by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi screening in Golden Hill (http://sdvsf.org/) consisted of two movies
produced and directed by W. Lee Wilder, either the brother or the cousin of the
far more famous (and better!) director Billy Wilder — Wikipedia says brother
but I remember Don Miller’s 1970’s book “B” Movies saying cousin — who began his filmmaking career
producing one of the greatest and most underrated films noir of the original cycle, The Great Flamarion (1945) — though its quality is mainly due to the
actual director, Anthony Mann (one of his earliest credits), and the cast
Wilder Bruder assembled: Erich
von Stroheim (so both Wilders
worked with him!), Dan Duryea and Mary Beth Hughes (in a marvelous femme
fatale performance rivaling the ones
Barbara Stanwyck gave in Double Indemnity — with the “other” Wilder directing! — and Ann Savage gave in Detour for yet another German expat, Edgar G. Ulmer). In 1946 W. Lee Wilder
made his directorial debut in something called The Glass Alibi and in the early 1950’s he formed a studio called
Planet Filmplays that specialized in science fiction and mostly released
through United Artists, but sometimes through the dying embers of RKO under
Howard Hughes’ control and the three years of corporate post-traumatic stress
disorder RKO experienced between Hughes’ sale of it in 1955 and its closure
three years later. (Among the non-science-fiction
films Wilder made through Planet Filmways is the quite interesting 1955 film The
Big Bluff, featuring Martha Vickers from The
Big Sleep in a role-reversal tale of a
young invalid woman being exploited and abused by the no-good rotter of a man
she’s married.)
The films last night were Phantom from Space and Killers from Space, both copyrighted 1953 (though Killers is dated 1954 on imdb.com) and both, as the titles
suggest, about aliens from outer space who visit Earth. In Phantom there’s only one alien and there’s no suggestion in
the script by William Raynor or Myles Wilder (W. Lee Wilder’s son) of how he
(or she — more on that later) got
here or what the purpose of his/her visit was. What’s more, until the final
scene we barely get to see the
alien at all: yes, folks, this is one of those movies that had such a small
production budget virtually all of it takes place in little rooms with the
characters talking to each other endlessly and telling us what’s supposed to be going on. It starts in a
police station where the cops on duty receive reports of an auto accident in
which a man has been fatally injured and the woman with him — his much-younger
wife, Betty Evans (Lela Nelson) — recovers and says the accident was caused by
their encounter with a strange someone-or-other in a metal suit who appeared to
have no head; the suit had one but if you looked through its visor all you saw
was a blank. The cops immediately suspect the third person in the car, a
boarder who went to high school with Betty and who they presume murdered her
husband so he could be with her — but they let him go after other reports start
coming in of people dying mysteriously after seeing the apparition. This could have been a good movie — certainly the idea of one outer-space being landing in a small town and being
totally uninterested in the surrounding people, either for good or ill, was done better that same year by the makers of
It Came from Outer Space, a quite
good movie based on a Ray Bradbury story in which the alien has crash-landed on
Earth and all he’s interested in
is getting the parts and the time he needs to repair his spacecraft so he can
fly away again — but it’s done in by a soporifically dull pace. Until the very
end of the movie we don’t see the alien in action (obviously the spacesuit cost
too much money for the filmmakers to rent it for more than a day or so); we
just hear people talking about it
and see a police artist’s sketch of it based on Betty’s description.
The cast
is a lot of nondescript veteran character actors standing around looking
serious and sullen as they stand around in little rooms, one of which I
recognized as the headquarters of the arctic expedition visited by a far
nastier and more malevolent alien in The Thing (1951) — and the big twist is that under the
spacesuit, the alien is invisible. (One wonders why, if the planet s/he comes
from has the technology to render people invisible, it can’t also make their
spacesuits invisible instead of having the guy clomping around in a big metal
piece of hardware that everyone on Earth can see.) The alien itself, once its
spaceship finally dissolves and it becomes visible again as it dies (a gimmick
Raynor and Wilder Sohn obviously
poached from the marvelously moving final scene of James Whale’s 1933 classic The
Invisible Man), and there’s a certain degree
of pathos in the ending (and when we finally see the alien, played by Dick
Sands in a makeup simpler than but similar to the one James Arness wore as the
malevolent vampire vegetable from outer space in the 1951 The Thing, s/he has a frustratingly androgynous appearance with
no visible breasts but no basket, either — much the way the Gill-Man in Creature
from the Black Lagoon and its two sequelae
had no discernible dick, which led Charles to joke that it wasn’t a Gill-Man
but a Lesbian Gill-Woman), but that’s hardly enough to rescue a surprisingly
dull film. I nodded off during much of it, and I wasn’t the only one; the
screening proprietor and several of the other guests also had trouble staying
awake through it, and the proprietor attributed this to Wilder’s heavy,
ponderous, slow-moving “German” direction (though I can think of plenty of
German directors, including the other Billy Wilder, whose films are paced
effectively and don’t serve as non-toxic alternatives to Sominex like this one
does!).
