Invaders from Mars
(1953)
The first half hour of this is tremendous,
a pre-Invasion of the Body Snatchers
paranoia vignette bringing alienation into the heart of the nuclear family.
It’s made all-the-more disturbing through being told from the point-of-view of
a small boy (David, played by Jimmy Hunt). His loving parents become cold and
physically abusive following their investigation of a strange light coming from
a nearby sandpit. A modern filmmaker would surely blanche at depicting
childhood fears in quite so undiluted a fashion. Certainly, it makes Kevin
McCarthy's (or Donald Sutherland's) concerns seem much more manageable.
Leif Erickson and Hilary Brooke do fine
work as the doting parents turned into heartless automatons (although this
change is so over-the-top that no one would fail to notice something was wrong;
these Martians need to do more groundwork). The lighting and staging in these
early (pre-transformation) scenes support the unsettling nature of what is to
come; when Erickson stands in the doorway to his son’s bedroom he is just a
shape shrouded in shadow and could be the embodiment of any child’s fears.
But then, following a detour to the police
station and the intervention of an enormously insightful doctor (Helena Carter)
we’re subjected to an earnest 20-minute science lecture in which an
astonishingly credulous (luckily for the boy) and far-seeing astronomer (Arthur
Franz) informs us of all the current theories concerning UFOs and space travel.
These range from referencing actual events (the Lubbock Lights) to mewtards
(actually mutants, but that's how I kept hearing it) living on Mars. I saw the
British version of the film, which expands this scene (other changes saw the
saucer blown up at the end and the removal of the original the ending which
suggested it might all have been a bad dream).
And then he gets the military involved, who
also believe him unquestioningly (I guess this is part and parcel of having a
rocket base on your doorstep; UFOs are ten-a-penny). Oh, for the halcyon days
of good old commie-under-the-bed terror eh? The last third of the film shows us
the mutants, and their master, none of whom are all that impressive (the
Martian slightly more so, in a tentacled head kind of way) while the army
employs extensive stock footage to defeat the menace. It's all a triumph for
the scientific/military establishment. And little David even gets mom and dad
back!
Ronald Reagan was surely inspired by the
movie’s vision for the future of America’s defence systems:
Dr. Kelson: It's just a matter of time before we set up
inner-planetary stations, equipped with atomic power and operated by remote
control. Then, if any nation dared attack us, by pushing a few buttons, we
could wipe them out in a matter of minutes.
Director William Cameron Menzies was
foremost an art director and production designer, but during the 1930s and
1940s he called the shots on a number of big pictures, both credited and
uncredited. These included Things to Come
and The Thief of Bagdad. Invaders is most certainly a cheapie,
but there’s a flair to the set design and imagery that contrasts with the
plodding B-nature of the script.
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