The Invisible Woman (1940)
Based on the unexpected quality of the previous movie in the Invisible Man series, I was looking forward to The Invisible Woman. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot happening here to prevent your mind from wandering. At 72 minutes, it’s repetitive and generic. It'll disappear from your mind as surely as its heroine does.
Professor Gibbs (John Barrymore) has developed a process that’ll make anyone invisible. He just needs a subject to test it on to ensure his continued funding from Dick Russell (John Howard). After putting an ad in the newspaper, department store model Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce) volunteers. While she uses her new-found invisibility to get revenge upon her jerk of a boss, Mr. Growley (Charles Lane), a group of mobsters have their own nefarious plans for the machine…
Unlike the previous Invisible films, this one’s a comedy. Russell’s butler is always fainting, falling down or getting knocked over. The crime boss who wants to make people invisible employs a trio of goons who might as well be the Three Stooges (in fact, one of them is played by Shemp Howard). While Jack Griffin was strangling his enemies to death with his bare hands, Kitty is pretending to be her boss’ conscience while she kicks him in the behind. While invisible, she gets drunk and the flustered men around her barely know what to do while she runs circles around them. There are some laughs, the kind that you’d find in a sitcom. In fact, the ending comes straight out of a TV show that's run out of ideas but desperately wants to go on for another season.
There’s an overall lack of imagination throughout and while the special effects were impressive for the time, they’re noticeably worse than in The Invisible Man Returns (released earlier the same year) or in the 1933 original. If you find yourself watching this screwball comedy, it moves quickly enough for you not to be bored but you won’t care about the plot. You’ll be more amused by random things throughout, like Professor Gibbs’ maid, played by Margaret Hamilton (better known as the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz) or the realization that, for the time, this was considered a risqué film because of the scenes in which Virginia Bruce disrobes down to her underwear and then runs around naked (although invisible) for most of the film. How times have changed…
The Invisible Woman is not really any worse than some of the other bad Universal Monsters sequels but it doesn't feature any of the original “monsters” and isn't in the same continuity as the other movies. Completists will watch it once and that's it. Everyone else needn't bother. (On DVD, March 5, 2020)
