The Invisible Man

This film seems to succeed despite itself. Early on, today's viewer can't help but focus on some of the truly horrible acting being delivered by some of the cast. It's almost like they were trying to camp it up (and who knows, with James Whale at the helm, maybe they were). Speaking of acting, Claude Rains is the certain star of this show, even though he never really appears until the end. His performance is more akin to the voice acting done by today's animated feature stars, or perhaps more like Andy Serkis' work as the motion-capture actor extraordinaire--but in Rains' case, done decades before that tech ever came to light. That fact means Rains is almost, in a sense, wasted here; his use of expression and subtle gesture, so evident in the best of his work, is basically absent here, and his character is thus played in broader strokes. Yet, for all that which seems to work against it, the film works on the most basic level of being entertaining and a good time with a good story--not to mention what were, at the time, eye-popping special effects. It's a classic, to be sure, though not a total monument to brilliance--just a testament to the kinds of things that, in the long run, were able to make cinema something really special, even if done just for the sake of a fairly lowbrow story.