The Horror!? 41: The Invisible Ghost (1941)

If not for some small and one big problem The Invisible Ghost could have been the rarest of creatures: a good Monogram film starring Bela Lugosi.
Lugosi is Mister Kessler, a (honestly) nice man living with his daughter and a few servants (including something virtually unheard of in films of this vintage - a black butler who is treated as an actual human being!). He seems to have only one problem. His wife left him some time ago for another man and broke his heart. What Kessler doesn't consciously know is that his wife and her boyfriend had a car accident that killed the man and drove Mrs. Kessler insane. For some reason Kessler's gardener keeps Mrs. Kessler secluded in some kind of cellar, possibly in the hope that no treatment of her mental illness and total isolation are the fastest way to her cure. Of course there is something that the gardener doesn't know - from time to time Mrs. Kessler sneaks out of her hiding place, stares through a window into the Kessler mansion and makes eye contact with her husband...who falls into some kind of trance/goes temporarily insane and strangles the next person he can find with his dressing gown. And here you can see the film's big problem in action: the script doesn't make a lick of sense. Or did you know that the police will not ever suspect the owner of a mansion to be the murderer who kills only people in his own damn house? Or that you can sentence people to death without any proof at all? The list of idiocies goes on and on.
All this could be quite fun, if the film itself wouldn't try to take the script seriously. Director Joseph H. Lewis does his best to use unusual camera angles, movement and the play of light and shadow to imbue the movie with atmosphere, but can barely make the idiotic watchable. He mostly directed Western and it is a real shame that one of his few horror/mystery efforts is such a waste of an obvious talent for mood and atmosphere.
Lugosi is surprisingly subtle and very likable when portraying Mister Kessler in his sane state of mind, only to go badly over the top when he has his fits, reminding me of a five year old imitating a mummy.
The rest of the cast, excluding Clarence Muse as the black butler Evans, who is very obviously the best actor of the lot, is as wooden as usual in Poverty Row features.