i>I shall offer my secret to the world,
with all its terrible power!
The nations of the world will bid for it -
thousands, millions.
The nation that wins my secret can
sweep the world with invisible armies!
Obviously the monocane
is fighting to regain its power,
and it succeeds.
Gloria Stuart has given many interviews
regarding her reactions
to playing scenes
in this film with Claude Rains.
She found him rather distant,
self-absorbed
and prone to upstaging her
in front of the camera.
But Whale intervened.
All in all, she did not find working with
Claude to be an enjoyable experience.
Actor Peter Lorre told an amusing story
about a joke played on Claude
that took place
when they were filming Casablanca.
"Claude was constantly studying, making
sure he had each line letter-perfect."
"One day we wrote a scene which
had nothing to do with the script,
and asked all the actors to memorise it,
except Claude, of course."
"When he came in the next day and saw
us rehearsing the scene, he was frantic."
"He called me aside and said 'Peter,
something terrible has happened to me."'
"'I can't remember a single line.' We all
broke up, and he wasn't even mad,
just relieved that
his memory wasn't failing."
Gloria Stuart was playing in The Seagull
at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1932
when Phil Friedman,
then Universal's casting director,
saw her and asked her to make a test.
A contract followed.
In addition to her films at Universal,
including three with James Whale,
she was loaned for various pictures,
including Here Comes the Navy
with James Cagney and Pat O'Brien,
and Gold Diggers of 1935
with Dick Powell.
One day Universal's production chief,
Carl Laemmle Junior, asked to see her.
Gloria recalled
"Junior was sitting behind his desk."
"'Sit down, Gloria.
We have a wonderful idea for you."'
"'We're going
to make you a female Tarzan!"'
"I guess it was a count of one, two,
three, then I really started screaming!"
She then went under contract
to Twentieth Century Fox,
and was featured in such films
as The Prisoner of Shark Island,
and two films with Shirley Temple,
Poor Little Rich Girl
and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
When she tried to make the move from
screen to Broadway in the 1940s,
"I never made it. It was years
and years of disappointment."
Her second husband, screenwriter Arthur
Sheekman, convinced her to stop trying.
In 1983 she learned printing
from Ward Ritchie,
a master printer and book designer
she had met back in 1930.
Both were widowed. Soon she was
creating artists' books in limited editions.
Ritchie was her companion
until his death in 1996.
When director James Cameron
selected the 86-year-old Gloria
for a leading role in Titanic in 1996,
yet another phase of her careers began.
Since Titanic, she has appeared in other
films and is still going strong aged 90.
Clearly, RC Sherriffs screenplay stayed
reasonably close to HG Wells' novel.
But what about those various treatments
and 11 scripts prepared by 12 different
writers that preceded Sherriffs version?
Garrett Fort, who had worked on the
scripts for both Dracula and Frankenstein,
started the parade with
a screenplay dated April 9, 1932.
He worked with Robert Florey,
who at that time
was slated to direct The Invisible Man.
But the script
was not based on Wells's book,
but rather on Philip Wylie's 1931 novel,
The Murderer Invisible,
that Universal had recently purchased.
Wylie's novel was set in contemporary
times in New York and New Jersey.
It dealt with a research scientist,
prior to disappearing himself,
experimenting and making an octopus
invisible in his laboratory tank.
With his own invisibility
comes megalomania.
He wreaks havoc on New York City
by blowing up Grand Central station,
among other major acts.
His plans are thwarted as he is about
to place invisible