At his mountain top castle, Dr. Janos Rukh (Boris Karloff) works to perfect his discovery, the ability to capture a ray from Andromeda, and use it to view the past. Laughed at by other scientists, he lives in seclusion with his young wife Diana (Frances Drake) and his mother (Violet Kemble Cooper), but for validation he’s summoned Dr. Felix Benet (Bela Lugosi) and Sir Francis Stevens (Walter Kingford), and they bring with them Lady Stevens (Beulah Bondi) and relative Ronald Drake (Frank Lawton). Rukh’s demonstration convinces them that he’s found something significant, and happens to have also supplied proof for Rukh’s earlier claim that a meteor hit in Africa. The other were planning an expedition to Africa and invite Rukh along to search for his meteor. Rukh’s mother is opposed, predicting that it will end in death, but Rukh and his wife go. Rukh does find the meteor, which is made of radium-X, an element that can cure and kill and do just about anything. Rukh is poisoned by the element, making his touch fatal, and pushing his already shaky sanity.
This is the first atomic horror film, nearly a decade before the atomic bomb fell. Based on that, I’ll give The Invisible Ray more leeway on its peculiar version of science. I’ll assume the film takes place on a parallel Earth, where the rules are different, because the rules of science here are really different.
I enjoy The Invisible Ray though it is silly and greatly flawed. It’s the third Universal pairing of Karloff and Lugosi, and I judge it on a lesser standard. I wanted The Black Cat and The Raven to be great A-films, but The Invisible Ray is a B-movie through and through. It was never going to be great. Fun is good enough. Karloff isn’t at his best, and Lugosi is quite good, but doesn’t get enough to do. It is, however, Karloff and Lugosi, and who doesn’t like that combo?
It’s a strange film, cobbled together from pieces that don’t fit. We start in the Gothic middle Europe of earlier Universal horror pictures. Rukh lives in a beautiful castle that exists in a different time. He works in a mad scientists lab of jolting electricity, though the “science” he carries out is calm and lacking in madness. His mother speaks like a horror film gypsy, making prophecies of doom—very peculiar behavior for someone who acted as a lab assistant.
Then they go to Africa. Why? Plot-wise it is to find the radium-X, which is odd to start with as it is only tangentially related to Rukh’s astronomical discovery. But it is more odd to stick in an African safari segment at all. It has a very different tone. Why not make radium-X Rukh’s lab discovery instead of seeing into the past? That works better for the story structure and keeps us in the land of mad scientists instead of explorers. Then we enter the third act of the film, with Rukh now a vengeful maniac, that has nothing to do with the previous “science” except that Rukh now has a lethal touch. Tacked onto the side we have the love story, which could be stripped away without changing anything else. I picture a studio planning meeting, where lesser execs listed film genres that were popular at the time, and the boss held up a finger and yelled, “Yes, we’ll do them all in one!”
In the end, the evil man is not condemned by being told he has violated the will of God, but that he’s “broken the first law of science.” It makes as much sense as anything else.