Adjust your
point of view
and enjoy!
Director: William Cameron Menzies
Producer: Edward L. Alperson Jr.
Writer: John Tucker Battle, Richard
Blake
Music: Raoul Kraushaar
Cinematography: John F. Seitz
Editor: Arthur Roberts
Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox Film
Corp.
Running time: 77 minutes
Budget: $290,000 approx.
Cast
Jimmy Hunt (David Maclean)
Helena Carter (Dr. Pat Blake, MD)
Arthur Franz (Dr. Stuart Kelston)
Morris Ankrum (Col. Fielding)
Leif Erickson (George MacLean)
Hillary Brooke (Mary MacLean)
Max Wagner (Sgt. Rinaldi)
Milburn Stone (Capt. Roth)
Janine Perreau as Kathy Wilson
Barbara Billingsley (Secretary)
Bert Freed (Police Chief)
Robert Shayne (Professor Wilson)
Luce Potter (Martian Intelligence)
Clifford Dove (Martian Mutant)
Trailer
Synopsis
Invaders from Mars begins with strident, serious martial music and a backdrop consisting of planets and stars. A narrator asks us to ponder what sorts of life forms inhabit these planets and states that such matters have been the concern of “scientists of all ages.”
The
story of Invaders from Mars is told
from the point of view of a boy, young astronomy buff, David
MacLean who is awakened at 4.40am by a thunderstorm and is stunned to witnesses
from his bedroom window a large flying saucer descend and disappear into a sand
pit not far from his parents’ home.
Just prior to this incident, David’s
parents are awakened by his alarm clock going off at 4.00am because David
wishes to be up to view a particular nebula. Interestingly enough, David’s
mother, Mary says to her husband, “you’ve been dreaming” when he decides to get
up and check on his son. Is the viewer being set up for something here?
When David’s scientist father, George
goes to check on his son, he tries to reassure him by stating, “you were
dreaming” and “this is all your imagination.” This reinforces what George’s
wife has just said to him and sets the viewer up with what the nature of
the film’s story is. At any rate, George
gives his son the benefit of the doubt and proceeds to investigate his David’s
claim about seeing a saucer land. After all, we learn that he works at a
“plant” that conducts activities which are “secret,” that there are “rumours”
and that he “can’t talk about it.””
George
goes to investigate David's claim the next morning and mysteriously disappears.
While George is missing, David's mother, Mary calls the police. The two
policemen who arrive begin to investigate and are soon swallowed up by the sand
in the backyard.
When George and the policemen return much later in the morning, he seems to have acquired a red puncture mark on the back of his neck and he is behaving in an oddly cold and uncharacteristically hostile manner. Note the close-up on George’s face. We immediately know something is wrong just by his expression, coupled with his savage tone of voice and his abrupt and rude manner. When he strikes his son, it is like a bolt out of the blue and we almost feel it as much as David does.
When George and the policemen return much later in the morning, he seems to have acquired a red puncture mark on the back of his neck and he is behaving in an oddly cold and uncharacteristically hostile manner. Note the close-up on George’s face. We immediately know something is wrong just by his expression, coupled with his savage tone of voice and his abrupt and rude manner. When he strikes his son, it is like a bolt out of the blue and we almost feel it as much as David does.
Notice too, how the return of the two
policemen immediately confirms what has happened to George merely by their
stance and facial expressions. To highlight what has taken place, George says
to wife just before they are about to leave the house, “Your son said he’s going to Andy’s.” Not “David” or “our son!”
David
quickly realizes that something is very wrong and eventually goes to the police
station for help after he notices that other townsfolk are acting in the same
way and after witnessing his young neighbour Kathy Wilson walking in the
sandpit near where the saucer landed and disappearing underground.
David
is finally placed under the protection of the city health-department physician,
Dr. Pat Blake who he comes to trust as she gradually believes his story. She
gains David’s trust by telling him, “Doctors are like ministers” and that
people can tell them anything. However, as she goes to find out more
information she has to lock David in the cell as she has to “obey the rules.”
In
addition to the help from Dr. Blake, David receives assistance from local
astronomer, Dr. Stuart Kelston. It is conjectured that the flying saucer is
probably the beginning of an imminent invasion from the planet Mars which is
now in close orbital proximity to Earth. At the moment, “Mars is closest to us
in its particular orbit.” Kelston goes on to state that the Martians make use
of “mu-tants” to sustain their way of life in space and that they are taking
action now due to a perceived threat from rockets being shot into space from
Earth. It turns out that David’s father is working at a plant that produces the
motor assembly for an atomic powered rocket.
The
army is eventually called in to investigate and troops and tanks under the
command of Colonel Fielding are sent in. The invading Martians’ sabotage plot
at an important nearby government rocket research plant is soon uncovered. The
secondary “baddies” (the two police officers, General Mayberry and the police
chief) who have had controlling devices implanted in their brains, are
dispatched with lightning speed. The army organises its forces and surrounds
the saucer landing site.
Meanwhile,
Dr. Blake and David wind up underground and are captured by two tall green
humanoids and are taken to the Martian and its flying saucer.
Army troops eventually blow open an entrance to the tunnels, and Colonel Fielding’s small detachment manage to reach the saucer entrance where they confront the Martian, a green humanoid face encased in a transparent sphere served by the tall, green and mute "mu-tants." The face is apparently “Mankind developed up to its ultimate intelligence” and the “mu-tants" are “slaves existing only to do his will.”
Under the Martian's mental control, the “mu-tants” have implanted mind-control crystals at the base of the skulls of the kidnapped humans, thereby forcing them to participate in the plot to sabotage an atomic rocket project at a military plant near the town. If the human victims fail and are captured the mind control devices are designed to implode, causing a fatal cerebral haemorrhage…...
Will the troops, Colonel Fielding, Dr
Blake and young David be able to escape the clutches of the Martian invader and his
“mu-tants?”
Will the Martian sabotage plan eventually
succeed, paving the way for an ultimate invasion of Earth?
Will the army have the necessary clout
to defeat the Martian menace of the mind-controlling alien Mastermind?
The Dream World Of David MacLean
(Warning: Spoilers Included Beyond This Point)
Not long after the start of the film, Invaders From Mars, you might baulk at the idea of having a kid as the central character and wonder where the heck you are with one foot seemingly lodged in a more or less familiar on-screen world with the other foot being immersed in a more than usual bizarro-world of movie sci-fi consisting of illogical (“surreal” – sorry!) plots and characters. True, if you approach the film with a purely rational and adult mindset. But be careful where you do step because with this film you are not in control!
In Invaders
From Mars, David's dream is in fact a nightmare or alternate reality reflecting
the various pressures being faced by a young boy. It is filled with threatening
doppelgangers of significant people he knows in real life. It is a world where,
as in a dream, logic takes a back seat and people and events become
representations of something else. We get to see and experience things from David's
point of view with only his world, his fears and his perceptions forming our frame
of reference.
For a young person such as David growing
up, the world can be an insecure and threatening place with remote authority
figures who cannot always be trusted, but who seem instead to be bent on
controlling and circumscribing their lives. How to approach such people and
make them take notice of what you say, how you feel and what you think?? A
difficult task indeed when the adults in your world are worried about possible annihilation
from atom bombs and foreign conspiracies destroying their way of life! Such
fears are all too easily projected onto young people and it is easy to overlook
the effect this has on them.
David’s dream world reflects a large
part of his real world experience. He lives a largely protected and sheltered life
and it is his youth and limited experiences which have caused him to construct such
a loopy scenario as expressed by the character, Dr. Stuart Kelston whereby the
Martians have come to the Earth in Motherships, that they live underground on
Mars and have bred a race of synthetic humans called Mutants as their slaves! In
David’s world, events are reduced to shades of comic book black and white with
no subtle shades of grey. Even the characters of his dream world are identified
stereotypically by the colours they wear: His mother dressed in black and Pat
dressed in white.
David lacks credibility and power by virtue of his age and nobody is going to take his predicament seriously. His parents have become distant and unfeeling monsters who have become part of an alien conspiracy to conquer the Earth. His parents appear like evil villains straight out of comic books or TV serials with their conspiratorial whispered asides. So, who will listen to him? He is just a kid.
However, this is David’s dream
and by virtue of this fact he does have some measure of power. After all, in
his world adults can be made to look ridiculous such as Colonels and scientists
finding themselves looking silly being perched up on a roof, a place that David
would be forbidden to go by those very same adults! Take that!
There are adults in this dream world that David can call on for help. Take Dr. Pat Blake, from the city Health Department. Where did they find all these stunningly beautiful women for these 1950s Sci-fi films? David’s subconscious has come up with someone who is tender like a mother who takes him seriously, accepts him and stands by him. She can even lie for him such as when she tells David’s parents that he has “every symptom of polio” in order to keep him out of their clutches. (Just like David has probably told his parents a few white lies in order to avoid getting into trouble) For his part, David’s young mind has transformed Pat, who he probably has a crush on, into a kind of screen heroine. It is extremely difficult for the viewer to take their eyes off Pat, particularly with the red adornment placed above her left breast which stands out starkly from the white background of her ‘uniform.’ It is with no surprise that we discover Pat lying helplessly on a glass operating table, with one shoulder bared and with a pulsing penetrating device slowly moving toward the back of her neck ready to violate this older woman that young David is on some level attracted to and who he must rescue from the clutches of these alien “rivals.” Not much different to the heroine tied to the railway tracks with the train looming closer! Kelston can hold and comfort Pat though since he has become an ideal representation of a future and older David. Go back to the shot of David and Kelston side-by-side at the telescope!
David’s dream logic gives him the power to act and be the hero for the world and his heroine, such as his inexplicable ability to leap into action, take charge, identify and operate the Infrared tunnelling Raygun, despite the fact no one has seen or used one before! What an action hero!
In David’s dream world, there are also other
heroes he can draw on for support such as U.S. Troops: Men who represent and
personify the American ideal of decency and exist only to protect and serve.
So, by what means are we being invited
into this distorted dream-like representation of David’s reality?
Clever Camera Angles
Invaders
from Mars makes effective
use of low and high camera angles to emphasize the dramatic and visual impact
of key scenes. For instance, in the police station, the long entrance way
combined with high and low camera angles emphasize David’s smallness in the
face of officialdom and authority.
Set Designs & Props
The Hill seems to be a stylized dream image, giving it the quality of an alternate world that one enters at one’s own peril. It is a living sinister place where characters are led up a curved path that winds up the hill between leafless black tree trunks and a broad blackened plank fence. At the top of the hill the fence dips out of sight where characters are then fed into the sinking sand of the Pit and downward into the bowels of the hill. The hill set deceives us with an optical illusion despite its flat painted picture-like perspective design. Notice, however, that when a character walks up the path, they seem to diminish in size. The optical illusion makes it seem as if they are shrinking as they walk and reach the top of the hill.
The use of glass paintings helps to
create similar illusions such as the view being given down the glass tube above
the Martian operating table.
The police station set design consists
of strangely elongated features and stark, unadorned walls, making it appear
like a dreamlike surrealist painting. It is as strange and unreal as the lab
that Kathy’s father works in. Once again we have high ceilings and long
entranceways leading directly to an oversized focal point, in this case
extremely tall test tubes. Both places are pretty much David’s own personal
constructs gleaned from movies and comics. So, it is no surprise that we find
Kathy’s father busy at work in the lab just after his daughter has died! All
part of David’s youthful lack of life experiences.
Stock Footage & Shot Repetition
Well, if you have only so much to spend
and you want lots of big stuff to be happening, what are going to do? So, in Invaders from Mars, we have;
Footage from WW2 training films to show
lots of hardware and tanks supposedly taking up position around the Pit.
Repeated sock footage, sequences, camera
angles and camera shots. One result of this kind of repetition is that we are
supposed to believe that there are numerous “mu-tant” Martian slaves and can-do
GI Joe soldiers battling it out in the Martian tunnel.
Special effects
The bubbling, melting walls of the
underground tunnels caused by the Martian heat-ray was an effect created by
shooting a large tub of boiling oatmeal from above. This breakfast cuisine was colored
red using food coloring and lit with red lighting.
Apparently more than 3,000 latex condoms
were inflated and stuck on to portions of the tunnel set's walls to create the cooled,
bubbled-up effect on these blasted out sections of the tunnel walls. Can you
imagine the fits of laughter while completing such a project and being
lubricated with a few beers! So who’da thunked it? Condoms are not just great
water balloons!
Music
The eerie vocal effect of the chorus seems
to be almost in stark contrast to our notions of the 'heavenly chorus' of
angels. It feels disturbingly discordant to our ears and adds to the “surreal”
quality of David’s dream world. We know instinctively that nothing good is
being indicated by it.
Open-Ended Ending
A
large explosion together with lightning and a clap of thunder, rips both David and
the viewer back to what seems to be reality. David runs from his bed into his
parents’ bedroom where they reassure him he was just having a bad dream. David
returns to bed, but with the noise of more wind and loud thunder he climbs out
of bed again and goes to his window. And what does he see? The flying saucer of his dream slowly
descending into the sandpit!
With
the image of David’s face dissolving to the "The End" title card, we
are left wondering: Is young David still asleep, trapped in some kind of recurring
loop of a nightmare? Or perhaps his dream is a premonition of things to come? Or
maybe it was all just a dream?
WHAT DO YOU THINK???
©Chris Christopoulos 2013
I saw this on our b&w tv in 1963 or thereabouts. I was so scar3d it made me sick and I spent the night in my parents bed. I now remember the movie fondly and saw it again in the ‘90s I guess, might have got a VHS from Planet Video, forget. Then it about boring a control chip into the back of the head: one day we’ll all have them!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great site Chris