Tonight I've got a Super Spectacular Saturday Night Special for you! As it goes, in the movie she's kicking her boss, not The Professor as seen in the poster!
Welcome back to The Dungeon!
Welcome back to The Dungeon!
From 1940, it's "The Invisible Woman!"
"The Invisible Woman" features a great cast that includes John (Bulldog Drummond) Howard as the playboy philanthropist Dick Russell!
Joltin' John (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde) Barrymore is the mad scientist professor working on a way to make a person invisible from a series of injections and weird machinations! On his right is the lovely Margaret (The Wicked Witch Of The West) Hamilton!
Dick Russell's bank account has gotten too thin for him the give the professor the $3000.00 he asked for, so he has to change his ad to 'who's willing to work for free?'
The mailbox fills up fast, but it's full of crank letters like this!
This is the invisible machine! As you can tell it's not invisible, but it makes people invisible! So far, it has only been tested on a cat!
In steps Minnesota born Virginia Bruce! Virginia is every bit prefect in this role whether you can see her or not! She's a model named Kitty Carroll with a mean and cruel boss, and her sole reason to become invisible is so she can literally go kick him in the butt!
One of the more interesting movies that Virginia was in was the Abbott And Costello romp,
"Pardon My Sarong" in 1942! Here's an awesome promo still from that film! Virginia is not in this shot but two of the other dolls in the movie are! Here's Marie McDonald and Janet Warren!
Maybe it's my imagination, but for being completely and totally obscure, this shot of a nude Kitty Carroll in the invisible machine is pretty darn racy!
The first thing Kitty does is go straight to the office of her now ex-boss!
After also seeing the ad in the paper, a trio of gangsters try and get to The Professor's secrets but are foiled by an invisible Kitty!
Purely running around naked whether you're visible or not seems like it was pretty bawdy for 1940! The title "The Invisible Woman" has been used many, many more times in the last 77 years, with most of them having nothing at all to do with this movie! One "Invisible Woman" movie is about a guy who has an imaginary lover, and one was about the mistress of the author Charles Dickens! It seems that invisible women come in all kinds of forms!
The trio of mobsters steal the machine and take it to Mexico, so they can make their boss invisible to sneak him out of the country! The leader of the three is a guy named Foghorn, named thusly for his deep voice! Donald (The Killers, The Brute Man) MacBride is Foghorn! They try the machine out on him but because he didn't get the injection, it doesn't work, but instead comes out embarrassingly talking like Mike Tyson! (Pretty funny that as a boy singer back in 1909, he was a soprano) Why Foghorn didn't have to get naked is something I'll leave up to your own imagination!
So The Boss, a guy name Blackie Cole and played by Oscar (Sabotage, Mr. Sardonicus) Homolka, has his boys kidnap the professor and bring him to Mexico to show them how to work the machine! Great standoff between The Boss and The Prof, don't you think?
Did I forget to tell you this was a comedy? Last but not least is a lot of people's favourite Stooge, Shemp Howard as the bumbling gangster Frankie!
Cha, Cha, Cha!!!
Let's go over this one more time in four words!
Bulldog, Jekyll, Minnesota, Stooge!
"The Invisible Woman" has it all, and more!!
"The Invisible Woman" has it all, and more!!
2 comments:
I took me forever to realize how many movies Donald McBride was in where he played the funny authority figure. Three others would be TOPPER RETURNS, THE EGG AND I and ROOM SERVICE (which is about the most underrated Marx brothers film, at least to me).
I can't go wrong watching a film starring John Howard (a relative on my mom's side of the family...corresponded with him in the '70s to discuss the family) and hallelujah, it's...EEP EEP EEP! The one and only SHEMP, fer crissakes! ;D
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