and John Weld, we are told, wrote a treatment and screenplay that were actually based on HG Wells' novel. He was replaced by British playwright RC Sherriff, whose very successful play Journey's End had been directed by James Whale on the stage and screen. The actor playing the chief of detectives is Dudley Digges, another Irish-born actor who made his stage debut with the Abbey Theatre Players in Dublin, and first performed in the US in New York in 1904. In 1911, he became stage manager for the distinguished actor George Arliss, for seven years. And from 1919 to 1930, Digges appeared in many Theatre Guild productions, and staged or produced several plays. In 1923 he produced George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma, which featured Claude Rains. Later, Rains relieved Digges the actor in two plays with extended runs and tours. Digges, starting in 1929, appeared in many films, including the first version of The Maltese Falcon in 1931, as Casper Gutman, Sydney Greenstreet's role in the 1941 Bogart version. Other notable screen credits include the 1935 Clark Gable, Charles Laughton Mutiny on the Bounty, The General Died at Dawn, The Light That Failed, Son of Fury, et cetera. He died in 1947. RC Sherriff, in his 1968 autobiography, described some of the rejected adaptations he had read prior to starting his own. He mentioned that one turned the invisible man "into a man from Mars, who threatened to flood the world with invisible Martians". That particular approach has not shown up as of now. Perhaps this was the elusive John Huston treatment, written in the summer of 1932 when he was under contract to Universal as a writer. Or, perhaps Sherriff, in retrospect, was confusing this with a project that he and Whale were working on at the time for Universal called A Trip to Mars, which was never made. Sherriff reread HG Wells' novel after many years, and wondered why so many writers of the previous scripts had chosen to ignore what Universal had purchased. With Whale in agreement, Sherriff did a dramatically sound adaptation. Said Sherriff in his autobiography "To give reality to a fantastic story, HG Wells knew it had to be told through the eyes of ordinary, plain-spoken people." "A screenplay, to my way of thinking, lay about halfway between a stage play and a novel." "You were free from the narrow boundaries of the stage, but you had to keep from wandering down the bylanes open to the novelist." "I had to add ingredients here and there to tighten up the drama." Historian Paul Jensen was the first to research and write an in-depth study of The Invisible Man, many years ago. He pointed out that some of the changes Sherriff made, such as adding Flora and her father, expanding Kemp's role, and making him a romantic rival, presented an interesting parallel. Jensen wrote "The model for these added aspects was probably Frankenstein." "The two films share the situation of a passionate young scientist who has disappeared in order to experiment alone, leaving behind a worried fiancйe, a fatherly associate - Dr Cranley here becomes Dr Waldman, and Baron Frankenstein - and a friend who is fond of the fiancйe." "By increasing Kemp's importance, Sherriff and Whale provide Griffin with a specific antagonist, thereby creating a more precise conflict than exists in the novel." "Such a conflict is dramatically necessary in The Invisible Man, because there is no overt struggle between the scientist and a monster, as in Frankenstein." "Here, the scientist himself becomes the monster." RC Sherriff, Robert Cedric Sherriff, was born in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, England, in 1896. He worked with Whale on two other films at Universal, One More River and The Road Back. He also wrote the unproduced version of Dracula's Daughter that
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