'Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man' is a flawed film but still lots of fun

Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951)
Starring: Lou Costello, Bud Abbott, Arthur Franz, William Frawley, Nancy Guild, Gavin Muir, Adele Jurgens, Sheldon Leonard, Paul Maxey, John Day, and Syd Saylor
Director: Charles Lamont
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Tommy (Franz), a professional boxer framed for murder by a mobster (Leonard), hides from the police by using an invisibility serum. He teams up with a pair of rookie private detectives (Abbott and Costello) in a desperate gambit to prove his innocence.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Abbott & Costello made a series of comedies that incorporated Universal's classic monsters from the 1930s, like Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein's Monster, and, the Invisible Man. Universal had revived the properties in a series of mostly serious sequels, several of which were crossovers with the Larry Talbot, the Wolfman, who encountered Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster while searching for a cure to his condition. (Larry Talbot's character was itself a revival of a 1930s horror character, the Wolfman of London, but it been the success of the other Universal horror films, so it was "rebooted" rather than being subject to sequels.)

Unlike some of their monster comedies, "Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man" is established as a true sequel to previous films in the series with references to the origins of the invisibility serum. For viewers familiar with "The Invisible Man" (1930) or its sequels ("The Invisible Man Returns" and "The Invisible Agent"), this tie-in lends a sense of urgency as the longer a person has the invisibility serum in their bloodstream, the more likely it is that he or she will be driven insane by it.

Unfortunately, that sense of urgency never becomes what it should be, because Tommy, our invisible man wanting to prove his innocence comes across as a total jerk and more than just a little crazy from the moment he is first introduced. There is literally not a moment where he isn't rude and abrasive to everyone he interacts with. Even in scenes where he is interacting with his girlfriend and the scientist who are risking imprisonment themselves to help him--scenes where there was an opportunity to make him more sympathetic--he is so obnoxious and paranoid that one wonders why the girlfriend even wants to be around him. (There are also a couple of plotting issues--big, gaping holes in the story that leads one to wonder if a scene or two were cut... because it's hard to imagine that any script could be so sloppily written and no one noticed as the film was being made.)

Of course the drama of whether the wrongfully accused man gets cleared of murder before the serum drives him insane or not is basically just an excuse to get us from comedy bit to comedy bit. Most of the routines in the film revolve around characters reacting to seeing--or rather NOT seeing--the invisible man, or boxing gags. The former gets a little old, with the callbacks later in the film being more tiresome than funny (although the spin-off gag involving hypnotism and half the officers and support staff at a police precinct is one of the film's comedic highlights). The latter, however, keeps getting funnier and more involved as the film unfolds, with Costello cartoonishly throwing punches that are actually being landed by the invisible pro-boxer--in a bar fight, in a boxing gym, and ultimately in a the boxing ring. Costello gets to to the physical comedy and pratfalls that he so excelled at, and he does it brilliantly. Meanwhile, Abbott is also very funny as a fundamentally self-centered and greedy huckster who wold probably sell out his own mother for a buck... but he is a charming rogue and you can't help but like him even while thinking he's being a bastard.

While this isn't the strongest of Abbott & Costello's efforts, it has enough going for it that I am giving it a very high Six rating. It might have been a low Seven if the filmmakers hadn't decided to end it on gag that's nonsensical and completely illogical and out-of-step with the rest of the movie. While the supposedly romantic lead being an unlikely jerk hurt the film, it's final 30 or so seconds nearly torpedoed it the material is so bad.