No, "The Invisible Woman" isn't a movie for the ages (as the 1933 "Invisible Man" certainly is!), but it's a cheery little screwball comedy with a science-fiction premise grafted onto it. Mad (in the dotty rather than the floridly insane sense) scientist John Barrymore needs a volunteer to try out the invisibility process he's been working on for 10 years (a chemical injection followed by an electrical transformation, rather than the chemicals alone that turned Claude Rains and Vincent Price, respectively, invisible in Universal's two previous films on this premise) and finds her in Virginia Bruce, a store model who uses her new-found powers to get revenge on a martinet boss (Charles Lane). Directed by Mack Sennett veteran A. Edward Sutherland (who actually did make a serious horror film, "Murder in the Zoo," though for the most part he stuck to comedies like W. C. Fields' 1936 "Poppy"), "The Invisible Woman" is quite amusing (though it sags a bit in the second half) and a light-hearted romp. Barrymore manages to retain his dignity in his hapless role, though given what happened to him in real life it's almost unbearably ironic to hear him warning Virginia Bruce NOT to drink alcohol! As for Bruce, she was one of the most unjustly neglected and underused actresses of her era; she was superb in the 1934 "Jane Eyre" for Monogram (far better than Joan Fontaine in the 1943 remake for Fox!) but otherwise got to play only second-leads in prestige films (like the 1936 Cole Porter musical "Born to Dance," in which she introduced the song "I've Got You Under My Skin") and leads in movies like this; still, she's good here throughout, especially in the scene in which she attempts to rally her fellow models to resist their viciously repressive boss: "The Invisible Man" meets "Norma Rae"!
Review of The Invisible Woman
