Peter DeHaven (Jeffrey Lynn) is engaged to Christine Lunceford (Marguerite Chapman). At his bachelor party the night before he gets drunk and passes out. Peter is a joker and has subject many of his friends to his juvenile humor. To pay him back his friend Doc AKA George Appleby (Herbert Anderson) gets an idea for a practical joke. Doc is a medical student. He suggests they take the unconscious groom-to-be to the school dissecting lab and lay him out with a lily between his hands. When he wakes in the morning he will be shocked at where he is. Sounds very funny.
Also on campus, in a nearby lab, is Professor Shotesbury (Edward Everett Horton). He is working on an experiment. He is trying to bring the dead back to life. He’s managed to bring his pet monkey Charlie back to life. Now he’s ready to try it on a person. The Professor and his assistant William (Willie Best) go over to the dissecting lab looking for a corpse. They find the unconscious Peter. The Professor steals Peter’s body and takes it back to his lab where he injects it with his formula. Peter wakes up but the Professor thinks he came back to life. When Charlie becomes invisible the Professor realizes that there is a minor side effect to his formula. It makes animals invisible. When Peter disappears the Professor realizes that he needs to find an antidote. In the meantime Peter is put upstairs in bed to sleep off his bender.
The next day an invisible Peter rushes to his fiancé’s house to try to explain to her why he didn’t show up for the wedding. When he gets there he overhears that the only reason Christine is marrying him is for his money and she is really in love with a man named Robert Struck (Craig Stevens). Glad that he found this out before got married Peter goes back to the Professor’s house to await the antidote and falls in love with the Professor’s daughter, Joan (Jane Wyman). The Professor manages to create his antidote but before he can inject it into Peter he is committed to a sanitarium by his colleagues for telling them that he can bring the dead back to life and create invisible monkeys and people.
“The Body Disappears” was released in 1941 and was directed by D. Ross Lederman. It is a romantic comedy with a science fiction aspect.
The movie is your standard frenzied comedic mix-up laugh-a-minute knee slapper. In other words, a screwball comedy. It fills up about an hour and twelve minutes of your time. There’s very little science fiction involved and a smattering of special effects. They are the basic special effects one sees in an invisible person movie but they are done well.
The best part of the movie is actually Willie Best. Yes he is doing his bulging eyed scared black man routine but it was 1941 and that’s all that was available. Still he makes the most of what he’s given and as the seventh or eighth billed star in the film he has more screen time than anybody else. With Best and Horton the movie is actually more enjoyable than it should be. The back and forth between the two stars are the highlights of the film. Horton especially is delightful to watch. It’s a carefree light film. It’s fluff, but sometimes fluff is what you’re looking for.