The Body Disappears

The casting of Edward Everett Horton as a nutty professor is reason enough to watch The Body Disappears. Horton has been experimenting at the small college he teaches with both invisibility and resurrection.

He and his trusted assistant Willie Best steal Jeffrey Lynn's body from the morgue and bring it back to Horton's laboratory at home. Lynn isn't dead, just completely ossified from his batchelor party and his buds thought it would be fun to have him wake up at the morgue.

Horton gives the invisibility potion to Lynn instead of his experimental resurrection concoction and Lynn goes invisible like Claude Rains. Also like a monkey that he had tried it on earlier who escapes.

Meanwhile when he leaves his bride Marguerite Chapman at the altar a manhunt starts for him with the suspicion of foul play in the air.

The Body Disappears is a nice item from the B picture unit at Warner Brothers with none of their big box office stars. Jane Wyman who plays Horton's daughter falls for Lynn invisible though he may be. Lynn has a good line of patter that gets her.

This one really is Horton's film and it is nice to see him carry a film for once as brilliant as he in support.

This frantic Warner 'B' comedy about how millionaire Jeffrey Lynne copes with being invisible succeeds, in large part, because of the great, great comedy chops of Everett Horton, who takes over the movie as the mad scientist who turns him invisible. Well, he's not mad, actually. He is, in fact, quite amiable, so amiable that he allows his colleagues to send him to an insane asylum after a lovely variation on the "Mayhem in the Classroom" vaudeville sketch.

Jane Wyman is also on hand doing her wide-eyed comedy gal, and Willie Best does a decent turn for the era. The cast is filled out by the usual competent Warners B cast of the the era.

Jeffrey Lynne, as the lead, is given very little do do and his plot is disposed of efficiently. This pretty much describes Mr. Lynne's career. But this comedy remains with some reasonable pleasures in it.

...For I have never seen such a physically nondescript and dramatically bland actor as Mr. Lynn. And yet Warner Brothers gave him a pretty good build up in the late 30s and early 40s, including unbelievably having him play a character that Priscilla Lane prefers over the enigmatic brooding John Garfield in "Four Daughters". But I digress.

Here Lynn plays wealthy sportsman Peter DeHaven who is to be married the next day, and this is his bachelor party. He likes to play all kinds of corny jokes on his friends and fellow party goers, like exploding cigars and hand buzzers. And then he passes out from drinking too much. Three of his friends and fellow medical students decide to carry him over to the Medical College dissecting room, lay him out on a slab, and place a lily in his hand. They figure he will freak out when he wakes up the next morning, thus repaying him for all of the jokes he played on them.

Meanwhile, eccentric chemistry professor Shotesbury is testing a potion that is supposed to bring dead animals and people back to life. He has just been successful at bringing a monkey back to life, and decides to move abruptly to human testing. So he goes to fetch a body from the dissecting room which turns out to be Peter. He gives what he thinks is a dead person the injection, and Peter comes to. Shotesbury thinks he has succeeded when a previously unknown side effect of the drug appears - invisibility of both the monkey and Peter. Complications ensue, not the least of which is that the police figure that something criminal has befallen Peter when he turns up missing the day of his wedding.

Edward Everett Horton is really the lead here as the confused professor of chemistry. Interesting note here - this film was released the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. I originally thought the film was released in 1943, the middle of the war, mainly because it is an object lesson in how to make a movie when there are no leading men to be found. All of the younger men have very small supporting roles with just a few lines. The lead is actually a 55 year old man, Horton, and Jane Wyman as his daughter. Lynn's voice is present during the entire film, but most of the time Lynn is not physically present at all - he is invisible. Actually anybody could have been playing Lynn's part when you can't see him.

This one is actually pretty funny for what is obviously a Warner Bros. B effort of the time. Horton is comically befuddled as always, workhorse Willie Best is funny and gets to flex his comic muscles here more than in most of the films he was in, and the plot has some interesting twists and turns. Also this film has something I thought I'd never see in the production code era - Actor Willie Best driving around New York City with Jane Wyman's bra on his head. Watch this one for the fun of it all and in spite of one rather obvious plot hole towards the end. See if you can find it.

I'd recommend this one. It was unexpectedly entertaining.

This is one of those thin little comedies that played the second half of a double bill back in the '40s. EDWARD EVERETT HORTON has a tailor-made role as an eccentric scientist who has inadvertently developed a serum that can make people invisible. On this one-note thread, the whole plot ambles on for little more than an hour in what seems like an endless comedy of errors.

While Horton at least does his best to keep things lively, poor JEFFREY LYNN has little more to do than pop up once in awhile in the flesh--remaining invisible for a good portion of the film. JANE WYMAN has the hapless task of making all the silly shenanigans look less foolish than they are--but she rarely succeeds. And WILLIE BEST does his best to look frantic and frightened by all the invisibility going on around him, as Horton's wide-eyed assistant in his usual stereotyped role as a black man.

It passes the time quickly but there's little substance to any of the plot with some nice cast members striving to make it agreeable enough--CRAIG STEVENS, MARGUERITE CHAPMAN and David BRUCE among them.

E.E. Horton, the pro, was already 55 when he made this one... he's still in pretty good shape, and this caper movie required a lot of energy! if you haven't seen him in my favorites "Lost Horizons" or "Top Hat", you gotta rent those! The first 1/2 hour is fast paced, and things move right along. You don't have time to get bored. Pretty good special effects too, as the Professor and Willie turn Peter DeHaven (Jeff Jynn) invisible.... of course, his daughter Joan (the lovely and talented Jane Wyman) catches them, and now they have to explain what they are up to.... and these crazy goings on threaten to interrupt the wedding of DeHaven and Christine Lunceford (Marguerite Chapman). AND, it's got invisible monkeys, too! Fun, if you can keep up with it. A little silly, but what the hey. We don't hear much about this one, probably because it was released ONE day before Pearl Harbor Day, December 1941.... Directed by Ross Lederman, who was married to "Doris Warner"... I wonder if that's the same Doris, daughter of Harry Warner... This WAS a Warner Brothers film....