film summary
Industrial research chemist Geoffrey Radcliffe is about to be executed for a murder that both he and all his friends insist he is innocent of. When appeals fail, his colleague Dr Frank Griffin gives him a dose of duocaine, the invisibility serum invented by his uncle, and Geoffrey is simply able to walk out of his cell. Invisible, he then sets out to track down the real murderer, although his efforts are hampered by the drug’s effects which soon start giving him delusions of grandeur.
Returns is a modestly enjoyable little effort. It invariably falls in the shadow of the superior Invisible Man. Director Joe May tries to mimic some of of Whale’s sublime droll humour. There’s a lot of broad comic-relief scenes with the gardener and Alan Napier’s drunken nightwatchman. Occasional lines like “I’ll only believe he’s invisible when I see him” and images of the invisible man stealing a scarecrow’s clothes hit the mark in attaining some of Whale’s eccentricity. May and Siodmak conduct some quite good setups. There’s a good opening with Vincent Price about to be hanged only to make an escape from his cell when John Sutton goes to visit him and injects him with the invisibility serum, he simply walking out once the police think he has vanished. There are some fine scenes during the police manhunt around the house - masked bobbies moving through the house spraying smoke only to have the Invisible Man emerge from a door and grab the last one in line and then emerge hidden behind the bobby’s clothes and gas mask and walk out in the midst of it all carrying Nan Grey. There’s a fine scene with Sutton and Grey dining with Price where they suddenly realize his ideas are becoming increasingly more maniacal and that his mind has been affected by the serum. All in all it is a surprisingly modest and clever little film. Nice effects where we see a lab animal and human gradually becoming visible from the skeleton to the epidermis.