William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders From Mars is a warped nightmare of a B-movie. Although it is hindered by wooden acting and some low-grade effects and costumes, it nonetheless embodies so much cleverness and ingenuity in its overall design and effect that you forgive the visible zippers and hammy lines of dialogue. In fact, if one wanted to take the film’s vibe to its logical conclusion, its budgetary limitations actually make it play more like some surreal nightmare, a science fiction opus filtered free of logic and reason.

Like many low-budget science fiction and horror films of the 1950s, Invaders From Mars is told largely from the point of view of a child, which renders the world around him inherently ominous and untrustworthy. We are introduced to bright-eyed, adolescent astronomer David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) looking through his telescope in the middle of the night, much to the bemused consternation of his uber-loving parents, George (Leif Erickson), a scientist, and Mary (Hillary Brooke), one of those ’50s idealized homemaker-mothers whose hair looks perfect even when sleeping. That night David witnesses what appears to be a green-glowing flying saucer land on the other side of a hill behind his house, although the manner in which he is awoken to witness this event immediately suggests a fuzzy gray zone between waking reality and sleeping nightmare. Did he really see it or was he just dreaming?

Nevertheless, David is soon cast into his own unique nightmare, as both of his parents fall victim to some kind of Martian mind-control technology that turns them into automatons whose only emotional register is furrowed-brow anger. As all good adolescents in genre films do, David tries to get the authorities involved, only to find that the police chief has also fallen under alien control, evidenced by the presence of a cross-like mark at the nape of the neck. All is not lost, however, as David does find support from Dr. Pat Blake (Helena Carter), a local doctor, and Dr. Stuart Kelston (Arthur Franz), a local astronomer David knows through their shared love of the stars. He also has the military on his side, whose booming tanks and heavy artillery align Invaders From Mars with so many other sci-fi films of its era that found victory through the mutual cooperation of the military (organized violence) and science (the extension of the human mind). The film is an evocative gem of Cold War paranoia, with the invading Martians and their mind-control technologies evoking all manner of real-life terror about communist subversion, mind control, and subliminal messages.

Director William Cameron Menzies had first gained notice as an art director during the silent era, most famously for Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924). He won an Oscar for The Dove (1927) and Tempest (1928) and was given an honorary Oscar for his monumental work on Gone With the Wind (1939). He started co-directing films in the early 1930s, often paired with another director who could work with the actors while Menzies focused on the design and framing. Menzies was never particularly interested in actors or performances, and it shows in Invaders From Mars, which is filled with wooden line readings, awkward gestures, and Jimmy Hunt’s incessantly wide-eyed “gee-whizzes!” Whatever deficiencies the film has, though, it is hard not to be taken by its visual ingenuity and clever sets. Almost the entirety of the film was shot on soundstages, including the hill behind David’s house (which is, in and of itself, a minor masterpiece of disorienting production design), which creates a consistent sense of vague unreality that is interrupted only by the intrusion of stock footage of military tanks. One of the very few early-’50s science fiction films to be shot in color, Invaders From Mars remains a touchstone, a film that is both fully evocative of its time and place and uniquely removed from the expected.

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