by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi
screening in Golden Hill (http://sdvsf.org/)
consisted of two quite good movies from Universal-International’s
science-fiction unit from the 1950’s, headed by William Alland (who got his
start in the business as an actor, playing the reporter Thompson in Citizen
Kane) and which featured its
share of silly giant-arthropod movies like Tarantula, The Deadly Mantis and The Leech Woman but also generated some quite exciting and
thoughtful films, many of them with Jack Arnold as his director. The two they
showed last night were actually quite accomplished movies that rank among the
best 1950’s U.S. sci-fi films, It Came from Outer Space (1953) and This Island Earth (1955). I’ve written about This Island Earth recently enough that I don’t feel a need to repeat
myself — suffice it to say that it’s a beautiful movie and I’d love to see it remade with a suitably sensitive
director and a writer able to combine the best elements from Raymond F. Jones’
source novel (which I read about a year ago and was startled to find was
out-and-out Cold War propaganda without any of the moral ambiguity of the
Franklin Coen-Edward G. O’Callaghan script for the movie) and the original
film. It’s also amazing that this classic isn’t officially available from
Universal Home Video and the screening proprietor had to make do with a
private-label release.
It Came from Outer Space — which is available officially, including at least one disc that contains the
original 3-D version of the film (though we couldn’t watch it that way because
the glasses that came with it work only with a TV or monitor screen, not a projected image) — is a 1953
production based on a story by Ray Bradbury, and though Harry Essex is the
credited screenwriter an imdb.com “Trivia” poster said that most of the scenes,
including the dialogue, came from Bradbury’s original treatment. I can readily
believe that: the dialogue has a beautiful literary construction and much of it
sounds like Bradbury reads. The
film has a quiet, dignified strength to it and a subtlety that suggests Messrs.
Alland, Arnold and Essex had seen the Val Lewton contemporary horror movies and
decided to apply his less-is-more aesthetic to science-fiction. The original
design for the film featured an ugly bug-eyed alien to be played by Edwin
Parker — the all-purpose Universal stunt man who doubled for Boris Karloff and
Lon Chaney, Jr. in their later films for the studio and then got cast (and
credited) as on-screen monsters in the 1950’s — though, wisely, Alland and
Arnold decided not to use it (and instead the costume got recycled for This
Island Earth!). Instead they suggested
the alien’s presence with a shadowy, gelatinous mass that appears at times
during the film and some intriguing alien’s P.O.V. shots that were literally
filmed through a soap bubble (and had to be kept short because the bubble burst
quickly). The principal human character in It Came from Outer Space is John Putnam (Richard Carlson), an amateur
astronomer who’s moved to the (fictional) town of Sand Rock, Arizona so he can
study the stars to his heart’s content and write articles about them, which
seems to be the way he makes his living. He’s got a girlfriend, local
schoolteacher Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush) — in the opening scene we see them
together at Putnam’s home and we get the impression they’re married, but they
aren’t and Putnam has a rival for her affections, local sheriff Matt Warren
(Charles Drake, who puts everyone in this movie one degree of separation from
the Marx Brothers — Drake played the male romantic lead in the Marxes’ 1946
film A Night in Casablanca), who lectures her about skipping her classes when Putnam has told her
to stay home and recover from the shock of what they’ve just seen.
It seems
that one night she and Putnam were out in the desert with a typical
comic-relief character when they saw a fiery object hurtling through the skies
and landing, digging a crater by the sheer force of its impact as it fell.
Putnam descends into the newly dug crater and sees that the “meteor” is
actually a spaceship and there appears to be a living being on it, but since he
didn’t let the other two people in his party go down to see it (nor did he
think to bring a camera and photograph it), they think he’s nuts and all that
the thing was was a giant meteor. That’s what Putnam’s scientific mentor,
university professor Dr. Snell (George Eldredge), thinks too when Putnam
summons him to the site, but soon ordinary people in Sand Rock, including
telephone linemen George (Russell Johnson) and Frank (Joe Sawyer), start
disappearing and being replaced by emotionless duplicates (three years before the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and two years before Jack Finney published his
source novel for that story). It turns out that the spaceship’s inhabitants are
kidnapping various Sand Rockians and assuming their identities because their
actual appearance would be too repulsive for humans to stand, but the original
people are unharmed and will be released as soon as the aliens do … whatever.
Sheriff Warren, who says he inherited the job on the death of his father (sort
of like J. A. Jance’s Arizona sheriff Joanne Brady inherited the job when her
husband was killed in the line of duty), notes that a number of stores in Sand
Rock are being burglarized but the only items being stolen are electrical
equipment, including a large amount of copper wire. Eventually it turns out
that the aliens are neither out to conquer the world nor to befriend it and
bring it peace; they couldn’t care less about us one way or the other and all they’re doing is collecting enough stuff to repair
their spacecraft so they, like E.T. in a later Universal classic, can go home.
The aliens fix the spaceship, they leave, the people they’d kidnapped
(including Ellen, much to Putnam’s relief — though out of all the kidnap
victims, she’s the only one who dressed differently as herself and an alien
replica — for some reason the replica Ellen was just wearing a white dress that
showed as much of her breasts as they could get away with in 1953 while the
real Ellen was dressed in a severe dress suit) are released unharmed, and the
film ends with a warning from Putnam that we undoubtedly haven’t seen the last
of beings from space.
It Came from Outer Space is distinguished by the quiet dignity and strength
of the writing (thank you, Ray Bradbury!) and the equally somber quality of
Arnold’s direction: the Arizona desert, with its alien-looking Joshua trees,
were Arnold’s favorite location (even in movies like his noir thriller The Tattooed Stranger that had no science-fictional element), and
Clifford Stine’s cinematography is beautifully contrasty and almost noir, a far cry from the plain photography most
science-fiction films (especially ones in black-and-white) got in the 1950’s.
Charles noted that even though we were watching a 2-D print-down of a 3-D
movie, the print preserved much of the dimensionality, with excellent depth of
field and a clarity rare in 2-D print-downs of 3-D films. The film also has an
unusually extreme stereo sound mix (which probably worked better in the 3-D
version, which I’d like to see sometime), with car-horn honks and other sound
effects coming from extreme angles to the right or left. The acting is
functional rather than brilliant, though Carlson’s taciturnicity works for his
character (as it would the next year in what was probably the most popular
Alland-Arnold film, The Creature from the Black Lagoon). Though no composer is credited (just Joseph
Gershenson, the overall head of Universal’s music department) and therefore
it’s likely the music was just assembled from stock tracks, the music works for
the film (aside from a typical 1950’s science-fiction overuse of the theremin)
and I was struck that the opening theme when the spacecraft lands was a virtual
note-for-note rip-off of the opening of Stravinsky’s The Firebird! It Came from Outer Space is a lovely movie that somewhat got lost in the
shuffle of 1950’s science-fiction cheapies but it’s one of the strongest of
them (as is This Island Earth), and it’s also one of the most successful efforts to bring Ray
Bradbury’s sensibility to the screen despite the dorky title (it’s certainly
better, and more in keeping with Bradbury’s style, than the fun but tacky The
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!).
