by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Her Infidelity
I turned on TCM and watched an intriguing item from their tribute night to
1950’s science-fiction movies about invasions from outer space: The
Man from Planet X, written and produced by
Audrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen for something called “Mid Century
Productions” (well, the movie was
made in 1951, midway through the 20th century), directed by Edgar G.
Ulmer — who shot the whole thing in six days and, despite the transparently
phony matte painting representing the horizon of the Scottish village of Bury
(an appropriate name!), where the film takes place — and starring a second-tier
but genuinely talented cast: Robert Clarke as American reporter John Lawrence,
who comes to Bury to interview a famous astronomer, Professor Elliot (Raymond
Bond), about a mysterious planet called “Planet X” that is basically crashing our
solar system and looks to be settling into an orbit similar to Earth’s; and
Margaret Field (Sally Field’s mother, and the physical resemblance is quite noticeable) as the professor’s daughter, Enid
Elliot (it’s not every day I get to watch a movie whose female lead has the
same name as my own mother!), who naturally becomes Lawrence’s love interest as
he meets both Professor Elliot and the scapegrace ex-con scientist Dr. Mears
(William Schallert) who’s working as Elliot’s assistant.
The Elliots are walking
over the moors when they spot a spaceship that looks like a high-tech jack
o’lantern with a cardinal’s hat stuck on top of it, and they confront the
inhabitant of this object, the Man from Planet X (played by an unbilled actor
named Dan Goldin who complained throughout the shoot of how uncomfortable the
costume was to wear and how little he was being paid), who wears what looks
like a diving suit of the period, complete with a SCUBA tank that can feed him
a regular supply of whatever it is he needs to breathe, which isn’t Earth air
because Earth air is toxic to his species and he needs a full spacesuit to
protect himself from it. The Man from Planet X holds some kind of gun on Our
Heroes until something goes wrong with his regulator valve, the earthlings figure
out how to fix it, and thereby he has a reason to like them and want to keep
them alive. Only the Elliots decide to entrust Dr. Mears with the task of
figuring out how to communicate with the alien by using geometric symbols
(since even if the alien doesn’t have a language at all resembling any of
Earth’s, his people would have
had to know geometry to construct the spaceship that brought him here) — and
Mears, who wants to grab the alien’s technology so he can become an
entrepreneur and make a fortune mass-producing gadgets based on it, grabs
control of the alien’s regulator and tells him he will either fed him
atmosphere or not depending on whether or not he cooperates. Eventually the
alien turns out to be the advance guard of an invasion force from Planet X, who
want to take over Earth because their own world is dying and they need a new
planet they can colonize to survive themselves — and Our Heroes first have to
figure out a way to warn the rest of the U.K. about the invader in their midst,
then to kill The Man from Planet X before he can broadcast the signal to the
rest of his species’ spaceships to start the invasion of Earth.
Though its plot
is pretty standard science-fiction — albeit the earliest use I can think of in
a film of the Invasion from Mars/Invasion of the Body Snatchers/It
Conquered the World gimmick of the alien
using mind control on humans to turn them into will-less zombies that will do
whatever he orders them to (I’ve read 1930’s sci-fi stories that used this
gimmick but I’m pretty sure this is the first such movie) — The Man
from Planet X is a haunting film, partly
because of Ulmer’s back-against-the-wall ingenuity as a director (he managed to
rent the set RKO had built for their mega-production of Joan of Arc in 1948, directed by Victor Fleming — his last film
— and starring Ingrid Bergman and José Ferrer, in his first film, so a medieval French village stood in for a
modern Scottish one), and partly because of the haunting appearance and
ambiguous characterization of the alien (the mask that’s supposed to represent
the real appearance of his face has quite a lot of Kabuki about it) — we’re not
sure until the very end whether he was a Day the Earth Stood Still-style alien who came to Earth to bring enlightenment
or a War of the Worlds-style
alien who came here to conquer and occupy, and even the last lines, in which
John Lawrence says that if Dr. Mears hadn’t frightened the alien and turned him
hostile to humanity, his presence here could have been “perhaps the greatest
curse ever to befall the world, or perhaps the greatest blessing. (TCM
highlighted the resemblance between the two stories by showing The
Man from Planet X right after the
magnificent 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still.) Movies about aliens coming to Earth with uncertain
intentions have generally been pretty dreadful, but this is one of the
exceptions (along with The Day the Earth Stood Still, the original Invaders from Mars, the original Invasion of the Body
Snatchers and the cheap, tacky but
unexpectedly haunting indie Teenagers from Outer Space), and for once Edgar G. Ulmer’s low-budget ingenuity
got harnessed (as it had previously for The Black Cat, Bluebeard, Out of the Night and Detour) to a genuinely good and compelling script.
