THE INVISIBLE RAY (1936)

“Your experiments are your friends. Leave people alone”

This science-fiction horror film released by Universal at the beginning of 1936 is fairly forgettable and more than usually implausible, saved only by the interest value in an always welcome re-teaming of Bela Lugosi with Boris Karloff (their third within two years)

The director of The Invisible Ray was Lambert Hillyer who co-directed one of Lon Chaney’s earliest silent film notable roles (in Riddle Gawne) and also 1936’s Dracula’s Daughter.  The screenplay was by John Colton who hits the ground limping with a clunky foreword seeking to open our closed minds to the amazing scientific possibilities of the age, but instead sounds like dialogue declaimed by Criswell in Plan 9 From Outer Space’s prologue: “Who are we in this youngest and smallest of planets to say that the INVISIBLE RAY is impossible to science?”  We’re now primed for the preposterousness that this was meant to dispel – and by that yard-stick the ensuing film doesn’t disappoint.

Karloff, billed as such in stark impact contrast to the more ordinary, fully-named Bela Lugosi, is a reclusive zealot of an astronomer, Dr Janos Rukh, equipped with an impressive telescope in his observatory high up in the Carpathian mountains. He is doted on by his blind mother, a strikingly poised Violet Kemble Cooper, who knows he is still a shy, awkward little boy inside a brusque intimidating surface. He is also fatally leaving his beautiful but drippy wife Diane to die on the vine in his research mania (Francis Drake, a weaker damsel-in-distress than her Yvonne Orlac in Mad Love). Karloff carries off this single-mindedness well, offset by an unusually attractive curly hair and moustache combination. His frosty severity in the role means that Lugosi gets to balance him with soft goatee-bearded urbanity rather than his default setting of ‘Dracula hypno-glower’- which he all too easily fell into in his worst movies - as Dr Benet, a French astro-chemist. One wonders why the writer gave him Gallic ancestry as Lugosi was only comfortable in his own Hungarian accent. More sensible would have been to make him a fellow countryman of Rukh, thus fitting his native tones like a suave glove.

No matter, for there are bigger stellar matters to discuss. Rukh invites a group of illustrious scientists to hear his claim that he has harnessed the power of the nebula of Andromeda, which he can capture and convert into a beam of awesome power that will play back our prehistoric past. All he need do is find a fallen meteor that will give him such properties. He can posture all he likes, for nothing can withstand the more penetrating ray of his mum’s perceptiveness. With chilling gypsy-like prescience she warns him: “Your experiments are your friends. Leave people alone”.

Though he is something of a mummy’s boy, Mother Rukh’s words don’t stop her son travelling to Africa as part of Dr Benet’s expedition to find the meteor with his wife in tow, a travel writer, Lady Stevens and her nephew Ronald, (the formidable character actress Beulah Bondi and the less so Frank Lawton), and the writer’s wealthy husband Dr Stevens played by Walter Kingsford. Rukh locates the meteor but gets more than he bargained for, courtesy of radiation poisoning that gives him a phoesphorescent glow and kills any living creature he touches, beginning with his poor dog. The luminous shimmer effect is weak in execution for a Universal film, looking drawn on and somewhat tacky.

While Rukh is occupied with a new career as a glow-stick Typhoid Mary, he fails to look to his wife who Ronald is making goo-goo eyes at. Thus begins one of those achingly tiresome love triangle sub-plots that thankfully gain minor screen time - Sample dialogue (Diane to Ronald ): “Oh darling, hold me tight. We’re going to need each other so very much”.  

Mercifully, the plot grabs the steering-wheel and takes a sharp turn away from Noel Coward (just not suitable in a horror film in my view) into macho revenge flick when Rukh finds out back home that his discovery has been stolen by Benet. He fakes his own death and then in Paris undertakes with serial killer precision the systematic murder of each of the six people he views as associates to the theft. He cuts a swathe through half of them, whilst erasing symbolic church statues each time as though counting off the numbers on his hand until a tell-tale phosphorescent hand-print around the dead Lady Stevens’ neck tips off Benet that his former colleague is very much alive. 

The not-quite-so-good doctor concocts a party that he hopes will draw Rukh in like a moth, leading to an amusing black-humour exchange for Lugosi where he is asked what will happen when someone tries to apprehend the luminous lunatic: “He will die…” replies a bemused Benet, his composure briefly dented by having to state the obvious. Rukh  begins to finish off the remaining perceived swindlers including Benet, but his long-dormant conscience surfaces just in time to save his wife from radio-active retribution. Compounding the emasculation even more, Mother appears and scolds him into throwing himself through the window where he flames out - in imitation of the film itself.

The Invisible Ray suffered from a tight shooting schedule as well as shoddy scripting, yet even the recycling of Flash Gordon sets and footage from Kenneth Strickfaden’s gizmos from James Whale’s two Frankenstein films couldn’t save it from going over $68,000 beyond its intended $235,000 budget. Universal did manage to save some money on salaries however. In spite of co-star billing, Lugosi still endured a fee considerably less than Karloff ( $4000 compared to Karloff’s $15, 625 as noted in Stephen Jacob’s wonderful Boris Karloff: More Than A Monster). To his credit, the Hungarian maintained friendly relations with his English colleague. Karloff at least used the film profitably as an opportunity also to recruit many more members to the nascent Screen Actors Guild.