Invaders from Mars

When the words Invaders from Mars are typed into the IMDB, the film that comes up first is the mostly disposable 1985 remake. This long-awaited restoration of the 1953 original will hopefully reverse that injustice. Invaders from Mars was a childhood rite of passage for sci-fi tykes a few years older than this writer. I recall seeing it in B&W on TV but definitely remember the impact it made around 1971, when it suddenly showed up ‘In Color’ in syndicated broadcast slots. We screened a very nice 16mm print in college. But later VHS, laserdisc and DVD releases were of depressingly mediocre quality.

In a special show FILMEX once presented an original trailer for Invaders from Mars, and for two minutes gave us a first-hand tease of the film’s rich greens and blues, a uniquely strange color scheme. Ignite Films has gone to great lengths to restore the show to its original specifications — no cuts, no blooped dialogue (“Start digging!”), no aftermarket ‘special edition’ revisions.

It’s of course great to see Invaders given such careful attention. The restoration had to partly source some print elements, as the vaulted original negative was incomplete. A few more years in unrestored limbo, and William Cameron Menzies’ achievement may have been irretrievably lost.

In addition to insuring the film’s future accessibility, Ignite has made an effort to please the home video market. The show is being released in three editions — DVD, Blu-ray and also in 4K Ultra HD. This first review is taken from an advance Blu-ray copy.

I wrote at length about Invaders in the 1998 essay The Ultimate Invaders from Mars so I’ll try not to cover that same ground. But it has been several years since last seeing the show, and it once again made a special impact.

My main takeaway from this viewing is a renewed respect for the film’s artistic qualities. Every image seems tapped into the comic-book mindset of its 10 year-old hero David MacLean. Its graphic compositions are clean and uncluttered. People perform before painted backdrops and simplified sets. Any more stripped down and Invaders from Mars would be minimalist, like the semi-abstract Red Garters or The Girl Hunt Ballet or even a UPA cartoon.

Director Menzies may have not been able to shoot every scene or every transition he wanted but a full story arc is definitely there in his first unit shoot. He concentrated on his set-piece visuals — he likely worked that Sand Pit Hill set for days until it met with his approval. His designs are remarkable, from the Americana home interior to the weird, oneiric Sand Pit, to the intriguing spaceship interior. The movie hits us shot by shot, very much like Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. In both films the story progression seems artistically driven, rather than an effort just to get a script ‘into the can.’  The vision is guided by something outside normal moviemaking conventions.

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The Editorial Mystery

Editing is everything in this weird show. A first assembly reportedly came up short, but the methods used to pad its running time add to the movie’s strange appeal. Some shots are simply held longer. The observatory dome slowly rotates into position, an action that takes almost a minute. On his mission of assassination George MacLean runs all the way into the factory where Mr. Wilson works, a held long shot. He then runs all the way back out, no cutaways. The first montage of ‘the tanks are rolling’ stock shots burns up almost 80 seconds of screen time. Additional returns to the footage, when combined, bring the total to almost three minutes.

The editing becomes more radical as the film progresses. Is it possible that director Menzies always planned for the movie to go avant-garde, repeating shots and whole sequences of shots?  The available screenplays indicate no editorial detours and certainly not the concluding nightmare montage.

We don’t know to what degree William Cameron Menzies supervised the film’s post-production, but somebody  took a huge creative leap in the editing process. However it came about, the plan must have been to ‘make it look like a dream.’  I would bet that that the discussions in the cutting room touched frequently on fantastic films with dream dislocation effects, like The Wizard of Oz and Dead of Night. Film theory becomes real when one must make complicated editorial decisions.

The same things happen ‘again only different’ in my dreams too.

The first blatantly repeated action we detect is Sgt. Rinaldi creeping up a gulley. It might actually just be a second take of Rinaldi crawling in the same part of the set. From then on, anything goes.  David escapes from a Mutant and is recaptured twice, in the very same footage. The same goes with the Mutant being shot down. It looks like they filmed the action with the infra-red tunnelling ray just once, and repeated it three times, saving the best shots for the final use. With flops and repositions, the four running Mutants seem multiplied tenfold, although most shots only do triple duty.

The strange thing is that, although we’re very aware of the repetitions, they don’t stack up as cheats, things that push us out of the movie. The music score tells us that the repeats are intentional, significant.

The climax montage is a real superimposition sandwich, combining the close-up of David’s endless running, a starfield, and groupings of themed actions: possessed people, the little device implanted into necks, people falling into the Sand Trap. At the end the montage turns back on itself, cued by a major music change. Scenes now run in reverse as the tempo slows, undo-ing the entire storyline and ‘putting the hallucination to sleep.’

Was the creator of this incredible montage the credited Editorial Supervisor, Arthur Roberts?  His credits don’t indicate anything else as distinguished. William Cameron Menzies obviously was expert in all post-production matters — could he have performed the editing personally?  Or did he induce some adventurous editor to ‘go all Eisenstein’ with the footage?  Perhaps the optical experts Irving Block and Jack Rabin contracted the genius editor who doctored Invaders into its final, very effective form.

I have no doubt that many Hollywood professionals dismissed Invaders as incompetent because it’s so unconventional. But whoever created this edit deserved some kind of special award. The lack of a screen credit means only that the Hollywood Guilds were doing their usual thing of making sure that only the work of ‘approved’ talent received official acknowledgement.

The Musical Phantasmagoria

The other element that puts Invaders from Mars over the top is its music, which is credited to Raoul Kraushaar but was apparently actually composed by Mort Glickman, who in the IMDB exists mostly as ‘composer stock music uncredited.’ Everyone applauds the eerie choral effects for the operation of the Martian Sand Trap; it’s one of the more creative musical effects of its kind. It begins as part of the eccentric music score, and is then acknowledged as a diegetic sound that David MacLean says he can hear.

The Martian war theme behind the main titles doesn’t return until the battle begins. Before then the busy, frequently-shifting score changes themes and tone so often, we wonder if it’s supporting the narrative or freely improvising around it. It’s so eccentric, we barely mind when the stock footage scenes jump into several irony-free stanzas of ‘The Caissons Go Rolling Along.’

The score makes a special point of quoting isolated pieces of Holst’s ‘The Planets’, as when we first meet the possessed Kathy Wilson. The finale mimics the end of ‘The Planets’ with an eerie Dream Theme, that seemingly rocks the movie to sleep behind the end title card.  Earlier on the music score goes nuts for the main underground battle. It never settles on a a set cadence or tone for more than a few seconds. It jumps back and forth, repeating the driving war theme. In addition to giving the disconnected action and repeated stock shots a strong forward momentum, the score multiplies the suspense. The bomb countdown is stretched-out by a strange, dream-logic time warp. The music and the sound effects are orchestrated as a single unit. The ticking of the bomb alternates with an engine’s roar as the flying saucer breaks free of the sand pit.

The Kraushaar-Glickman music for Invaders raises the tension as if tightening a rubber band; it’s likely that it drove theaters full of little kids into a panic. It’s a shame that it doesn’t seem to exist as an isolated music track. When not connected to the images and the sound effects track, would it sound like disorganized nonsense?  I’ve always found it psychologically unnerving.

John Tucker Battle’s 1950 screenplay also concludes with a last-minute escape from the underground tunnels.  But the defenders overwhelm the Martians and the spaceship doesn’t take off. A lot of ‘wrap up’ dialogue follows, with David’s aunt on hand to tell him his parents are safe, etc.. From his window, David doesn’t see his dream ‘beginning again.’  Instead, a second spaceship arrives to rescue the Martian Intelligence, still in its plastic bubble.

I wonder if Robert Skotak has the answers to any of these questions. Should we assume that the rewrites and revisions invented the ‘all a dream’ time structure, or is it possible that that entire construction was created in post-production?

The destruction of narrative logic liberates Dream Logic.

In any case, we still feel that Invaders is an unique ‘experimental’ picture . . .  if the film were edited with a literal narrative approach, it would play as incoherent nonsense. The elaborate montage finale is not ‘padding’ but the film’s emotional climax. Without it the wrap-up would resolve much too quickly. We wouldn’t want Invaders’ weirdly awkward elements to be different — the pacing of all those ‘running through tunnels’ shots becomes hypnotic. Because everything we see is warped by the boy hero’s subjective imagination, all the non-sequiturs and disjointed dialogues make perfect psychological sense.