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, itâs repetitive and generic. It'll disappear from your mind as surely as its heroine does.
Professor Gibbs (John Barrymore) has developed a process thatâll 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 machineâŚ
Unlike the previous Invisible films, this oneâs a comedy. Russellâs 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 bossâ 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 youâd 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.
Thereâs an overall lack of imagination throughout and while the special effects were impressive for the time, theyâre 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 wonât care about the plot. Youâll be more amused by random things throughout, like Professor Gibbsâ 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 risquĂŠ 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 changedâŚ
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 âmonstersâ 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)
