidly aging. She is, after all, 3000 years old. 

The movie has a bit of a tragic end, with Kharis and Amina/Anaka sinking into a swamp. But this sets up the creepiest scene in the series, which we'll examine when we look at The Mummy's Curse in a few weeks. 

Mummy's Tomb (1942)

 

Read/Watch 'em In Order #153

The Mummy's Tomb was released in 1942, two years after the previous movie. But it's set 30 years after The Mummy's Hand. This retroactively sets Hand in the early 1910s.  The timeline of the Universal Monster movies--and the exact time in which they are set--was always a little elastic. But in this case, the time frames work just fine. There's nothing in Hand to firmly indicate it didn't take place 30 years before it was made. In fact, it actually makes sense, since Egypt in 1940 would have been more concerned with the Afrika Korps than with archeology. 

Anyway, Dick Foran and Wallace Ford are back as Steve Banning and Babe Hanson. Now, though, they are made up as old men. Steve is a widower and has a grown son. 

George Zucco also makes a reappearance. He was shot by Babe in the first film, but it turns out he survived. The mummy Kharis had been set on fire, but he was apparently only singed. 

Anyway, Zucco's character assigns Mehemet Bey (played by Turhan Bey) to take Kharis to the U.S. and wreak vengence on the entire Banning family. As the book Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films 1931-1946 (1990: written by Michael Brunas, John Brunas and Tom Weaver) points out, there's no explanation why the bad guys wait 30 years before instituting this plan.

I remember how surprised I was when I first saw this film when the stars of the first film (both Steve and Babe) end up getting ruthlessly killed by Kharis so early in the film. Steve's sister is also killed. The 30-year time jump helps make this a little more palatible, since both men are implied to have lived full lives, but it was still a shock. This cycle of Mummy movies aren't the equal to the true classics, but I still liked Steve and Babe. 

 Steve's son John and the cops eventually tumble to the existance of Kharis. 

Mehemet Bey, in the meantime, takes a liking to John's girlfriend and has Kharis kidnap her. This brings everything to a head as John and a torch-bearing posse kill Bey and run the mummy into an abandoned mansion, where the mummy is presumably killed in a fire. But fire didn't completely destroy Kharis in the last film, did it?

By necessity, the 60-minute film moves along at a brisk pace. In fact, the first ten minutes taken up by a flashback to recount the important points from The Mummy's Hand, so there's really only 50 minutes to tell the new story. Univeral Horrors is justly critical of the film in this regard:

"There is a pointed emphasis on speed and efficiency at the expense of character development and atmosphere." (page 318)

All the same, I like the movie. Turhan Bey stands out in his performance as the bad guy. Lon Chaney, Jr. takes over the role of Kharis and, though he isn't given a chance to give the monster any real personality, he does make an effective unstoppable killing machine. And the ending, set in that burning mansion with John Banning fighting to rescue his girl and escape, is quite good. On a more minor but very entertaining point, I do enjoy that the good guys eventually decide that they are indeed pursing a 3000-year-old undead killer based on crime scene forensics. 

This, though, is not the end of Kharis.

The Mummy's Hand (1940)

 

Read/Watch 'em In Order #152

By 1940, it must have been pretty obvious to the bigwigs at Universal Pictures that their monsters were money-makers. They could keep churning out sequels and audiences would keep buying tickets.

There had already been three sequels to Frankenstein and one to Dracula. The introduction of the Wolfman was still a year away, but both The Mummy and The Invisible Man would be getting sequels.

Well, The Inivisible Man Returns is definitely a sequel, even though the title tells a bit of a white lie in that it's a different guy turning invisible this time around, so the original not really returning. The Mummy's Hand, though, can be seen as a reboot. The 1932 original featured a resurrected mummy using the name Ardeth Bey and who could pass as a regular human. The 1940 sequel involves an entirely different mummy (named Kharis) who, over the course of a total of four films, never gets out of his mummy wrappings. Or, for that matter, get any dialogue.

Still, he's an effective monster. Played by Tom Tyler during a lull in Tyler's B-Western films, he glares out at the world through pitch-black eyes and shambles through the night in search of his victims. He's legitimately creepy.

The Mummy's Hand is very low-budget. It reuses scenes from the 1932 film, lifts its score from Son of Frankenstein and employs sets built for another movie. The end result is 2nd-Tier Universal Monsters, but even 2nd-tier U.M. can be a lot of fun.

Archeologist Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and his comic-relief sidekick Babe (Wallace Ford) are in Egypt and have picked up a clue to the location of the three thousand-year-old tomb of Princess Ananka. They talk a vaudeville magician into financing an expedition. The magician's pretty daughter Marta (Peggy Moran) tags along because she's initially convinced that Steve and Babe are con artists.

What none of them know is that there is a secret organization dedicated to making sure no one ever defiles the princess' tomb. Also, there's a mummy entombed outside Anaka's resting place. 3000 years ago, Kharis tried to use the forbidden Tanis leaves to resurrect Ananka after she died. As punishment, he was buried alive. The secret society is able to use the juice from Tanis leaves to bring him back to life if necessary. 

And that, of course, is what happens. Steve's expedition finds the outer tomb and is close to finding the entrance to Anaka's tomb. The leader of the society (played with quiet menace by George Zucco) brings Kharis to life. The mummy kills a couple of people. But both he and Zucco's character are distracted by Marta, taking her alive rather than killing her as well. And, to be fair, she is awful pretty.

The Mummy's Hand takes a little too much time to get to the mummy and some of the comic relief falls a little flat. Though, to be fair, the magician (Cecil Kellaway) has an hilarious scene when he tries to explain to his daughter what he's done with the last of their money. Also, the character of Babe is actually useful in the expedition. If his comedy scenes are only mildly funny, Babe at least serves a useful purpose in the narrative.

I also like that both Marta and Steve use their brains to figure out stuff at key moments. It's Marta who deduces there's a secret entrance to Anaka's tomb somewhere in the first tomb. It's Steve, using his knowledge of hieroglyphics, who finds a way to get to that tomb in time to save Marta.

And, as I said, Tyler's mummy is sincerely creepy. It is apparently completely destroyed at the climax, but--as we all know--it's very, very hard to permanently destroy a Universal monster.

By the way, there are several plot points here (most overtly the existance of a secret society protecting an ancient tomb) that were re-used in slightly altered form for the 1999 reboot of The Mummy.

But that raises an important question that all good nerds are forced to consider. Is The Mummy's Hand a reboot of the 1932 film? Or is it set in the same universe with another mummy popping up as a result of another curse? After all, in a world where one mummy can exist, there's no reason why there can't be a second mummy.

Well, I like to think of the Universal Monsters all existing in the same universe (with the exception of one Invisible Man film which simply can't be made to fit). So I think the 1932 film and the four movies that begin with The Mummy's Hand are indeed in the same universe as Frankenstein, the original Mummy, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It means that, in ancient Egypt, there were two separate incidents in which a guy is cursed to be a mummy after falling for a princess. But those princesses were darn good-lookin', so I'm okay with that idea. 

Soon, we'll look at the next film in the Mummy series. 

The First One Without Karloff

Boris Karloff played Frankenstein's Monster three times, bringing pathos and humanity to the role.  It's always been fascinating to me that for the rest of his life, Karloff received fan mail from children that were addressed to the Monster. "I know you are always scared, but if you came to my house, we could play and  no one will chase you and you won't have to be scared anymore. I will be your friend."

To quote Karloff himself:

When I played Frankenstein’s Monster I received sack loads of fan mail…mostly from young girls. These children had seen right through the make-up and had been deeply moved by sympathy for the poor brute. (from "My Life as a Monster")

But by the time The Ghost of Frankenstein came along, Karloff had decided to retire from the role. So Universal turned to their other monster movie star--Lon Chaney Jr.  Though usually best suited for supporting roles, Chaney had done a magnificent job a year earlier as Larry Talbot in The Wolfman. 

The Ghost of Frankenstein marked the series descent from A-picture territory into the realm of B-Movies. But, as my 1 or 2 regular readers know, I have a real love for the straightforward storytelling we find in the world of B-Movies. Ghost doesn't have the mythic power of the earlier films, it's still tells a good story.

Bela Lugosi reprises his role as Igor, the Monster's manipulative but only friend. I think this is Lugosi's best role--we never doubt he's evil, but we also never doubt that he really does consider the Monster to be his friend. Of course, that won't stop him from looking out for himself no matter what.

Igor was supposedly shot to death in the previous film (1939's Son of Frankenstein) and the Monster was knocked into a searing-hot pit of sulfur. But we soon find out that both had survived. Igor takes the Monster to the village of Vasaria, where a son of the original Doctor Frankenstein works as a brain surgeon. Soon, several people are dead and Igor is pretty much blackmailing Frankenstein into helping the Monster. This leads to a plan to replace the Monster's damaged and evil brain with the brain of one of his victims--Dr. Kettering. 

But Igor has plans of his own concerning whose brain will be put into the Monster's skull...

It's all great fun, with the story jumping around from one plot point to the next in an internally logical manner. Chaney doesn't elicit quite the same level of sympathy that Karloff brings to the role of the Monster, but he still gives us a worthy effort. A scene in which he befriends a young girl come closest to emulating a Karloff-like moment. 

The rest of the cast do fine jobs, most notably Lugosi and Lionel Atwill as Frankenstein's less-than-ethical assistant. The black-and-white photography and the lighting are wonderful, giving the movie the proper atmosphere. Despite the drop in quality when compared those made in the 1930s, I'm glad The Ghost of Frankenstein and the later films were made.

The Last Invisible Man

Read/Watch ‘em in Order: #9

The previous movie in this series—The Invisible Man’s Revenge—was too different from the other films to be considered a part of the same continuity, but that’s not the case with this film.

Despite a heavy dose of both verbal and slapstick humor, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) ties squarely in with the original film. Bud and Lou are newly licensed private eyes. When boxer Tommy Nelson is accused of murder, he hires the boys to help him catch the real killers.

But Tommy has another advantage. His girlfriend’s dad has inherited Jack Griffith’s original formula (heck, there’s a picture of Claude Rains hanging in his lab) and Tommy injects himself with it. But there’s still the danger of the formula driving Tommy insane and there’s no guarantee he can be cured even if he does clear his name.

Of course, that last bit does represent a continuity glitch---it had already been established in the second film that a complete blood transfusion would work as a cure. Also, Tommy is able to eat without the undigested food being visible inside him. But we can forgive this last one, since it helps set up a great visual gag later in the film when Lou and Tommy are sharing a plate of spaghetti.

The film was one of several that followed up on the commercial success of 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.  The boys had shown us that it was possible to incorporate great comedy with a serious and respectful treatment of Universal’s classic monsters, so that formula was repeated several times. In this case, the plot involved Tommy and the boys getting evidence against mobsters who framed the boxer and arranged for fights to be thrown. This part of the film is played relatively straight and progresses in a logical manner as they identify the chief mobster and set him up for a fall.

But the gags mixed in with this are hilarious without distracting from the “rational” part of the plot. The dialogue highlights Bud and Lou’s verbal wit, while several bits of physical comedy are amongst the best in any of their films. The funniest moment, I think, might possibly be the punch line (or rather the punch sight gag) involving Lou accidently putting a number of people to sleep via hypnotism.

And an extended sequence with Lou in a boxing ring, being secretly helped by Tommy during a fight, is truly classic. In fact, the entire film was consciously built around this routine.

Even the short throwaway gags (such as Lou trying to pick up a gun while wearing boxing gloves) are funny. The special effects are great and the supporting cast holds up their end of the film nicely. Sheldon Leonard plays the head mobster—a standard role for him but one he always did well both in serious films and in comedies. William Frawley gets several terrific scenes as the long-suffering police detective trying to catch Tommy.

It’s a worthwhile finale for a classic and enjoyable series of horror films.

And that does indeed bring us to the end of the Invisible Man films. We’ve still one more Shadow novel in “The Hand” series to cover, then we’ll be ready to move on to something else. Right now, I’m leaning towards examining Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellicidar novels—if only because I haven’t revisited them in awhile. But we’ll see. It’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to… um, I mean I’ll read what I want to. 

Actually, I’m open to suggestions. Any film or book series you all would like me to cover?

“In this house, you’ve got to believe what you can’t see.”

Read/Watch ‘em in order #7: The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944)

Robert Griffith returns to England after spending years in a Capetown insane asylum, determined to take vengeance on the family he thinks once cheated him.

But his plans seem to go awry until he stumbles across the cabin of a mad scientist—a fellow who has developed an invisibility serum and is anxious to try it out on a human. (He’s already made an invisible dog and an invisible parrot.)

The title character is played by Jon Hall, who portrayed the invisible spy in the previous entry in the series. But this time he’s no hero, but rather a madman who has already committed a couple of murders before the movie even begins.

So he doesn’t need an invisibility serum to send him to crazy-town. He’s already there.

This is probably the weakest of the series. It’s a little slow-moving for a B-movie, taking a good 20 minutes to set up the plot and get to the invisibility stuff. (That’s a pretty big chunk of a 78-minute movie.) Remember that the first two movies started with the main characters already invisible, while Invisible Agent had a suspenseful encounter with fascist agents to set up the story. Revenge just has a lot of conversation. The dialogue is perfectly well-constructed, but an element of danger or excitement wouldn’t have hurt.

Still, it’s a fun movie. John P. Fulton’s special effects continue to be remarkable. A shot in which Griffith splashes water on his face, making his face and his hand partially visible, is perhaps the creepiest moment in the series.

Jon Hall does a solid job of playing a unpredictable psychotic. John Carradine gives a classy performance as the scientist, continuing his long and honorable connection with the Universal Monster universe. (He was one of the hunters that found Frankenstein’s monster hanging out with the blind hermit in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and he’d take over the role of Dracula for two movies in 1945.)

But IS this movie a part of the mainstream Universal Monster universe? The main character is named Griffith, but there’s no indication that he’s related to the original invisible man. And he doesn’t use the same formula—Carradine’s Dr. Drury creates a serum on his own.

This races a vitally important question. Is this movie a part of the same continuity as the rest of the monsters and the other invisible man films, or does it exist in its own separate little universe?

Why is this question so important? Well, because….  because…

Because… um….

Well, because it just IS. If you have to ask, you’re probably reading the wrong blog. Heck, this is an issue we’ve dealt with herein the past.

Of course, it’s possible that Carradine simply creates an invisibility serum independent of the one created by Jack Griffith. And perhaps Robert Griffith’s last name is an ironic coincidence.

But I place it in a separate universe. What convinces me of this is the fact that everyone is pretty much shocked by the existence of an invisible man. Remember that Jack Griffith’s original rampage was a very public one and the possibility of making a man invisible was known to everyone in later films. Yes, other sequels to the original had some continuity glitches in them, but this one is simply too big to ignore.  So we’ll consider The Invisible Man’s Revenge, a flawed but still enjoyable B-film, to be located one reality to the left of the world in which Jack Griffith began his invisible shenanigans. 

This is such an important issue that I think we'll spend next week discussing whether a series of novels and a comic strip should belong in the same universe.

That leaves us with Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), which is without question part of the original universe. We’ll pay the boys a visit very soon.

Who Needs the Shadow?

Read/Watch ‘Em in Order: Entry #6

Watching The Invisible Agent (1942) made me think of a story about the old-time radio version of the Shadow. During World War II, the Mutual Broadcasting System used to get angry complaints from people, demanding to know why the invisible super hero wasn’t being used as a spy against the Axis forces.

But, heck, we didn’t need the Shadow. We had Frank Griffith, the grandson of the original invisible man, sneaking into Berlin to do some invisible espionage.

I enjoy this movie enormously, so I’ll get the things that bother me about it out of the way first, so we can get to the good stuff.

There’s a couple of continuity errors in regard to the earlier film—mostly inconsistencies with some of the problems and limitations of being invisible that seems to have been forgotten or ignored by the filmmakers this time around.

To be fair, though, I’m watching this just a week after having viewed the previous film, while audiences in 1942 had waited two years since the last installment. And it was by then nine years since the first film. So continuity errors probably weren’t as noticeable.

{For the record, here's the inconsistencies: There's no mention at all that the drug eventually drives its user insane, though to be fair, the hero is only invisible for a couple of days, so the side effect may not have had time to become a  danger. The invisible agent can eat without the undigested food being visible inside him and he can fight Nazis in a smoke-filled room without showing up like a bubble. Also, unless I mis-heard a line of dialogue, the original invisible man seems to have been given a different first name.}

But the movie is still fun regardless. Frank Griffith is running a print shop in New York under an assumed name. He has a run-in with German and Japanese agents who are after his grand-dad’s formula, but manages to get away. All the same, he also initially declines to let the U.S. have the dangerous formula either.

Pearl Harbor changes his mind, but he won’t let anyone besides himself to use the drug. So, before long, he’s parachuting while invisible into Germany.

He contacts a drop-dead gorgeous blonde spy who’s been vamping an SS officer for information. Soon, the Germans figure out he’s active in Berlin, but it’s hard to track down an invisible spy.  Frank goes after a list of German and Japanese agents in the United States, then learns of a plan to send a fleet of suicide bombers to New York City.

But a trap involving a fish net lined with hooks might just be more than even an invisible man can handle.

It’s enjoyable and fast-moving storytelling. John P. Fulton continued to do a fine job with the special effects, most notably a scene in which Frank turns invisible and undresses while descending to the ground on parachute.

And Curt Siodmak’s script is interesting on several levels. Aside from being a fun story, it also works as a heartfelt condemnation of tyranny. It’s also an effective character study about the sort of men who hold power in a totalitarian government. The movie portrays Nazi officers and Japanese spies who plot against each other as much as they plot against the Allies. Frank Griffith has some great dialogue when he confronts one of the villains about this:

One of your own gang pushed you off. Someone else will push him off. And that’s how you’ll all go, killing your own. Dog eating dog--until only the biggest and the hungriest are left. You were a little dog, Heiser, and they’re pretending you’re mad so they can shoot you tonight.

Peter Lorre is one of the bad guys, using the same subtle mannerisms and speech patterns he employed as Mr. Moto to portray a Japanese. Keye Luke (best known as Charlie Chan’s Number One son) has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part as a doctor in Berlin’s Japanese embassy. Cedric Hardwicke and J. Edward Bromberg are the two main Nazi villains.

Bromberg, who played the bumbling but evil governor of Spanish California in The Mark of Zorro (1940), plays a bumbling but evil SS officer here. He strikes a perfect balance, providing some comic relief without ever losing track of the fact that his character is a man who has others brutally killed to further his own career.

Well, that covers three of the five  Invisible Man films. So far, we have two good guy invisible men and only one bad guy invisible man. We’ll have to see what the final score is after we watch The Invisible Man’s Revenge and the Abbot and Costello entry.

Mystery, Madness and the Invisible Man

READ/WATCH ‘EM IN ORDER #4

As is only proper with any B-movie worth its salt, The Invisible Man Returns (1940) jumps feet first into the story without wasting any time at all.

Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe is about to hang for the murder of his brother. But Geoffrey’s gal and his best friend are both convinced he’s innocent. And Geoffrey is very fortunate in his best friend---Frank Griffith--is the younger brother of the original invisible man and has recreated the formula to make one invisible.

So, one smuggled hypodermic needle later, Geoffrey escapes. Now all he has to do is find the real killer.

But there’s a couple of factors working against him. First, Robert hasn’t had time to find an antidote yet. And, as we all remember from the first film, the invisibility formula eventually turns you COMPLETELY BUG NUTS!!!

This gives the movie several layers of suspense. Who’s the real killer? Will Geoffrey be restored to visibility? Will he go whacko and become a villain himself?

Can he dodge the cops? Remember, the police in the Universal Horror reality have experience in chasing an invisible man. And the Inspector in charge of the investigation soon proves to be a smart and capable man.

All this adds up to 81 minutes of fun. First, the script (co-written by Curt Siodmak—Universal’s go-to guy for good monster stories) is a solid one. The only weakness is that it’s pretty obvious who the real killer very early on. But otherwise, the plot unfolds quickly and logically.

Second, the cast is great. Vincent Price (in his first horror role) does a typically fantastic job as Geoffrey Radcliffe. He starts out as a desperate man who’s frightened of what he might do when the madness begins to overtake him. From there, he smoothly segues into a near-madman raving about how he could rule the world.  Whether he can hold on to his sanity until he can clear his name is a real question.

The rest of the cast is also strong. Remember, this was an era when character actors in supporting roles were always given that minute or two of extra screen time they needed to really shine.  Cecil Kellaway, as Scotland Yard Inspector Sampson, oozes a sense of intelligence and professionalism. It’s Sampson who quickly figures out how Geoffrey escapes. When he goes to Griffith’s lab to question the scientist, he’s smoking a cigar and casually walking about the room blowing puffs of smoke. He knows, you see, that an invisible man would show up as a silhouette in the smoke.

Alan Napier, who a quarter century later would be Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred on the 1960s Batman TV show, oozes slime as a ruthless, dirty thug. The scene in which Geoffrey uses his invisibility to psych out Napier’s character to get information is both funny and effective in terms of advancing the plot. Even a minor bit of business Napier uses adds to his performance—a tendency for his character to wiggle his pinky in his ear every few minutes humanizes him and makes him seem a little more sleezy.

Third, John P. Fulton’s special effects are astonishing, especially when you remember that this was decades before CGI. (In fact, Fulton got an Oscar nomination for his work here.)  There’s a sequence in which Geoffrey is apparently trapped in a house by the cops. It’s raining out, so when he tries to duck out a back door, he shows up like a bubble. The cops then begin spraying the house with smoke, once again causing Geoffrey’s outline to become visible. Each of these shots looks perfect. 

So, with our journey through the original Invisible Man movies now at the halfway point, we find ourselves with another winner. The Invisible Man Returns may not be the classic that the original is, but it’s an entertaining movie—well-crafted on every level. It’s well worth… um… seeing.

By the way, in the previous entry, I had actually forgotten about 1950's Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, which is indeed a part of this series' continuity, so we'll be covering that as well as Invisible Agent and The Invisible Man's Revenge. 

"I can stand there amongst them in the day and night and laugh at them. "

Read/Watch 'em in order: Entry #3 (The Invisible Man films)

I do this blog for several reasons. Obviously, it's in large part for self-promotion--done with the hopes that some of you will click on the links for my books and buy them. Or request your local library get copies.

Second, I feel it my duty to share my brilliant observations about all things geeky and thus bring an occasional glimmer of light to all your sad and dreary lives.

But yet another reason is that it serves as a reminder to me of books, stories or films I haven't revisited in years.

For instance, I haven't seen the classic version of The Invisible Man in a long, long time. So opting to discuss the films in that series gave me reason to watch it again.

And, gee whiz, it's a great movie. John P. Fulton is responsible for the often remarkable special effects. James Whale does a great job as directer, injecting the film with his usual sardonic and sometimes campy humor. This is really apparent early on, as reflected in the wonderfully colorful characters that the Invisible Man encounters in a village pub.



But the movie really belongs to Claude Rains. This was his American film debut and (despite never seeing him other than when swathed in bandages) he dominates every scene he's in.

The plot of the movie has him going mad--a side effect of the drug that makes him invisible--and launching a reign of terror across England. He drafts his former lab assistant--a sniveling coward named Kemp--to help him deal with several drawbacks of being invisible.

But Kemp betrays him and the police begin coming up with some reasonably effective tactics to stop him. The plot is very well constructed--with most events building out of the logical consequences of someone becoming invisible.

Still, it's Claude Rains' vocal performance that makes this a classic. His insane rants are intermingled with occasional attempts at trying to remain calm--giving the whole performance a feeling of pathos. My favorite scene might be when he confronts his lady love and struggles to regain his sanity, only to tumble over the edge into Crazy Town once more. With the important exception of Casablanca, I'd rate this as Rains' best movie performance.

The film is reasonably faithful to H.G. Wells' original novel, though it ramps up the title character's insanity and leaves out the social and political themes that Wells included in most of his novels. This was why Wells himself disliked the film, but I think he was wrong in this. Taken for what it is, it's one of the horror movie high points of all time.

Poor H.G. He was a brilliant man, but his science fiction ideas were so inherently awesome by themselves that no one ever noticed (or simply didn't care about) any larger socio-political themes he might have been trying to discuss. The coolness of invisible men, time machines, and Martian fighting tripods simply overwhelmed any deeper points.

The Invisible Man had several sequels made during the 1940s: The Invisible Man Returns (1940), Invisible Agent (1942) and The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944).  We'll be getting to all these films eventually. (We'll be leaving out 1940's The Invisible Woman because it's not a part of the same continuity.) Though none of these are the classic that the original clearly is, all are worthwhile and enjoyable B-Movies. All are worth a look.

A House Full of Monsters

The classic Universal monster movie cycle began in 1931—the year Dracula and Frankenstein came out. It ended either in 1945 with House of Dracula OR in 1948 with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. It depends on whether you count that final comedy as part of the same continuity or not. I do count it—the monsters are treated with enough respect to warrant its inclusion in the canon.


By my count, there were 21 films in the cycle. Three with vampires; five with mummies; four featuring Dr. Frankenstein’s horrific creation; one with a werewolf; four with an invisible man; and four teaming up either two or three of the above in the same movie. That’s a heck of a lot of monsters. Someday I need to watch them in sequence and get a final body count.


Initially, these movies were very much A-level productions—especially the James Whale-directed Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. Before long, though, they dropped down into B-movie territory.


But being a B-movie from the 1930s/40s is not a bad thing. These are films that often had good quality scripts and fine character actors. In fact, some of the most entertaining films from Hollywood’s Golden Age were the B-movies, more often than not featuring better constructed plots than the big budget fare.


And taking a look at House of Frankenstein (1945) and House of Dracula (1945) gives us proof of this. These were the last two “serious” films in the monster cycle. Both are beautifully photographed (in glorious black-and-white, of course) examples of first-rate storytelling.


Both movies take the three most popular monsters---Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula and the Wolfman—and drop them into a story together. House of Frankenstein has the added bonus of Boris Karloff playing a mad scientist. Ironic, of course, since Karloff had originated the role of the monster. Karloff’s hunchbacked assistant is played by J. Carrol Naish, one of the era’s finest character actors.

The movie is episodic, involving one sequence featuring Dracula and another featuring the Monster and the Wolfman. Great performances by Karloff, Naish, and Lon Chaney, Jr. (playing Larry Talbot/the Wolfman for the third time) give the movie a strong backbone and the script injects some honest-to-goodness pathos into the tragic dénouement.

House of Dracula features Onslow Stevens as a scientist and devout Christian who tries to find cures for both vampirism and lycanthropy. But he’s double-crossed by Dracula (who was pretending to want a cure so that he could clamp down on the pretty nurse) and ends up with a bloodstream full of vampire parasites. This turns him into a homicidal maniac, but not before he performs a brain operation on Larry Talbot and does apparently cure him. But poor Larry never can fully escape tragedy---as he is left to deal with the now insane doctor at the climax. Dracula get left out in the sun and the Monster gets caught in a burning lab (at least the third time he ends a movie trapped in a burning building).

Stevens is great in this film, exuding intelligence and sincere compassion early in the story before going off the deep end to total whacko-territory later on.


There’s a few continuity glitches in that there’s no explanations how several of the monsters survived their apparent deaths in the previous film—but, hey, these are monsters and several possible explanations come to mind, making these glitches forgivable.


A more serious weakness of both films is that Frankenstein’s Monster doesn’t get to do much more than stumble around a bit before meeting his apparent demise, spending most of both movies in a coma. He’s played by Glenn Strange in both movies and, with some coaching from Karloff, Strange does a good job in the few moments he’s active. It’s a pity he didn’t get to do much more than take long naps.


And, actually, House of Dracula raises one real doubt as to whether Abbot and Costello Meets Frankenstein should be considered canon. If the Universal Monster cycle ends with House of Dracula, then Larry Talbot is finally cured of his lycanthropy. But if the later comedy is part of the cycle, then the cure was only temporary. Larry Talbot is cursed forever to become a killing beast, unable to even seek the final peace of death.


On the one hand, Larry is played so sympathetically by Lon Chaney Jr. that it’s nice to think he gets a happy ending. On the other hand, A & C is itself a great movie that otherwise deserves to be part of the cycle. And monsters should be tragic, after all. Sorry, Larry, I’m afraid you’re simply stuck with being forever a werewolf.