Hammer Films actually took the trouble of clearing the rights to a number of classic Universal monsters, but the one they never got around to adapting was the Invisible Man. The 1958 Invisible Man TV series is sort of the closest thing to a Hammer Invisible Man, even though it isn’t gothic, or even horror. Instead, it placed an invisible scientist (the good guy for a change) in a Cold War espionage context, but it regularly co-starred familiar Hammer players, like Michael Ripper and Thorley Walters. Even the voice of the Invisible Man, Tim Turner, had a Hammer connection as the future narrator of The Mummy’s Shroud. The half-hour format was way too short for the genre, but it is still fun to watch an Invisible Man battle Communists, especially villainous Anton Diffring and Andre Morell in two of the better episodes (which release in yet another DVD-set this Tuesday).
“The Prize” (S2 E4, directed by Quentin Lawrence and written by Ian Stuart Black) was freshly ripped from the headlines, taking transparent inspiration from the Nobel Prize that was awarded to Boris Pasternak, before the Soviets browbeat him into declining it, just less than a year before the episode originally aired. In this case, it is dissident author Tania Roskov (played by Swedish thesp Mai Zetterling) who intended to accept a Nobel-like prize in Europe, but was intercepted by the sadistic secret police officer Gunzi at the border.
You know who else is picking up an award for science at the Nobel-like gala? That’s right, invisible Dr. Peter Brady. Sure, he is still working on reversing the invisibility process, but he achieved something pretty amazing. Distressed by Roskov’s plight, Brady decides to sneak into the unnamed but presumably Baltic nation to rescue her.
