By 1941 Jane Wyman had been acting for ten years without breaking into the top ranks at Warner Bros.; she consistently played supporting roles or worried girlfriends. The fantasy farce The Body Disappears (1941) is an unlikely cross between the fantasies Topper (1937) and The Invisible Man (1933). Told in flashback at a trial, the tale starts with a college prank. Friends of the drunken student Jeffrey Lynn place him on a dissection table in the medical school. The dotty professor Edward Everett Horton administers a serum that he thinks will bring Lynn back to life, but it instead makes him invisible. The silly complications see the professor becoming invisible as well, followed by his daughter (Jane Wyman). Her main function in the show is to fall in love with Lynn, and wrest him away from his deceitful fiancée (Marguerite Chapman), who is seeing another boy (Craig Stevens) on the side. A driverless car, invisible fistfights and invisible kisses are comic highlights. Critics were split on whether the film was inventive or simply derivative of Universal's 'invisible' series, which the year before had produced its own comedy, The Invisible Woman. Jeffrey Lynn remains invisible through most of the movie, leaving Edward Everett Horton to hold screen center as the mad professor hustled away to an asylum. Variety ignored the young cast and said that Edward Everett Horton and his comic assistant Willie Best carried the show, sharing the acting honors fifty-fifty. The likeable comedy has a good excuse for failing to reach its audience: it was released the night before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and played during a week when nervous Americans stayed home to listen to news on the radio.

By Glenn Erickson