Flick Review < The Invisible Thief | Segundo de Chomón, Ferdinand Zecca (1909) / H.G. Wells (1897)

The Invisible Thief, 1909

Segundo de Chomón, Ferdinand Zecca

based on the H.G. Wells “The Invisible Man.”

“The Invisible Thief, opens with a close-up of Wells’s novel itself (showing the famous scene of the bodiless dressing gown), which inspires a criminal to duplicate
Griffin’s experiment. He discards moving clothes for burglary and scaring off bobbies, but dresses in mask and wig to materialise. The film employed virtually all
the special effects (e.g. floating objects and swag) which would be refined by Fulton for Whale’s 1933 film.”

H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies, 2007