Some sources credit The Thing from Another World as the first movie to have an extraterrestrial visit Earth, when it was just beaten to be punch in 1951 by The Man from Planet X. This scrappy independently-produced feature was conceived, completed, and released between the time the big studio production began and when it could make it to cinemas. The small operations of a studio like Mid-Century Films could quickly turnaround a product, giving these Davids the occasional advantage over the big studio Goliaths. But winning a battle doesn’t mean winning a war, which is why Mid-Century lasted nowhere near long enough to worry about having to change their name.
Robert Clarke stars as an American reporter. He is in remote Scotland to observe the closest approach a passing planet will make to our own. I imagine the disappointment the planet felt as it whizzed by the moors instead of seeing somewhere like New York City. It’s like, jeez, I travelled all this way, and all I saw was desolation. I’m sure that, in reality, it would be beautiful desolation, but still.
But this isn’t reality, and the moors here are some frankly lousy sets that are supposed to be that country. I admire the pluck of the filmmakers, but absolutely nobody ever would have been convinced by a few fake rocks and some very suspect backdrops. I like how all those backgrounds were obviously hand-painted, but they aim for a degree of realism that, by failing to be convincing, only draw more bad attention to them. One example is when Clarke steps off a boat and there’s a ridiculously fake backdrop of a town immediately behind him. Since he steps on a boardwalk in the foreground, I assume 1) he was on one incredibly narrow boat which is currently 2) in an extremely tight space between the boardwalk and the town proper. I was also surprised to see Margaret Field drive her car right on that boardwalk to pick him up. The car then continues in the same direction, so we somehow have a boardwalk which connects to the land at two places, which seems unlikely.
Am I taking unnecessary potshots at the film? Of course I am, but I shouldn’t even be considering matters like this when watching a movie. And this is a surprisingly odd, though slight, picture.
Field’s father is a professor played by Raymond Bond, and the two live in a broch. I had not heard that word before, yet another term for an old castle or fortress kind of thing, and pronounced like the name of the candy company. If you learn anything from this essay, it is possibly a new word to play in Scrabble.
Also in the broch is William Schallert, a fellow scientist and one who is disgraced for reasons I don’t believe are fully explained. It also isn’t entirely clear what he wants, and gets, from an alien visitor which has crashed in the moors, except the idea of it alone makes him mad with power.
I would say the alien’s appearance is typical of this kind of thing, except this picture was released before the similar sci-fi films of the 50’s. So, this is first time we would have seen a small person in a goofy boxy suit and giant glass helmet. The face behind that glass is an expressive mask that is vaguely humanoid, except the usual orifices are more sharply rectangular than our own. If the movie had been in color, I would assume the creature’s skin would be green.
It is a design that gets laughs at first and then somehow becomes slightly more disturbing the more we see of it. The one time we see it is also the one solid jump scare, as Field sees its face peer out from a window of his ship. Given its lack of expression, any emotions it might have are entirely imparted upon it by the viewer. In the end, I felt sorry for the guy without having a firm opinion on whether his intentions had been for good or ill.
The spaceship is also interesting, in that is seems to resemble something more likely to be dropped to the bottom of an ocean instead of down from the heavens. There’s an observation along those lines when Clarke and Bond go to investigate it. Bond marvels how “the only difference between water and space is density”. While I get what’s he’s saying, I think there are a few more qualities to distinguish the two.
Whatever plan the alien has, it is hypnotizing the populace, starting with Bond. How this was done is interesting. An intense beam of light settles upon a person’s face, which then goes slack as they fall under the visitor’s control. The effect of this mesmerism wears off after a while, which I imagine results in having to devote too much of one’s time to keeping the humans under their spell.
Soon, the populace is almost entirely under that control and doing the alien’s bidding to…well, I still don’t know what. But Clarke hasn’t been affected and, together with the constable (Roy Engel), he tries to prevent what may be the end of the world.
The performances are just so-so in this. Clarke is solid in a serviceable role with little nuance. He’s an American who feels free to boss around the citizens of another country, which is pretty much par for the course. Similarly, Bond is a scientist with little more personality than would expect from the scientist role in this kind of thing. He is somebody who says, “Let us concentrate on this extraordinary object”, and proceeds to do that intensely, apparently oblivious to there being a superfluous word in that statement (would they stare intently at an ordinary object?). Schallert, at least, gets to do some bad guy pantomiming. Field has a rather thankless role as the sole woman and she will inevitably be a damsel in distress. She is also supposed to be in her late teens or early 20s, when this actress is clearly around 30. Heck, by the time this was made, her daughter was already four, that being future Academy Award winner Sally Field. At least she has some personality. The only other character who does is Engel. Alas, his performance is ridiculously over-the-top, to an extent which makes his overreactions to every little thing feel almost like mockery.
As for the technical aspects, the film is competently shot, but little more than that. There are a couple of shots which strive for artiness, but only draw attention to themselves by having so much of the floor in the image. Most of the rest of the picture reveals the sets for what they are, and that is cheap and limited. Generated fog helps to at least mask this somewhat, and I was amused by a line from Bond concerning “the fog they mistake for climate around here”.
The Man from Planet X deserves a place in the books on sci-fi cinema history, at least for being one step ahead of the major studios, even if this was simply an attempt to earn a fast buck in anticipation of the original The Thing. But this is an odd and languid film, one in which most of the characters seem to be blasé about such matters as the discovery of a planet of which we were previously unaware making a dangerously close approach to our own. Clarke doesn’t even seem that worked up when he confronts Schallert about what the man did to so piss off the weird visitor. He calmly asks, “What did you do to him back in the dungeon?” I think the operative word there is “dungeon” and, when that isn’t the strangest part of your inquiry, the alien might not be the weirdest thing in the film.
Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer
Starring Michael Clarke, Margaret Field, Raymond Bond
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s three-film blu-ray collection Edgar G. Ulmer Sci-Fi Collection