A huge meteor like thing crash lands in the Arizona desert. An amateur astronomer discovers that it was in fact a spacecraft before it is buried by a land slide. As is the way, no one in his town believes him and soon after, various people are replaced by automaton duplicates.
This bit of 50's sci-fi was originally released in 3D during the brief craze for the format at the time. Unlike two other studio releases from 1953, War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars, this one was shot in black and white and was therefore more likely to have been considered an actual b-movie back in the day. In some ways though it is a more thoughtful feature than either of those two and is not a Cold War analogy in the traditional sense, as while it looks at themes of paranoia and xenophobia it tackles them from an opposite angle than was usual. The ugly looking one-eyed alien is at first presented as a killer monster of the unknown but once we get to understand the its perspective more we begin to comprehend that these beings are in actual fact benign creatures that are far more at risk from hostile elements of human society than we are of them. So I am guessing that the underlying message was one of not judging the 'alien' communists too rashly and to instead try to understand rather than attack and to be wary of lynch mob mentalities in your own back yard. A pretty radical message in those years of the so called Red Menace I would have thought.
It was the first sci-fi film directed by Jack Arnold who would go on to direct others such as the seminal The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). It also has additional kudos for being based on a story from one of science fiction's greatest writers Ray Bradbury, namely 'The Meteor'. So, there is certainly some talent linked to this one. The Arizona desert setting is also really very good and the alien is a memorable bit of design work for its time, with its point-of-view also imaginatively given via what can best be described as 'giant eye view'. There is also some Theremin music, which seems quite par-for-the-course now but which I am sure was pretty original and super-weird back in 1953. Because the story ultimately doesn't have typical alien villains, the dynamic is less suspenseful than is usual but this is offset by the more original cerebral approach to sci-fi which ensures that the film remains more interesting than many similar efforts from its time in other ways. It maintains the unorthodox approach right to the end too, by ending on a credit sequence (replete with images of the main characters to go along with it) rather than starting with one as was traditional, which again shows that they were actively trying for something different here in several ways.
This bit of 50's sci-fi was originally released in 3D during the brief craze for the format at the time. Unlike two other studio releases from 1953, War of the Worlds and Invaders from Mars, this one was shot in black and white and was therefore more likely to have been considered an actual b-movie back in the day. In some ways though it is a more thoughtful feature than either of those two and is not a Cold War analogy in the traditional sense, as while it looks at themes of paranoia and xenophobia it tackles them from an opposite angle than was usual. The ugly looking one-eyed alien is at first presented as a killer monster of the unknown but once we get to understand the its perspective more we begin to comprehend that these beings are in actual fact benign creatures that are far more at risk from hostile elements of human society than we are of them. So I am guessing that the underlying message was one of not judging the 'alien' communists too rashly and to instead try to understand rather than attack and to be wary of lynch mob mentalities in your own back yard. A pretty radical message in those years of the so called Red Menace I would have thought.
It was the first sci-fi film directed by Jack Arnold who would go on to direct others such as the seminal The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). It also has additional kudos for being based on a story from one of science fiction's greatest writers Ray Bradbury, namely 'The Meteor'. So, there is certainly some talent linked to this one. The Arizona desert setting is also really very good and the alien is a memorable bit of design work for its time, with its point-of-view also imaginatively given via what can best be described as 'giant eye view'. There is also some Theremin music, which seems quite par-for-the-course now but which I am sure was pretty original and super-weird back in 1953. Because the story ultimately doesn't have typical alien villains, the dynamic is less suspenseful than is usual but this is offset by the more original cerebral approach to sci-fi which ensures that the film remains more interesting than many similar efforts from its time in other ways. It maintains the unorthodox approach right to the end too, by ending on a credit sequence (replete with images of the main characters to go along with it) rather than starting with one as was traditional, which again shows that they were actively trying for something different here in several ways.