Small Town Blob Makes Good

Contemplating this current run of classic 50s B-movie reviews, I became aware of the odd continuity of personnel between many of them: some actors, directors and writers appear to have made quite a good living out of this sort of thing. Kenneth Tobey pops up in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The Thing From Another World, James Arness is the bad guy in The Thing and the good guy in Them!, William Alland and Jack Arnold produced and directed a whole slew of them, and so on. I actually considered linking the reviews this way, but there are just a few too many blind alleys, and the odd really good film with no connection to any of the others.

Having said that, sometimes these things occur without you even planning them. Last time’s movie was The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, based on a story by Ray Bradbury – and so is the film under consideration on this occasion, Jack Arnold’s 1953 film It Came From Outer Space.

This movie seems relatively obscure and rather less celebrated than some of its contemporaries, which strikes me as a little odd as it could almost be the type-specimen of a certain type of vintage SF film: alien visitors in the desert, an oooo-eeee-oooo-ing soundtrack, robotic I’ve-been-replaced-by-an-alien acting, and so on.

Anyway, it all takes place in the Arizona desert, where we find freelance astronomer (hmmm) Johnny Putnam (Richard Carlson) relaxing with his girlfriend (Barbara Rush), indulging in a little light romantic chit-chat, and trying to ignore some ropey visual continuity (director Arnold brazenly crosses the 180-degree line for no apparent reason – this is technical movie stuff, sorry). All this is put on hold when they spy what looks like a meteorite falling to Earth out in the desert.

Quickly leasing an open-topped helicopter (a vehicle unlikely to win many safety awards, I suspect) they head out to the site, unaware of what lies within: an alien vessel, from which something has already emerged… but when Putnam descends into the crater and glimpses the craft, the other occupants quickly seal it and trigger a landslide, burying it under tons of rock. The other townsfolk are, of course, scornful of Putnam’s story of what he’s seen, but something is out in the desert, and making its plans for certain of the local inhabitants…

This is a thoughtful and atmospheric tale of an encounter between everyday American folks and shapeshifting otherworldly blobs, with the script let down only by a few dubious elements – it’s apparently of great significance that the aliens are stealing people’s clothes, presumably so they have something to wear when they adopt human form, but the film makes it pretty clear they can fabricate clothing as part of their disguise anyway. Also, the alien starship, supposedly the result of a thousand years of effort and research, is eventually repaired using equipment from the back of a phone company truck and the local hardware store. Yes, well.

And once Arnold hits his stride the direction is actually pretty good: there’s heavy use of shots where the camera becomes the alien’s point-of-view, which I don’t recall seeing used in many earlier films, and the special effects aren’t bad either (in hindsight it’s obvious this film was made in 3D – ray guns get shot at the camera, etc).

What makes this movie slightly unusual and difficult to categorise is the fact that it doesn’t scream subtext at the viewer. The aliens here are, well, alien, mostly. They’re not proxy-Communists and they’re not especially interested in human beings, they’ve just had the alien equivalent of a puncture and have stopped on Earth to fix it. This isn’t a red-scare movie or an atom-scare movie, and it’s not unthinkingly cheery about the human characters, either, who are mostly shown to be xenophobic and automatically hostile to the unknown and to outsiders.

This seems to me to be what this film is about: being an alien in human terms, particularly an outsider in a small town. Putnam, it’s made clear, is new to the area, and still treated with some caution by his new neighbours – ‘a lonely man,’ one of them says. The sheriff (Charles Drake) is particularly resentful of his relationship with Rush. And our sympathies are with him when he tries to convince everyone of what he’s seen, and they reject him flatly.

The whole film operates insularly, on a defiantly local scale: no-one even thinks of calling in the FBI or the army when they finally discover aliens really are in their midst. The climax is ultimately the townspeople versus the aliens, with Putnam caught in between. Both sides are depicted as scared and quite possibly overreacting: there certainly aren’t any bad guys.

So it’s thoughtful, on a number of levels, but somehow it doesn’t quite pack the visceral thrills of many of the other films of the same period. For this review I watched it for the first time since the early 1980s, without especially high expectations, and was moderately impressed by the movie’s technical proficiency and the intelligence of (most of) the script. It Came From Outer Space is certainly not the most mindlessly enjoyable of the 50s Bs, but it has a definite quality of its own that’s rather pleasing.