"From the earliest days of the motion picture, filmmakers and audiences have been fascinated with special effects." "From turn-of-the-century trick films like George Méliès's A Trip to the Moon, to Willis O'Brien's stop-motion dinosaurs in The Lost World, it was the silent cinema that set the stage for all the optical and digital magic that we take for granted today." "But it was the early talkies that truly gave special effects their soul." "Films like King Kong mixed outstanding movie magic with compelling emotional drama." "Another 1933 film, Universal's The Invisible Man, also pushed the technical capabilities of the time to their limit, without ever losing sight of the human element." "Next to HG Wells, who wrote the original novel, the man most responsible for the success of The Invisible Man was director James Whale, who also directed Universal's Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and many other distinguished pictures," "and let's not forget Claude Rains, who made his American film debut under particularly trying circumstances." "Totally swathed in bandages, he was forced to act almost completely with his voice." "But what a voice it was." "So join me now as we remove some of those mysterious gauze wrappings and take a revealing close-up look at The Invisible Man." "You're crazy to know who I am, aren't you?" "All right, I'll show you." "There's a souvenir for you." "Look." "He's all eaten away." "Although HG Wells firmly believed that motion pictures would become the most important art form of the 20th century, he was less sure that his own books should be adapted by Hollywood." "One of Wells' novels, The Island of Dr Moreau, had just been produced by Paramount under the title The Island of Lost Souls, and legend has it that Wells was not pleased with the results." "The studio had taken a multilayered social satire and turned it into a horror movie." "A very good horror movie, it must be said, but quite a few notches down from what Wells had originally intended." "So when it came time for The Invisible Man, he insisted that Universal treat his work a little more respectfully." "First published in 1897, The Invisible Man was the second book in the celebrated series of scientific romances that earned Wells his reputation as the father of modern science fiction." "HG Wells was much more than a run-of-the-mill science-fiction writer." "He was a genius." "He was a visionary." "He was also very political, a committed socialist who used these fantastic stories as provocative parables about the problems of society and the need for social change." "Stories about invisibility, cloaks that make one invisible, helmets that make one invisible, have been part of mythology and folklore and fairy tales for ever." "But Wells was one of the first writers to put a scientific spin on the idea." "This time it wasn't just magic, and two years before the book was published, x-rays were discovered." "It was on the public mind." "A little of this injected under the skin of the arm every day for a month." "An invisible man can rule the world." "Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go." "He can hear every secret." "He can rob and wreck and kill." "Of course, the idea of an invisible man is a wonderful metaphor for the outsider, the person who exists on the fringes of society, and Wells himself, of course, grew up in grinding poverty." "Like Wells, the man who would bring the invisible man to the screen also survived a harsh English childhood." "Actor lan McKellen received an Academy Award nomination for his performance as director James Whale in the film Gods and Monsters." "Having to disguise himself as a middle-class gentleman to earn a living in the British theatre in the 1920s." "All the actors would have to provide their own clothes for these productions, and probably wear them when they were off duty and adopt the accent that went with them." "Interestingly, the film version of The Invisible Man had its creative roots in a partnership forged by Whale long before he had any visibility in Hollywood." "RC Sherriff, Robert Cedric Sherriff, was the author of the play that brought James Whale to prominence." "Whale had been an actor, an occasional director, a set designer on the London stage in the 1920s, and when he read Sherriff's play Journey's End, which was about trench warfare in World War I, he was determined to put it on." "Every experienced director turned it down. "Not commercial"." "So I offered myself." ""Journey's End" made the careers of everyone associated with it." "It was only a matter of time before Hollywood beckoned." "Ultimately it led to James Whale making a film version of it in Hollywood, and then getting a contract to be a director at Universal Studios." "Then he was given a once-in-a-lifetime assignment that made him one of the hottest directors in town." "Although the nominal star of Frankenstein was Colin Clive, it was Boris Karloff's landmark performance that really drew the crowds and made the film an international sensation." "Earlier, in 1931, Tod Browning's Dracula had also been a surprise hit for Universal, but Whale's Frankenstein made it clear that monster pictures were here to stay." "The film set in motion one of Universal's most lucrative and enduring franchises:" "The horror movie." "Whale was given a free hand by Universal's head of production," "Carl Laemmle Jr, to develop a new project - the spookier the better." "He chose The Old Dark House, a black comedy based on a novel called Benighted by JB Priestley." "Unlike Frankenstein, Whale was involved in every aspect of the film's preparation, and tailored several roles for British stage colleagues, including Charles Laughton and Ernest Thesiger." "In a measured send-up of his Frankenstein role," "Boris Karloff appeared as a demented and malevolent butler." "The Old Dark House had so many offbeat touches of unpredictable humour that it was unlike anything that the studio could have expected and the audiences could have expected." "It's still unlike anything that you're likely to run into." "He was in a very fortunate position at a certain time in the '30s cos Junior Laemmle, when he was running Universal, took a liking to him and sort of let him do what he wanted to," "so for a studio director at the time he had a great deal of autonomy, starting with the creation of the scripts, and going right up to the promotion of the movies." "I think that's why the movies have endured, because he had such a strong personality and it's all over every frame of his movies." "Whale was eager to bring RC Sherriff to Hollywood for a screen adaptation of The Road Back, based on the best-selling sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, which had been one of Universal's most prestigious productions in 1930." "But the studio was more interested in monsters." "Universal had decided that it wanted a sequel to Frankenstein, and it wanted Whale, obviously, to direct it." "Whale didn't want to do a sequel to Frankenstein or a sequel to anything, and so he pinned his hopes on The Invisible Man as a possibility to lure Universal's interest away from the sequel to Frankenstein into another fantasy horror subject." "Although the studio had trumpeted the fact that they had the prestigious rights to HG Wells' The Invisible Man, that was all they were initially interested in - the title of the book and the name of the author, for publicity reasons." "Whale finally convinced Sherriff to adapt the Wells novel after a frustrating period of what nowadays is called "development hell"." "So many of the attempts other writers had made veered away from the story that HG Wells had written." "One thing that Sherriff told me about when I interviewed him in 1971 was how astonished he was at the strange and extreme directions that these other writers took the idea." "They seem to have offered the screenplay job to every writer in the Universal stable." "Robert Florey, John Huston." "James Whale wrote a treatment that was expanded on by the distinguished silent-film scenarist Gouverneur Morris." "Preston Sturges wrote a screenplay set in post-revolutionary Russia." "Garrett Fort, the writer who'd worked on Dracula and Frankenstein, was called in." "Universal seemed to be looking everywhere except to HG Wells' story." "In 1931 a novel was published called The Murderer Invisible, by Philip Wylie, which was a much more hard-hitting, dramatic story about a man who is out for power, to get it through his invisibility." "It was Philip Wylie who came up with the idea of an invisible octopus, as well as legions of invisible rats sent forth from New Jersey to spread invisible bubonic plague in Manhattan." "And it lacks the delicate touch, the lightness that HG Wells had." "And Universal bought the rights to this novel." "I'm convinced that one way or another, elements of that story entered into the adaptation that we now have, that Sherriff came up with." "The emphasis upon Griffin's megalomania." "Suddenly I realised the power I held." "The power to rule, to make the world grovel at my feet." "This is much stronger in the film script than it is in HG Wells." "Fortunately someone finally remembered that Wells had been given script approval." "The final screenplay restored Wells's plot with few concessions to Hollywood." "The interesting thing about Wells' story is that Jack Griffin, the invisible man, was not really a mad scientist, although he became that in Hollywood." "He meddled in things men should leave alone." "What do you mean?" "In the novel he speaks more like a political revolutionary who wants to tear down the existing social order because he's so totally alienated from it by his invisible state." "He's not an unreasonable man, but he is caught in an unreasonable situation." "Here's your blooming bicycle." "You can do what you like with it." "How's that for a hairbrush, George Henry?" "Although today it's hard to imagine The Invisible Man without Claude Rains, the distinguished character actor was not the first choice of the studio or director." "There was some uncertainty about who would play this part." "Boris Karloff was set to, but he had a contretemps with the studio and walked off." "So at one point Whale asked Colin Clive if he would play it, and he said he was attracted to the idea but wanted to get back home to England, and turned it down." "The perfect invisible man ultimately materialised in the form of an English stage actor largely unknown to film audiences." "He was born on the wrong side of the River Thames to a family... they were very poor." "There were 12 children and all but two died from poverty-related illnesses as infants." "He had a very heavy cockney accent and he used to sing me the cockney songs he sang when he was a little boy and I couldn't understand a word he said." "That's how strong the accent was." "But Rains overcame his speech problems and triumphantly reinvented himself on the London stage, like James Whale." "He had an amazing vocal presence, but he'd only done one film in England and his only Hollywood screen test seems to have been a real disaster." "It was mannered and theatrical and overblown and..." "So, a couple of years later, when the director of The Invisible Man was trying to find somebody to play this part, he said "I don't care what he looks like."" ""He just has to have a voice that's mesmerising"." "Because if the character can't be seen, Rains has the greatest voice in the world, and if he can't be seen, at least the voice will have the presence." "The story goes that he was in a screening room and they were watching screen tests and this voice came on with this terrible performance and he said "That's it!" "That's the man I have to have."" "And everybody said "You're crazy." "This man's a terrible actor." "He's indicating."" "And he said "I don't care."" "In a departure from Wells's novel, screenwriter Sherriff added a fiancée for the invisible man." "Jack, I want you to let my father help you." "You know how clever he is." "He'll work with you until you find that second secret that'll bring you back to us." "Whale cast Gloria Stuart, who had previously appeared in The Old Dark House." "Today she is best known for her Oscar-nominated performance in James Cameron's Titanic." "The task of making Claude Rains invisible fell to the special-effects maestro John P Fulton." "It's relatively easy to film an invisible man when he has no clothes on, but when he has some clothes on, but only some, this presents a significant challenge." "Any portion of the actor that was to disappear was covered in black velvet, then photographed against a black velvet backdrop." "When combined with a separate shot of the normal set, the illusion of invisibility was startling." "Fulton said that the most difficult shot in the whole film was one in which the invisible man is seated in front of a mirror, looking at himself, his own reflection, as he unwraps the bandages off his head." "This required the filming of four separate pieces of film and later combining them together, because you needed to film the back of the invisible man as he is unwrapping it, you needed to film the room that he's seated in, where he does this," "then for the reflection part you needed to film the wall that is in the reflection and separately you needed to film the front of the invisible man as he unwraps himself." "He said that was the most difficult shot he'd ever done." "To create the invisible man's ghostly footprints, foot-shaped blocks of wood were dropped out of a specially constructed platform covered with artificial snow." "The film's ingenious effects generated tremendous audience curiosity and helped make The Invisible Man one of Universal's biggest moneymakers of 1933." "When I was about ten," "The Invisible Man came to Downingtown, Pennsylvania, which was a small town near where I lived." "It was during winter and he decided that he was going to take me to see this film." "So we got all bundled up." "It was snowing outside and he wrapped a scarf around his face and he had his homburg hat on his head which he always wore and we went up to this little movie theatre where the owner is the ticket-taker " "is the man selling tickets - and he said, you know, "I'll have two tickets"" "and that voice that wasn't, you know, I mean..." "You couldn't fool anybody with that voice and the man selling the tickets went nuts." "He said "Mr Rains, I'm so excited you're here" and he started in this loud voice and my father didn't want anybody to know that he was bringing me to see this and he said "I wouldn't let you pay" and my father said "No, I must pay"" "and the man said "No, I won't let you pay"" "and my father went "You must pay" and this went on for a while." "And then we went to see the film and during the whole thing he was talking to me about the process, about..." "I guess this was the first time that they had done this kind of special effect and they encased him in plaster, his face, with straws through his nose and his mouth in order to get the mask that they needed" "to do the special effect with the invisible man, and he had been gassed during the war." "He was blind in 90% of one of the eyes and this process was awful to him." "This..." "He was claustrophobic and it was frightening and he..." "He's telling me this while the movie is going on, in this loud voice." ""And then, you see, they put the straws in my nose."" "This'll give them a bit of a shock." "Something to write home about." "A nice bedtime story for the kids, too, if they want it." "Quick/ Get hold of him" "Much of the film's humour derives from the relentlessly logical extrapolation of a completely fantastic premise." "There are one or two things you must understand, Kemp." "I must always remain in hiding for an hour after meals." "The food is visible inside me until it is digested." "You must always be near at hand to wipe off my feet." "Even dirt between my fingernails would give me away." "The humour grows not from truly eccentric figures like the ones in The Old Dark House, but from average folk, as they encounter something which is beyond their beliefs." "Seeing objects move on their own and suits run about, seemingly empty." " Put the handcuffs on." " How can I handcuff a bloomin' shirt?" "In the novel, the character of Kemp is permitted to live but Whale and Sherriff couldn't resist giving him a darkly comic sendoff." "Sit where you are." "I'll get out and take the handbrake off and give you a little shove." "You'll run down and through the railings." "Then you'll have a big thrill for 100 yards till you hit a boulder." "Then you'll do a somersault and break your arms, then a grand finish-up with a broken neck." "Goodbye, Kemp." "I always said you were a dirty little coward." "You're a dirty, sneaking little rat as well." "Goodbye." "Whale's unparalleled flair for sardonic and unexpected comedy became his hallmark." "He typically saved his most memorable touches for an always-colourful supporting cast." "He was interested in unconventional characters - the oddballs and eccentrics." "Take Una O'Connor, for instance." "Do you suppose that I'm going to carry trays backwards and forwards all day?" "Luncheon's at one, and it's one now." "Get out" "James just loved her." "He thought she was so funny." "I remember he would imitate her and say, you know, "I just adore Una O'Connor"" "and you could see that in the films." "What he has her do, the way she plays hysteria and alarm and all of the reactions that she does." "Very funny." "Oh, shut up" "It seems to me a joke leaps out of the screen when you see very camp actors." "I think that is the word that we have to apply to James Whale's movies - camp." "It's a good word." "It's often connected with being gay." "It's an irony which is involving even as it's objective." "You're laughing at the world but you're really enjoying it at the same time." "On a dramatic level, The Invisible Man both reflected and revisited the story and structure of Whale's earlier success, Frankenstein." "In both films you have the scientist who has disappeared to conduct his experiments in secret." "Can't you see I mustn't be disturbed?" "You'll ruin everything." "My experiment is almost completed." "And a whole day's work ruined by a foolish, ignorant..." "You have his fiancée, who's worried about him, who wonders what's happened to him." "I've never seen him like it before." "He was always so keen to tell me about his experiments." "Oh." "His experiments." "Yes, that's what frightens me." "The day we announced our engagement, he told me of his experiments." "He said he was close to a discovery so terrific that he doubted his own sanity." "You have an individual, in this case, Dr Kemp and in Frankenstein, Victor, you have an individual who is friends with them both, acquainted with them both, but who loves the scientist's fiancée." "He cares nothing for you, Flora." "He'll never care about anything but test tubes and chemicals." "How can he go away like this without a word?" "Flora, dear." "Please, darling, let me tell you how I feel." "You know I'd go to the ends of the earth for you." "I shouldn't like that." "I'm far too fond of you." "I wish you were." "You almost have the feeling Whale was fine-tuning character and story elements from the earlier film that didn't quite work." "In Frankenstein, for instance, the studio made him tack on a happy ending in which Henry Frankenstein survives." "So it's almost as though this time Whale was determined to kill off the leading scientist" "and kill off the rival for the heroine." "And this time the heroine gets nobody." "From 1931 to 1936" "Whale enjoyed extraordinary creative latitude at Universal." "With success came the usual studio perks." "So he said "I got this chauffeur" and he said "This chauffeur would sit there and I'd be in the back and the chauffeur wanted to talk all the time, and he kept turning back."" "And he said "I would look in panic at the traffic coming"" "and he said "That only lasted about two weeks and I said 'Look, I really don't need a chauffeur." "I'd prefer to drive myself."'" "That's a typical James Whale story." "He found that so funny." "Beyond the horror pictures, Whale put his personal stamp on a wide variety of stylish films." "It always said "A James Whale production"" "and Junior Laemmle let him do what he wanted to do." "He was completely in charge." "It was all his concept, his ideas." "It was his film." "So I once asked Jim "Of your other films is there any that I should know about or that you would particularly recommend to me?"" "And I recall that he mentioned specifically Remember Last Night?" "Which is a very interesting film." "It's a murder mystery." "When you see it you see that it's a typically James Whale film in every way." "It's filled with vases of fabulous arrangements of flowers everywhere, a fantastic major set that just goes on and on and on forever, with the camera gliding everywhere, and it's a very interesting film." "It's completely filled with his particular personal sense of humour." "Also in 1935," "Whale created his signature work, Bride of Frankenstein, a baroque masterpiece of black comedy." "It was followed by what many consider to be the definitive screen adaptation of the great American stage musical Show Boat." "Whale's love for the theatre is well reflected in these rare photos of a lavish production number he staged that was cut from the finished film." "Finally, Universal gave Whale and RC Sherriff the go-ahead for their dream project, The Road Back." "But the film was clouded by the studio's mounting financial problems and a change in ownership." "It was an indictment of the Great War and what it did to Germany." "It was going to be my masterpiece." "What happened?" "The fucking studio butchered it." "They took the guts out of my picture." "They brought in another director to add some slapstick." "When his particular studio changed hands and no longer employed him then it was difficult for him to quite understand what to do." "It wasn't possible to become an independent director, employed by everybody and allowed to do what he wanted to do." "His freedom had sort of gone." "Without a patron he didn't ever have the same kind of controls." "He was forced to go back to Universal and work off his contract by doing real programmers that he didn't care about." "And he said it took all the joy and fun out of making pictures for him." "Disillusioned with Hollywood, James Whale retired from pictures, living quietly and comfortably in Pacific Palisades until the unbearable effects of a stroke drove him to suicide in 1957." "All the obituaries mentioned Frankenstein, of course." "It's one of the most influential films of all time." "People sometimes forget that James Whale's The Invisible Man also launched a whole subgenre, beginning with The Invisible Man Returns." "In Universal's first follow-up to the original film, a man falsely accused of murder adopts invisibility as a means to escape prison and clear his name." "In contrast to the first invisible man, this one displays a bit more consideration for his lady friend." "I am a worm to treat you like this after all you've been through." "Here." "Now we'II... we'll wipe away those tears." "I'll try and act like a normal person." "Unfortunately, normal relations are a bit of a strain when your boyfriend seems a close cousin to the headless horseman." "And, as before, the invisibility potion leads to some distinctly antisocial behaviour, not to mention some industrial-strength delusions of grandeur." "Let's drink to the golden age." "Well, drink/ Drink to me." "Drink to my invincible power, to a new era, to a changed world with me as its guiding genius." "And just in case you didn't recognise that mellifluous voice, the film's climax finally gives us a look at Claude Rains's successor, Vincent Price." "The first comic offshoot of the series came with The Invisible Woman, in which the fair sex was given an equal opportunity not to be noticed." "This time John Barrymore plays a bumbling mad scientist who avoids drug use and relies instead on electrical gizmos, seemingly inspired by James Whale's Frankenstein, and rather than experiment on himself he decides to advertise for a human guinea pig," "only to be surprised when the volunteer turns out to be a woman." " You mean skirts and things?" " Mm, skirts and things." "Mrs Jackson, you're letting me down." "I can't possibly perform my experiment unless the subject doesn't wear a... hasn't any... is... is, you know, in the, uh, in the altogether, as it were." "I'm convinced that one reason invisible man films have always been popular is that they're really about nudity." "For decades in Hollywood, the only nudity on screen was the invisible kind." "Actually, the invisible woman might have done better keeping her clothes off, for as she unhappily discovers, invisibility is no asset to her career as a professional model." "Next, Universal put invisibility to good use for the war effort." "As the invisible agent, actor Jon Hall found the perfect way to move unnoticed behind enemy lines." "John Fulton's special effects for Invisible Agent were among the best in the series, especially for the obligatory nude scene." "And thank goodness someone finally had a cosmetically superior alternative to those unsightly gauze bandages." "Just a jar of cold cream." "When it came time for The Invisible Man's Revenge, said revenge was accomplished with the help of John Carradine, as a mad veterinarian." "By now increasingly sophisticated camera tricks practically convinced audiences that invisibility might be a reality." " You don't believe me, eh?" " No." " Come here." " What?" "Have a look." "This time blood transfusions provide temporary relief from invisibility, rather like HG Wells by way of Bram Stoker." "Watch this scene carefully." "It's one of the earliest examples of an invisibility effect combined with camera movement, a particularly ingenious effect created by John Fulton long before modern motion-control techniques had even been invented." "Sadly, Fulton was not responsible for all the film's effects, as the visible suspension wires in this scene demonstrate." "Our elusive hero, once more with the voice of Vincent Price, made a brief appearance at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein." "There's nobody to frighten us any more." "Oh, that's too bad." "I was hoping to get in on the excitement." " Who said that?" " Allow me to introduce myself." "I'm the invisible man." "But Universal made up for it by giving Bud and Lou an invisible man picture all their own." "In the film's most uproarious scene, Lou becomes a most unlikely prizefighter, who receives some welcome assistance in the ring from an invisible partner." "But perhaps one of the most memorable tributes to the spirit of the original Universal film came with Son of the Invisible Man." "I've been on this stuff for over a week now and I'm still perfectly sane." "Yes." "I'll rule the world with my secret." "Yes." "And I'll need you, Ted." "I must have a visible partner." "I can tell by your stunned expression that you're pretty impressed." "Look, Ma, no hands." "No, this isn't a lost classic, just an inspired spoof from the compilation comedy Amazon Women on the Moon, displaying a wicked sense of humour James Whale would have appreciated." "Oh, my." "Now, how did that happen?" "There must be a ghost in here." "This is unreal." "James Whale himself became invisible in Hollywood for a long time, but he left a wonderful cinematic legacy which people have finally begun to fully appreciate." "And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Whale's films are really important because they inspired so many others and they've given so much pleasure to so many with that trademark impish humour that could be nobody but James Whale." "Here we go gathering nuts in May, nuts in May, nuts in May" "Here we go gathering nuts in May on a cold and frosty morning" "Whoops" "For more information on The Invisible Man" "I hope you'll join me for our feature-length audio commentary which you can access from the main menu." "As the invisible one himself might have said, you ain't seen nothin' yet." "For Universal Studios Home Video, I'm Rudy Behlmer."