Whale, as he is known to do, masterfully balances the camp with the terror. When the titular character Griffin reveals his power he is both gleefully hilarious and truly frightening. The way Griffin plays with his victims is quite ghastly but there is a sense of cartoonish villainy here. His motivations aren't complicated, simple world domination. His monstrousness is in his behavior more than his "freakishness". Unlike Dracula who is portrayed as the embodiment of evil or Frankenstein or the Wolf Man who are both victims of societal alienation, Griffin is just a bad man with bad intentions. The characters keep referring to his "madness," that he's been driven mad by the serum he uses to become invisible, but the character doesn't behave irrationally. Nothing about him suggests he is mentally ill. He is motivated quite sanely by greed and a desire for power.
In fact he is a man who discovers power and decides to use it to his own benefit, even at the expense of others. This is, like many of these monster movies of the era, a morality play. It is teaching us about how ugly this sort of quest makes us, so much so we lose our humanity. Does he have a reckoning at the end, a realization of how wrong he was? I'm not sure I buy his death bed confessions and see it more as his sorrow about his plans not working out. But there is room for each of us to interpret that ending.
The film does a wonderful job of building the world of invisibility. They show us just how much chaos can be created by someone who can't be seen. There is a clever moment in the middle where the Invisible Man talks about the challenges he faces being truly invisible from walking down stairs to being seen in the rain to eating food which remains visible until it is digested. The film even tries to come up with the science of becoming transparent, even if the science is nonsensical to modern audiences. Especially in that era the film could have got away with just making him invisible and not making it feel real, but that just isn't enough for Whale who focuses on imbuing his story with a sense of reality, as much as one can with such a fantastic tale.
I don't know if I am reading into this watching from today and looking back, but it feels like we can see some of what Whale is playing with as he builds to the much stronger Bride of Frankenstein a couple years later. Still The Invisible Man is a fun watch for many reasons, no pun intended.
The Invisible Man
Starring: Claude Rains, Gloria Stuart, Henry Travers, William Harrigan
Director: James Whale
Writer: R.C. Sherriff
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