Film review: The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

Halloween approaches, and more terrifyingly, so does the election, so escapist fare it is.  This one was part of my box set of Universal Monster movies, and seemed like just the ticket.  It starts very auspiciously with a great animated title:

It lacks for Claude Rains, but this time our invisible man is Vincent Price in one of his earliest roles, and even if we don't see his face until the very last scene, we get to hear his velvety tones.  He plays Sir Geoffrey Radcliff, who, as the film opens, is about to be hanged for killing his own brother.  He is the well-loved, safety-respecting owner of a colliery, so it is extra galling that his brother was killed in a mine collapse.  Looking after the colliery in his absence is his friend Richard Cobb, played by a real "Sir", Cedric Hardwicke, who gets top billing on the poster, Price being a relative unknown.  Fretting over Sir Geoffrey's plight are his beloved, Helen Manson (for whom Cobb clearly has eyes), played by the striking (if rather stiff) Nan Grey (whom we've already seen as the sexy Lili in Dracula's Daughter) and Dr. Frank Griffin, the scientist whom Geoffrey bankrolls, who, it turns out, is the brother of the Claude Rains character in the original film.  

He visits Geoffrey in prison and then a couple of hours later, Geoffrey literally vanishes.  However, immediately cottoning on to what has happened is the best character in the film, the portly and deceptively avuncular Detective Sampson (Cecil Kellaway).  He has researched Claude Rains' file and knows the family relationship.  He pays the doctor a visit and reveals that he's on to him.  He also tucks a cigar into his pocket and himself blows cigar smoke everywhere because smoke and rain will reveal even an invisible man.  In fact, later on, when Geoffrey's character is known to be in a house, he brings in teams of be-gas-masked coppers to pump smoke everywhere to flush him out, 

so an unusually resourceful Peeler, he.  Of course, there is a race against time (a) for Geoffrey to find who really killed his brother (hint: the motive could equally be financial or romantic) and (b) for Griffin to find an antidote to the invisibility potion, because, as we well-know from Claude Rains' fate, it quickly turns one mad (mad! I tell you!).  (There are adorable scenes of Griffin experimenting on invisible Guinea pigs - a true laugh-out-loud scene.)  Well, Geoffrey does find the killer, and he meets his fate falling from a coal car in the colliery, but Geoffrey also goes a bit monomaniacal, and has to be drugged with champagne by Griffin at one point.  

However, he escapes and while wrestling with the killer, he catches a stray bullet.  Can he be saved?  (Hint: it turns out it's a good thing he's so popular with his employees given the blood he's lost.) 

Verdict: a minor Universal, but with some nifty special effects, including (but not all as funny as) the invisible guinea pigs.  And Detective Sampson deserved a spinoff series.