Umbrella Entertainment has a triple feature of invisibility movies. They are collecting together The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Invisible Woman (1940), and Invisible Agent (1942). I have it in good authority that if you do not get a copy that they will disappear quite fast.
French experimental filmmaker Georges Méliès was one of the first to experiment with the concept of invisibility in film. He created the illusion of a person vanishing into thin air. Universal’s 1933 “The Invisible Man” was the first official adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel. H.G. Wells had script approval over the 1933 version. It remains relatively faithful to his original work. The success of the Universal classic spun many sequels that included Universal’s own comedy classic “Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man“. To date, there are seven entries in Universal Pictures’ Invisible Man movie series.
- The Invisible Man (1933)
- The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
- The Invisible Woman (1940)
- Invisible Agent (1942)
- The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944)
- Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951)
- The Invisible Man (2020)
THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS: Wrongly accused of murdering his brother, Geoffrey Radcliffe () is found guilty and sentenced to die. But when sympathetic Dr. Griffin (John Sutton) injects him with a serum that renders him invisible, Radcliffe is able to escape and search for the real culprit. With Inspector Sampson (Cecil Kellaway) of Scotland Yard hot on his trail, Radcliffe begins to suspect that a recent hire in his family’s mining company might have the answers he seeks.
THE INVISIBLE WOMAN: Eccentric Professor Gibbs (John Barrymore), brilliant but impractical, invents the invisibility machine and advertises for a guinea pig. What he gets is Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce), an attractive, adventurous model, who thinks being invisible would help her settle a few scores. Complications arise when three comic gangsters steal the machine to use on their boss. But they fail to reckon with the Revenge of the Invisible Woman!
INVISIBLE AGENT: Frank Raymond (Jon Hall), grandson of the original Invisible Man, still has the old formula but considers it too dangerous to use, even when Axis agents try to get it. But Pearl Harbor brings him to volunteer his own services as an invisible agent in Germany. Though a bit cold (clothes are not invisible), his adventures are more comedy than thriller (with occasional grim reminders) as he makes fools of Nazi officials and romances a luscious double agent, in search of Hitler’s secret plan…