The Invisible Ray (1936)

I had two points of reference to this film long before I saw it. One of them was a little silent clip of its trailer on the video documentary, The History of Sci-Fi and Horror, over which the host, Butch Patrick, gave a little bit of a synopsis of its plot. However, a far more memorable connection to The Invisible Ray came from the movie, Ed Wood, as it's the movie the one guy tells Bela Lugosi is his personal favorite and makes the mistake of saying, "You were great as Karloff's sidekick," to which Lugosi eloquently responds, "Fuck you! Karloff does not deserve to smell my shit! That limey cocksucker can rot in hell for all I care!" That was what I had on my mind when I finally saw the movie, as part of the Bela Lugosi Collection put out by Universal, which I received as a Christmas present one year (I want to say around 2010 or 2011). I've said this before but I'll say it again: while the movies in that set are all worth watching (some more than others), it's interesting to note how, many decades after their respective deaths, Karloff is still overshadowing Lugosi, as four of the five films in that set co-star him and a couple are really starring vehicles for him. That's definitely true of The Invisible Ray. Although Lugosi does have plenty of screentime, Karloff is unquestionably the protagonist and has the meatiest role, while poor Bela gets to do little more than stand around and spout exposition. But more on that later; as for the movie itself, it's a pretty fair little flick. It's nothing groundbreaking or meaningful in the history of the genre, the production values aren't particularly showy or fancy, and the story is played out in a fairly standard fashion, but the main concept behind it is cool and a bit unusual for the time and, as they always were, Karloff and Lugosi are great to watch, especially Karloff.

One stormy night, a group of scientists and prominent people from England arrive at the home and laboratory of Dr. Janos Rukh in the Carpathian mountains. Rukh, who's been dismissed as a charlatan by the scientific community for his unusual theories, is intent upon vindicating himself, particularly to Sir Francis Stevens and Dr. Benet, with a demonstration in his laboratory. There, he manages to capture a ray of light from the galaxy of Andromeda and uses a special projector that shows the images of the Earth's past contained within the ray. They see a meteor crash into the southern portion of Africa, an event that he had theorized happened previously but his theory had been dismissed, as had his belief that it contained a new type of element more powerful than even radium. As Benet is heading an expedition to Africa, he invites Rukh to come along and the scientist accepts, despite warnings from his blind mother that even if he finds what he's looking for, he will not happy. Once in Africa, Rukh separates from the others to find the site where the meteorite crashed, which is near an active volcano, and begins his work, extracting a sample of the rock there. He discovers a powerful force within the rock sample, one that has enough power to completely disintegrate a large boulder near his camp, which he does as a demonstration to his native assistants of what will happen if they try to abandon him. This unhinged mindset proves to be the least of what's happened to Rukh, as that night, he sees that his face and hands give off a phosphorous-like glow in the dark. He has been poisoned by the element, and he also discovers that any living he touches instantly dies. Rushing back to the main camp, he reveals his condition to Benet, who manages to come up with an antidote that, while effective, must be taken every day for the rest of his life; otherwise, the effects of the contamination will return and eventually kill Rukh. Returning to his camp, Rukh continues his studies and eventually manages to harness the element's power to devastating levels, becoming gripped by the power he holds. As a result, Benet and Stevens decide to present the element to the world as their shared discovery, which prompts Rukh to accuse them of stealing it from him. This, combined with the knowledge that his neglected wife, Diana, has decided to leave him for someone else, eventually drives the increasingly insane Rukh to take deadly revenge on those who he feels have betrayed him, including Diane, using his deadly condition as a means to do so.

As was typical of these types of films made around this time, The Invisible Ray was directed by Lambert Hillyer, a journeyman director who started out as a vaudeville actor before moving into the film industry during World War I. Also a screenwriter, he worked mainly in westerns throughout his career, ultimately directing over a hundred of them, although he also did his fair share of crime films and dramas (one of his early films, 1923's The Shock, starred Lon Chaney). The Invisible Ray was one of only a few times he ventured into the sci-fi and horror genre, with the other notable one being Dracula's Daughter the same year. He also directed the first of the two 1940's serials based on Batman, which was the first depiction of the Dark Knight outside of the comic. He continued directing films to the end of the decade, continuing to focus mainly on westerns and dramas, and ended his career at tiny Monogram Pictures, with his last film being 1949's Range Land. Like a lot of old-time directors, after his movie career wound down, he took to television, directing episodes of Meet Corliss Archer, Your Favorite Story, I Led 3 Lives, The Man Called X, The Cisco Kid, and Highway Patrol, but he retired in the late 50's. Hillyer died in 1969 at the age of 79 (he was just three days short from his 80th birthday).

Boris Karloff played a good number of mad scientists in his career and Dr. Janos Rukh is one of his earliest. Like a lot of his sinister roles, though, Rukh does have some sympathy to him, as we learn from the very beginning that he's been ostracized from the mainstream scientific community for his radical theories and has invited two of his peers to his home/laboratory in the Carpathian mountains in a bid to show them that he's right. There's already an undeniable hint of vindictiveness in his voice and manner when he talks to Diana about their impending arrival, asking, "What do they know?", which will later act as fuel for his desire for revenge, and when they arrive, as accommodating as he is, Rukh doesn't mince words about how they've disagreed with each other in the past. He very eagerly explains how the equipment in his laboratory works and gives them the demonstration that proves that his theory about a meteorite crashing into the southern part of Africa millions of years ago was correct. His knowing that Dr. Benet is soon heading an expedition to Africa was one of his incentives for the demonstration and he's quite surprised when he's invited along, as he has no standing with their scientific congress. But, as this expedition has no association with any such congress, Rukh agrees to go along, despite a warning from his mother that he will not find happiness in his discovery, as he's not good in relating to people. Mother Rukh's words prove true, as her son breaks off from the others during the expedition to find the site where the meteor crashed, leaving everyone else, including his wife, Diana, stuck at their camp while they wait for him. Upon finding the impact site, Rukh spends many weeks there, gathering samples of the material and harnessing the powerful element it contains. However, he soon begins to show the effects of prolonged exposure to the element, as he becomes maddened enough to threaten his native assistants and guide with it when they tell him that they want to leave him, and that night, he discovers that it's poisoned his body when he sees that his hands and face glow in the dark. Moreover, when he pets his dog, he sees that any living thing he touches dies instantly. Horrified at this, he makes his way back to the main camp and has Benet come up with an antidote for the poisoning, which does work but is something he must take every day for the rest of his life; otherwise, the effects will return and it will eventually kill him.

Once he manages to stave off the poisoning, Rukh returns to his own camp and continues his work, managing to completely harness the element to the point where he could destroy an entire city with its power. While he acknowledges that he will eventually filter the element to where it can be used to heal by placing a special screen in the projector, he's now become quite fanatical about its destructive potential, and is none too pleased when Benet tells him that he and Sir Francis Stevens are going to reveal it to the world as their shared discovery, accusing them of stealing it from him. Rukh's life continues to crumble when he learns that, as a result of his neglecting her for so long, Diana has left him for the young Ronald Drake and refers to her as something else that they've stolen from him (despite his neglect, it was clear that Rukh did love Diana, as he sent her away from his camp for fear of unintentionally killing her and was disturbed when he later heard her crying in her tent). Returning to his home, Rukh uses the element's filtered power to cure his mother of her blindness but, unable to let go of his feelings of betrayal, decides to go to Paris, where Benet has been using the element, dubbed Radium X, to work numerous medical miracles. Upon meeting with Benet, Rukh, despite being told that he's been chosen for the Nobel Prize for his discovery of it, is clearly not happy when he sees Benet getting so much credit for the use of the element, warning him that he's still the only one who can truly harness its power. Knowing that Diana plans to marry Drake, Rukh says he won't stand in the way of their happiness, and when Benet tells him that Diana won't do anything without his consent, he says that she'll hear from him soon. He proceeds to fake his death by killing a man who looks like him with the Radium X and, following Diana's marriage to Drake, begins murdering the members of the expedition one-by-one. It's not clear whether this was his plan all along or if it came to him when his deranged mind made a connection between them and the statues of the six saints at the church where Diana and Drake were married but, regardless, he kills Sir Francis and Lady Arabella Stevens (for her part in bringing Diana and Drake together), destroying the statues that represented them afterward, and plots to kill the rest of them at a late night lecture that Benet gives.

At this point, Rukh has not only completely lost his mind but he's obviously stopped taking Benet's antidote at regular intervals, as he used his deadly touch to kill Lady Arabella and to kill a professor so he could take his place at the lecture, sneaking into the house. Admitting to Benet that the element began affecting his mind almost immediately and now, he rarely thinks the way he used to, he kills him and proceeds to do the same to Diana and Drake. While he corners Diana in her room, he finds himself unable to kill her but tells her that nothing will stop him from killing Drake. Fortunately for Drake, Mother Rukh arrives and confronts her deranged son. Realizing that he's reaching the end of his life, Rukh tries to inoculate himself with the antidote to give him time to kill Drake but his mother destroys the small kit he has containing the chemical, leaving him with no way to save himself. Rukh admits that it's probably better this way and, as his body begins smoking, jumps out an upstairs window and combusts on his way down to the street below, completely disintegrating.

Going back to that line from Ed Wood, referring to Bela Lugosi as Karloff's "sidekick" here isn't just demeaning but it's downright wrong, as Dr. Benet is anything but to Rukh. He's one of the prominent scientists who's turned a skeptical eye to Rukh's theories and he continues to have doubts about it when he first arrives at his laboratory for the demonstration, as he and Sir George Stevens exchange doubtful looks when Rukh tells them of what he intends to do. However, when his demonstration succeeds with flying colors, Benet is amazed and decides to invite Rukh on the expedition to Africa he's mounting. When Rukh goes off on his own there, Benet is not suspicious or impatient with his decision like everyone else, telling Sir Francis that it's his business, and he spends the time conducting his own research, deriving a very effective medicine from sunlight. Due to his medical expertise, he's the one who Rukh comes to when he realizes that exposure to the Radium X has contaminated him, and Benet is horrified at his condition. Using a sample of the element and its chemical formula, he's able to cook up an antidote for Rukh that proves to be effective, but tells him that he can never be truly cured and that he must take it every day for the rest of life. He also worries what the poisoning might have done to Rukh's mind, worries that seem justified when, some time later, he tracks down his remote camp and finds him fanatically boasting about the destructive potential of Radium X. That's when he tells him that Sir Francis is taking the sample he used for the antidote to the International Scientific Congress in Paris and they're going to share credit for the discovery, which doesn't sit well with Rukh. Benet insists that this discovery is much too important and powerful for one man and he's also tasked with giving Rukh a letter from that Diana that tells him she has fallen for another man, further infuriating him.

When they return from Africa, Benet is able to use Radium X to cure many awful maladies, to the point where the line of patients stretches out the door of his clinic in Paris. When Rukh comes to see him, Benet tries to alleviate his feelings of betrayal by telling him that he's been awarded the Nobel Prize for it and that all of Paris is waiting to honor him. He's quite pleased with Rukh when he says that he won't do anything to stop Diana from marrying Ronald Drake and tells him that she won't do anything until she hears from him. After Rukh warns him again that he's the only one who can correctly harness Radium X's power, he leaves and fakes his death. Shortly afterward, when Rukh begins killing the members of the expedition one by one, Benet is at the Stevens household when Sir Francis is found dead in his bedroom with a look of abject terror on his face. On a hunch, Benet uses an ultraviolet camera to photograph the dead man's eyes and when he develops the film, he sees Rukh's image reflected on the corneas. When Lady Arabella Stevens is then killed, Benet shows the authorities, including the Chief of the Surete, a glowing handprint on her neck that is only invisible when the lights are out and tells them that it was made by someone poisoned by Radium X. Later, when they're all sure that it's Rukh, who's still alive, Benet proposes that they set a trap for the madman by announcing a late night lecture on Radium X, one that's he sure to come to in order to kill the remaining three. He says that scientists will be invited and admitted only by invitation and, furthermore, if the police fail to stop Rukh at the gate, come midnight they'll turn out all the lights in the house so that the glowing man will be visible. Come the night of the lecture, Rukh does indeed manage to get in and Benet is soon cornered in his laboratory, where he sees just how deranged Rukh has become by this point. He tries to go for his gun but Rukh touches his hand, killing him instantly.

Rukh's wife, Diana (Francis Drake), is very devoted to her husband at the beginning of the film, as eager for him to prove himself to his peers as he is, knowing full and well that he is brilliant. She's confident in his abilities throughout the demonstration, assuring Ronald Drake that he can pull off what he claims, and when he's invited to join the expedition, she goes with him. However, Diana begins to feel abandoned and neglected when Rukh heads off on his own to find the meteorite's crash site, and is further disturbed by the mutual attraction that begins to develop between her and Drake. When Rukh sends a native to their camp to deliver a letter that tells them he won't return for some time yet, Diana has the man and their native leader take her to him, as she feels he needs her. But, when she arrives at the camp, she's utterly heartbroken when Rukh refuses to see her and demands that she leave the following morning. Unaware of his reason for doing so, Diana spends most of the night crying in her tent. Returning to base camp, Diana and Drake are finally forced to admit their feelings for each other, with Diana also confessing that she married Rukh because of how much her late father, who worked with him, admired him. As a result, the two of them presently don't know what to do about how they feel. Time passes and Rukh continues working in isolation, eventually learning that Diana has been sent home due to an illness and that she's sent him a letter in which she says she feels he no longer loves her and that's become involved with someone else. With her marriage to Rukh dissolved, Diana plans to marry Drake, although she has the courtesy to wait until she hears from Rukh to do so. She's then horrified to read in the newspaper about Rukh's "death," but it doesn't stop her from marrying Drake. Their happiness is short-lived, as Sir Francis and Lady Arabella Stevens, the latter of whom Diana had begun working for, die within days of each other, and she begins to blame herself for it, feeling it wouldn't have happened had she not been on the expedition. Come the night of the lecture, it's not quite clear if Diana knows that Rukh is still alive or not but, regardless, she's soon confronted by him after he kills Benet. Her life is spared, though, as he's unable to kill her, and she passes out after he leaves; when she awakens, she's greeted by Drake and knows that everything is going to be alright now.

The attraction between Diana and Ronald Drake (Frank Lawton), Lady Arabella Stevens' nephew, is clear from the minute they meet each other at Rukh's laboratory and Drake is very disappointed to hear that she's married to him. Being a mapmaker, he feels inferior to the scientists around him, which probably further complicates how he feels about Diana, and things only get worse when they're stuck in Africa together. Drake admits to Lady Arabella that he is "interested" but he dare not do anything because of Diana's marriage to Rukh, and he admires her devotion to him when she decides to go to him, saying that he knows that she's the type of woman who wouldn't let any man down. When Diana returns to base camp, though, they have no choice but to admit their feelings for each other, and when he asks her if she loves Rukh, the only answer she can give is how she married him because of how much her father admired him. At this point, they don't know what they're going to do, but as time passes and Diana begins to doubt Rukh's love for her, they decide to go ahead and act on their feelings, the two of them eventually leaving when Diana becomes ill. Following Rukh's apparent death, the two of them are married but their marriage is soon plagued by an apparent curse when both Sir Francis and Lady Arabella die soon afterward. With Diana blaming herself, Drake is determined to win this battle against whatever this is, learning from Benet that Rukh is still alive and committing these murders out of revenge. Instead of going to hiding, as it becomes clear that he and Dr. Benet are two of Rukh's targets, Drake proposes they set a trap for him, with Benet coming up with the details via the midnight lecture. While Benet is killed, Drake never has to confront Rukh, as his mother arrives and puts an end to the rampage, leaving Drake and Diana free to finally have a happy life.

While Rukh, despite his unintentional neglect, does love Diana, the most important woman in his life is actually his mother (Violet Kemble Cooper). Blinded by her son's first attempt to capture the ray from Andromeda several years before, Mother Rukh, like Diana, is well aware of how brilliant he is and hopes that he will be able to prove that he's not the charlatan the mainstream scientific community believes him to be. At the same time, she knows that he isn't good with people and tries to dissuade him from taking part in the expedition to Africa, saying that it's best he stay at home with his experiments. Despite listening to her fears, Rukh, of course, does go to Africa and returns with Radium X contamination but also with a means to harness its power for healing, which he does in order to cure her blindness. It works, much to her and Rukh's elation, and she tells him he now has much work to do, but instead, he decides to go to Paris, where Benet is making similar use of Radium X and where Diana is now working with Lady Arabella Stevens. Again, his mother tries to dissuade him, knowing he will find only tragedy there, and while he does decide to go, he leaves with her the formula for the element in case her hunch does come true. Having sensed her son's growing insanity, and no doubt hearing about the deaths of Sir Francis and Lady Arabella, Mother Rukh arrives at the lecture during the latter part of the third act and confronts him, telling him he's broken the first rule of science. To stop him from doing any more killing, she smashes the kit containing Benet's antidote for his condition, leaving him with no way to stop the Radium X from completely consuming his body and causing him to burst into flames. With him gone, Mother Rukh hands the formula over to the head of the Scientific Congress so it can be continued to be used to help mankind.

Along with Dr. Benet, Sir Francis Stevens (Walter Kingsford) is one of the scientists who's always been very skeptical of Rukh's theories, having dismissed his claims about the meteorite containing a powerful new element years before. Initially, both he and Benet are skeptical about Rukh's claims of capturing a ray from Andromeda when they arrive at his laboratory, and even after the demonstration, he wonders if it was a hoax and is only convinced when Benet reassures him that it wasn't. Astounded by it, Sir Francis is intent upon finding the meteorite to see what it contains, with Benet then asking Rukh to join them. However, when they're stuck in Africa for weeks upon weeks when Rukh goes off by himself, Sir Francis' attitude is anything but scientific, as he's bored, hot, and miserable, to the point where he wouldn't mind leaving Rukh behind. His wife, Lady Arabella (Beulah Bondi), dismisses her husband's complaints and is more interested in her nephew's obvious attraction to Diana Rukh, which he confirms to her but admits he dare not act on it. Of course, they do act on it eventually, with Diana becoming an assistant to Lady Arabella in Paris as she waits for the opportunity to marry Ronald Drake, and this leads to both her and Sir Francis becoming targets for the deranged Rukh: Sir Francis for "stealing" his discovery by taking the Radium X sample to the International Scientific Congress in Paris and Lady Arabella for acting as "matchmaker" for Diana and Drake. However, their bodies yield evidence that prove it was Rukh's doing, with his image caught in Sir Francis' cornea and his glowing handprint left on Lady Arabella's neck. One last actor of note is Frank Reicher, who played Captain Englehorn in both King Kong and The Son of Kong, who has a brief appearance near the end as Professor Meiklejohn, the unsuspecting scientist who Rukh murders in order to use his identity to get past the guards at Benet's lecture. What's really weird is how, in the ending cast list, he's incorrectly credited as "Mendelsson."

As I said in the introduction, the film's production values aren't big and fancy by any means, and the art direction isn't anything you haven't seen in previous films made around that time, but it's a good-looking movie nevertheless, with nice cinematography by George Robinson and sets by Albert S. D'Agostino. Speaking of the sets, if you've seen a lot of Universal horror films made around this time, you'll probably recognize that a couple of them are from other films. For instance, the room with the fireplace where we first see Diana and Mother Rukh at the beginning of the movie looks an awful lot like the drawing room with Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron in the opening of Bride of Frankenstein, which had been filmed the year before (incidentally, when Rukh is firing up his projector, the shots of lab equipment that you see are taken from the original Frankenstein). But that's to say nothing of the church where Diana and Ronald Drake get married, which is actually the still-standing Notre Dame set from 1923's The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney. Given how often sets are dismantled following the wrapping of filming, it's really amazing that that one was still up over a decade after the movie was made. The most impressive sets in the film, though, are original: the interiors of Dr. Janos Rukh's laboratory at his home in the Carpathian mountains, which is separated from the actual house by a small corridor. The lab is divided into two main rooms: an observatory with his large telescope and a gigantic, wide room with a very high ceiling that contains the projector that Rukh uses to show everyone the data captured on the ray from Andromeda (in short, it's a planetarium). The projector is a large device that sits in the center of the room, to the left of which is a small set of bleachers shielded by a new kind of barium crown glass and a spiraling staircase on the right. It's just a knockout of a set, so much so that Universal reused both for Dracula's Daughter and their Flash Gordon serial, both of which were the same year. None of the other sets come close to looking as cool and are pretty ordinary, like the Paris apartment Rukh begins staying in during the third act, the Stevens' large, fancy house, and the large house that serves as the setting for the climax.

One thing that makes this movie stand out amongst the other genre films Universal was producing around this time is that a good chunk of it takes place in the jungles of Africa. Normally, you'd spend most of the time either in the foggy or rainy streets of a European city (which we do get when the third act rolls around), a small, isolated country village, or a house in a barren countryside; very rarely would we end up in a hot, tropical setting (what comes closest are Universal's Mummy films and their blistering hot desert settings). While it's very clear that we're on the backlot with these jungle sets and they're often shot in a very confined manner, they do enable The Invisible Ray to stand out a bit from its peers. The same goes for the bit where Rukh, dressed in a protective suit and helmet, is lowered down into the crater where the meteorite crashed, as that's something you'd expect to see in a 50's sci-fi flick. (What's really interesting is this footage was reused by Universal a few years later in their serial, The Phantom Creeps, which starred Bela Lugosi; in fact, it was Lugosi's character who was lowered into the pit in that instance, meaning that Karloff essentially "doubled" for him!) Of course, the depiction of the natives, particularly the cliched, primitive way in which the few who can speak English sound, isn't exactly PC by today's standards (plus, they don't seem to know enough about Africa to realize that Nigeria, where they're said to be, isn't even close to where the meteorite crashed in that projection), but it's not nearly as bad as some of the other films made around that time.

Despite the recycling of sets and shots from past films and use of the backlot for the jungle settings, The Invisible Ray was far from a cheap film for the time, starting out on a budget of over $166,000 and, by the time it was completed, it had run over by $68,000 and the release date pushed to January of 1936. The main cause for this was the visual effects work by John P. Fulton, which is about as extensive as that in The Invisible Man a few years before, as you again have a movie where there are a number of effects shots needed to show off the main character's bizarre condition. This mainly comes in the form of a phosphorescent glow around Boris Karloff's face and hands that you can tell was done via a very simple optical effect and it looks archaic by today's standards but it works well enough for what it is, as do similar effects of Rukh's glowing handprints on some of his victims. Another effects shot that is quite nicely done is the image of Rukh imprinted on Sir Francis Stevens' dead eyes, which Dr. Benet discovers by photographing the eyes with an ultraviolet camera (I don't know if that's scientifically accurate; I highly doubt it is), and the shot where Rukh uses the ray derived from Radium X to cure his mother's blindness. The most extensive use of visual effects in the film, though, is during the scene where Rukh projects the images that have been captured on the cosmic ray up into the ceiling of his planetarium and we get a POV shot of the camera passing by the moon, Saturn, Orion, and Andromeda, ending on a shot of the Earth millions of years ago, the meteor crashes into the southern part of Africa. Ignoring the fact that the model of the Earth shown is not the way it looked millions of years ago, as well as that Orion and Andromeda are nowhere near as close to each other as this sequence would have you think, it is a really interesting, well-made example of early visual effects work, especially when you see that meteor impact.

Speaking of that model of the Earth, it's one example of several nice-looking miniatures in the film, courtesy of Cleo E. Baker. Granted, it's very clear that that is a model but, like the glowing effects on Rukh, it serves its purpose. Aside from that, the most notable miniature in the film is the exterior of Rukh's Gothic-looking home in the Carpathian mountains, which is so detailed and photographed so well that it does look like a real building. In addition, there are some good physical effects on display, the best of which is when Rukh shows off the power of his ray to the natives by turning it on a nearby boulder, which proceeds to crumble and disintegrate as it stands there. It's quite a startling effect, actually, and the same goes for how, as the movie draws to a close, you can see Rukh's body beginning to give off smoke before he jumps out an upstairs window and combusts into a fireball on his way down to the street below.

Going back to the parallels with The Invisible Man, they go deeper than the simple fact that they both involve an unusually large amount of visual effects for the time. Like in that film, your main character is an ambitious scientist who inadvertently transforms himself through his experiments, slowly but surely begins to go mad from the results, and goes on a deadly killing spree before he's finally put down (the similarities become ironic when you remember that Boris Karloff was initially supposed to be the star of The Invisible Man). Like Jack Griffin, Janos Rukh also becomes gripped by the potential power of his discovery, using it as a way to keep his native assistants from deserting him and also brags about its potential to destroy entire cities when projected in its ray form. Really, the only difference between the two of them character-wise is that, while Griffin's killing spree was a result of his rampant megalomania and the feeling that he was untouchable, Rukh is driven by revenge against those who he feels have betrayed him in one way or another. In both cases, though, their motivations are spurned on by their growing madness. Also, like a lot of these mad scientist movies, the film begins with that conservative attitude that there are some things that mankind should leave alone, which Mother Rukh states during the opening scene, and yet, while we go in knowing that Rukh's discovery is going wreak havoc, what makes it different from most others of this genre is that we get to see both sides of the coin. While we do see Radium X's dark and destructive side, we also see its ability to heal when Rukh uses it to cure his mother's blindness and when Dr. Benet is curing numerous maladies with it at his clinic. The film even ends with Mother Rukh handing over her son's notes and formulas of the element over to the scientific congress so it can continue to help mankind, which is quite different from the attitude she held at the beginning of the movie. It's a sign she has learned what appears to be the true core of the movie, which is any type of scientific knowledge can be used either to heal or destroy and that it all depends on how it is wielded. Surprisingly progressive thinking for a science fiction film made during this period.

This is an instance where you're not going to get a detailed breakdown of the movie's most memorable scenes as, while it definitely has them, they're done fairly simply. The first major one, of course, is when Rukh shows his "guests" the projection of the data captured on the ray from Andromeda, which consists of him explaining what he's about to do, firing up the projector, and then showing everyone the images of outer space and various celestial bodies like the moon, Saturn, and Orion, before ending with a view Andromeda itself and the shot of the meteorite impacting on Africa millions of years ago. During the section that takes place in Africa, you have Rukh's discovery of where the meteorite hit, his getting his first sample of Radium X and showing the natives its destructive power, and his discovery that he's been contaminated and the deadly effects when he pets his dog. When he rushes back to the main camp, he shows Benet his frightening condition and takes shelter in the tent where he stores his instruments in the back of camp while he comes up with an antidote. After they return from Africa, Rukh cures his mother's blindness and then fakes his own death by murdering a Frenchman who is dressed like him and physically resembles him, promising to bring him fame before doing so. His murders of Sir Francis and Lady Arabella Stevens both take place offscreen but he leaves evidence behind in the form of his image on the former's eyes and his glowing handprint on the latter's throat, and we see him making connections between his intended victims and the statues of the saints at the church, which he destroys one by one. The climax at Benet's midnight lecture is fairly standard, with Rukh murdering Prof. Meiklejohn and using his invitation to get into the building (there's a nice shot of him looking through the window from the outside), where he corners and easily kills Benet in his laboratory. Come midnight, the power is shut off and Rukh sneaks around the dark building, attempting to hide his glowing face and hands, and traps Diana in a room upstairs. Like I said before, he finds himself unable to kill her and heads out to kill Ronald Drake, only to be confronted by his mother, who destroys his antidote, forcing him to jump out a window as the poisoning from the Radium X finally does him in.

The film's score is by Franz Waxman, whose most notable work at this point had been Bride of Frankenstein, which he did the year before (a couple of pieces of that score are heard near the end of the movie when Rukh is confronted by his mother and rushes upstairs to jump to his death), so it definitely has a major talent behind it. But, that said, the music is actually one of the movie's elements that leaves the least impact, as it's something of a generic score, especially the main theme you hear during the beginning, which doesn't sound that different from the music heard in many other horror films made around that time. I do really like the romantic love theme, which you hear over the latter part of the opening credits, twice over the film's ending and the repeat of the cast of characters, and several times throughout the narrative, but other than that, this score doesn't do much for me, as that's all I remember enough to where I can kind of talk about it. Waxman was a great composer and at this point, he was already well on his way to achieving that stature, but, coming off his classic score for Bride of Frankenstein, this is a big step down.

The Invisible Ray may not be a major classic, as it's not that showy of a movie, its story is told in a pretty standard fashion, and the music score, despite being by a great composer, is rather meh, but it still has a lot to recommend it. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi are both great to watch, especially Karloff (who's essentially getting to play a different take on the Invisible Man), the supporting actors all do their jobs well, the concept behind the story is an interesting one, the sets and production values look nice, even if some of them are recycled, the section in Africa is unique for a mad scientist movie of the time, there's a good amount of nicely-done special effects for a film made in the 30's, and the way the subject matter of radical scientific discovery is handled is quite sophisticated given the way it usually was. If you're a fan of Karloff and Lugosi or of classic horror and science fiction, it's definitely worth a watch, and at just 79 minutes, it's hardly that much of a commitment.