Mad Scientist You Can't See

Made prior to "The Bride of Frankenstein", not long after his first big hit in 1931, Whale made his second of three masterpieces--some may argue his 1932 film, "The Old Dark House" is as well--with  the great (I use this right before his name practically every time I mention him, it seems) Claude Rains only seen at the very end on his death bed as the invisibility potion wears away. That distinctively rich voice, with degrees of madness up and down when his Dr. Griffin is wrecking shit or assaulting/killing folks for kicks (he causes a tragic train crash and sends a colleague off a cliff in a car to its fiery doom), Rains in bandages, a coat, and goggles gleefully torments and relishes the carnage he causes. When I picked up the Blu-ray Legacy set, I had forgotten just how many films are in the Universal series but the first is by far the very best and it's not even close. The special effects alone for 1933 are a marvel, as clothes and bandages come off to reveal Rains to frightened awestruck locals, leading one copper to surmise, "He's all eaten away." Not just that, he throws homicidal and juvenile tantrums, tosses bottle at barflies, lobs a taken bike at a host of villagers, and pushes a bar owner of the Lion's Head down a flight of his own stairs because he wants payment for food and board! All of this, which includes Dr. Griffin ransacking pubs, banks, rooms, and properties with plenty of police he teases, mocks, punches, chokes, and prods to great delight, Rains' voice is more than enough though his performance behind layers can be incredibly visualized. A long, storied career, Rains had quite a Universal Studios trio with this film, "The Wolf Man", and "Phantom of the Opera" even before his next phase performing with the likes of Bogart and Bette Davis. Whale actually could have never made Bride and he would still have been heralded...the sight gags like chairs, windows, doors, cigars, a bank teller cash drawer, scarves (often choking someone), and levers moving by themselves alone are astonishing achievements. Even footprints in the snow, seeing bandages free from a head invisible, the invisible body of Rains gradually appear, Rains causing a room full of people to scurry and clumsily fall over each other, and commanding a colleague to do his bidding while proving his capabilities are equally amazing sequences of significant achievement. Rains going on about his goals to kill, sell his secrets to the highest bidder, get lots of cash after a life as an impoverished chemist, and insults to anyone who dares to try and stop him is almost always done through voice and special effects with the actor occasionally getting to physically convey the uptick in aggressive mania and heightened bursts of violence. And knowing he is free to move about often undetected unless purposely revealing himself, the lunatic doc makes sure he raises plenty of hell. Una O'Connor, as the pub owner's wife, wails and bellows much like she later does in Bride and EE Clive as a cop she often argues with in Bride comments when asked to nab Rains by a barfly, "You can't put handcuffs" on an invisible man. 5/5

*The Invisible Man (1933)