This is another 1953 film that holds special significance for me since it was likely the first science fiction movie I ever saw, even if I saw it only in part at the time, which would be 1965 or 1966. As with Lost in Space, which had debuted in the Fall of 1965, I saw this movie at a neighbor’s house one afternoon. Neither was the kind of show or movie my parents would have on TV at home.
The story opens with a boy, David MacLean, who uses an alarm clock to wake up at 4am to stargaze with his telescope out his bedroom window. The alarm wakes his parents too, who come to investigate. David says, but Dad! Orion is at zenith! And it won’t happen for another 6 years! He pronounces it OH-rion, not oh-RI-on, as astronomers do, and it’s impossible for Orion to appear at zenith, and if it did it wouldn’t happen only every six years. That’s Hollywood astronomy for you. (To be fair, there’s a small town in Illinois near where my parents grew up that pronounced Orion the same way.) His father uses the scope to look at Rigel (he pronounces it ‘regal’, not RYE-jel) and Bellatrix, and his mother turns on the ceiling light, which would ruin the boy’s night vision. Bad parents! (These are the kinds of things I remember after decades, more than the exact plot.)
But that’s an incidental prelude. Only 40 minutes later, David is awakened by a thunderstorm, and looks out the window to see… a greenish flying saucer descending beyond a nearby hillside. “Gee whiz!”
This movie is very stylish at the beginning, even as it devolves into a standard military operation, with tanks approaching from every direction to try to blast the alien invaders into smithereens, as so many other skiffy movies of the era do.
Some of the stylish parts are apparent right away.
First, the iconic image in the movie is the hillside, seen from the bedroom window, which uses forced perspective to appear larger and farther away than it actually is. It was done on a sound stage (as many 1940s and ’50s movies did) using such forced perspective, with a backdrop of the evening or morning sky beyond. We never see the far side of that hillside..
Second, the soundtrack uses a recurring choral motif every time anything alien appears, which is appropriately creepy. (No theremin, at least.)
And third, some very simple special effects are used to suggest alien weirdness. One is at the beginning as the saucer lands and presumably hides itself underground: we see a crusty surface, lit from below by green, that gradually expands and breaks up. More often, we see a patch of fine sand, with the center dropping away into a funnel, as if a stopper had been pulled beneath the surface — and then, later, a reverse shot of this, with the funnel filling up again. Those shots are the ones I most remembered years after first seeing the movie.
The plot is familiar, and I’ll only outline it here. David’s father goes out next morning to investigate, and seems to fall into a pit just over the edge of the hill — cue that shot of sand dropping away — and returns oddly changed. Zombie-like. And with an injury, or sore, on the back of his neck. Police come, and fall in too, and return like zombies. Then the mother. The boy appeals to the sheriff. Here’s a fourth image from the film: many scenes like this one are filmed in such a way that the poor boy is diminished before uncaring, even hostile adults.
The boy is referred to a female Dr. Blake, who is sympathetic and hears his story, and calls in an astronomer, a Dr. Kellston. The astronomer speculates that Mars may have cities underground (they can’t be disproved!) and mutants (pronounced MU-tants, with a flat a as in ‘ants’), and maybe they’re worried about Earth’s exploration of space — given that David’s father works at the nearby plant where a rocket is under construction. (Cue photo of rocket.)
And so soon enough the military is called in, and we see endless scenes of tanks approaching the area.
The final act has Dr. Blake and the boy drawn underground to the Martians’ lair, where Martian troops (actors dressed in green suits) stomp back and forth among the tunnels in support of the leader, a head inside a sphere with arms rising up the area of the shoulders.
— I can’t find a version of the entire movie on YouTube, but this highlights reel, that comments about the movie, shows the Martian leader, the hillside, and much else, including how much people like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese admire the film.
After much, much running around, our heroes escape from the Martian tunnels, and the Martian ship explodes.
And then, after a series of run-in-reverse flashbacks, David is back in his bedroom, hearing another storm, and sees the saucer once again descend behind the nearby hill. Was it all a dream?
\
As the video linked above notes, there were two versions of this movie. UK distributors thought the movie too short and added more scenes, and perhaps changed the ending. I’ve only seen the US version.
The bottom line here is that the movie is effective for its paranoid and otherworldly creepiness. It invokes the standard sf trope of the time, that humans might be taken over by aliens (there was some of that in It Came from Outer Space), made much more explicit in the later Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in 1956, and it depicts the recurring idea that the way to confront aliens is to bring in the tanks and blast them.
