Blu-ray 3-D gets a jolt of excitement with a release that nobody saw coming, a core classic 1950s title. Like much of the exciting 3-D news these days, the prime impetus behind the 3-D Blu-ray of It Came from Outer Space is the 3-D Film Archive. It was initially announced for overseas release — the U.K.? France? — by a third party that licensed it from Universal. That got canceled when the distributor announced that Universal had decided to put it out themselves.
So far, every disc the 3-D Film Archive has been involved with has become a highly desirable collector’s item. This show is as polished as Universal’s 3-D disc of its own Creature from the Black Lagoon. I’ll have more about the disc quality below.
The more time passes, the more special seems the initial spate of 1950s science fiction films, before the genre became synonymous with cheaper exploitation productions. Universal’s first science fiction offering is a tale of alien visitation from an original story by Ray Bradbury, whose florid, poetic dialogue still survives in some sequences. One of the most successful productions of the 3-D craze, It Came From Outer Space is still a special item. Considering the cut-price tactics applied to the Universal Sci-fi efforts that would follow in the next four years, we appreciate the time and expense taken with It Came: the Arizona locations, impressive miniature shoots, experimental 3-D opticals, and an interior-exterior desert road set that’s simply enormous… and that works much better in 3-D than it does flat. This is also the first Sci-fi film by ’50s cult director Jack Arnold.
Author, stargazing amateur astronomer and Ray Bradbury-like dreamer John Putnam (Richard Carlson) has just sold one of his fantasy stories. He is showing the stars to his fiancée Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush of When Worlds Collide) when they witness the landing of a meteor-like vessel from Outer Space. Only John gets a look at the ship before a landslide buries it at the bottom of a deep crater, and only when people start disappearing from the nearby town of Sand Rock can John convince anyone that aliens have arrived on Earth. Sheriff Matt Warren (Charles Drake) remains skeptical about the funny business in the desert until Ellen disappears as well — replaced, it seems, by an eerie copy.
The smoothly directed It Came From Outer Space can boast excellent Robert Boyle designs and a sincere group of actors, particularly Richard Carlson. As with all but a couple of producer William Alland’s fantasy pictures, the B&W photography doesn’t hide the standard studio sets. But impressive sights are achieved in second-unit and special effects shoots, such as the initial view of the globular, honeycombed ship under the crumbling rocks, and a nearly shapeless alien seen only in brief glimpses. Jack Arnold took credit for the film’s fanciful tone. The lonely desert already seems like the surface of an alien planet. The sight of John Putnam following a trail of glittering dust across his living room floor imparts the feeling of a space-age fairy tale.
The show scores additional genre credibility for being written by Ray Bradbury, who to us ’50s and ’60s kids was a futurist guru who could do no wrong. Our grade school teachers screened short subjects about Bradbury to inspire creative writing. TV Guide always mentioned the author’s participation, as a special badge of virtuosity. Bradbury’s sense of wonder comes through in Richard Carlson’s speeches. The idea that the aliens use telephone lines as a conduit for their eerie surveillance is nicely suggested, with impressive moving 3-D shots that link the telephone lines with a speeding truck. Add the ‘alien POV’ optical effect and spooky music, and the spell is cast.
As happens often in early ’50s Sci-fi the visitors from space are frustratingly ambivalent: sometimes benign, sometimes threatening. Earth is only a pit stop for the shape-shifting star travelers to repair their ship and be on their way. The huge, formless hulking eye-creatures are an exciting, highly publicized flourish added in post-production. They can change their appearance to resemble us, and so move about freely. The trouble arises when they kidnap and impersonate Earthlings to obtain supplies from town. The human duplication results in some offbeat Cocteau-like moments, such as when John Putnam finds two telephone linemen hiding in a storeroom: “Who are you? Why have you come here?”
Also visually poetic is the sight of an alien posing as Ellen standing atop a rough desert hill, wearing an incongruous evening gown and flowing scarf. If the show had more moments like this and fewer ‘boo!’ scares with hands reaching into the frame, it might have found more serendipities with Bradbury’s verbal poetry. It’s good that William Alland appreciated Bradbury’s contribution, but the producer’s subsequent shows were mostly written by hacks. Albert Zugsmith produced the best Uni film in this genre, The Incredible Shrinking Man. It was sourced from the respected author Richard Matheson.
The human duplicates look correct but move stiffly and speak with hollow, haunted voices, a style combo that quickly became a Sci-fi cliché. But if taken in the right spirit It Came From Outer Space never seems stale. Even though similarly themed movies were made before this one, this show set the standard: with the killing score 2 – 0 in favor of the humans, the visitors are more sinned against than sinners.
Story-wise things don’t develop much farther beyond Putnam’s initial dilemma. He knows there are visitors among us but nobody will listen to him. When Putnam gets down to cases with the aliens and debates their leader, things become more confused. The extraterrestrials claim that we are the hostile race, yet they are the ones doing the kidnapping. They try to fry John with a ray gun and casually threaten the entire planet with destruction. They’re probably right to suspect that Arizonans would shoot first and get sociable later, but their threats to the obviously friendly Putnam put them in a bad light. The much later Mars Attacks! had a field day lampooning the Sci-fi genre’s irrational pacifism.
As the repaired alien ship blasts off into the night sky, Putnam is still spouting alien-hugging happy-talk. In fact, the whole visit was a miserable fiasco of interstellar diplomacy. The supposedly lofty visitors are just as trigger-happy as we Earthmen. One of the contradictions of early ’50s sci-fi is the constant talk about the higher moral standards of civilizations from space. What we see is more of the knee-jerk aggression we’re used to on Earth.
Dreamer Putnam is not much of a scientist. Instead of sticking to facts he spends altogether too much time telling the sheriff his flaky-sounding theories. If he wanted cooperation, he should have told the authorities that he saw a solid gold meteor at the bottom of the crater. That spaceship would have been uncovered in ten hours flat, and we’d all be partaking of the secrets of the universe instead of watching it zoom away, without so much as a photo snapshot to prove it was ever here. Lucky for us, It Came From Outer Space still retains its magic. Its poetic qualities haven’t diminished.
Savant first saw It Came From Outer Space in Polaroid 3-D in 1972 when the defunct Star Theater on Hollywood Boulevard screened a short series of 3-D pictures. The illusion was stunning, with the rockslide sequence indeed making us bob our heads reflexively. Some of the scenes had a cutout diorama look. Isolated planes of action stacked up like paper cards instead of creating a convincing depth continuum. One setup in the sheriff’s office, where a room divider stretches diagonally into the distance, looked like a forced perspective trick, as if the objects and people in the shot were really flat things in a 3-D world. But scenes with mist and smoke and some of the elaborate special effects looked great. Only the unsatisfying shots of the meteor zooming across the sky stand out, because the cartoon matte around its trailing sparks fails to blend well with the sky. Yet Universal invested a great deal of effort in the film’s visuals. Some of the superimposed explosions, glitter and flying sparks are awesome. I believe that one 3-D explosion shot was re-used for the ‘creation of the universe’ sequence in Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Other 3-D details from way back when: the print I saw projected had only one intermission to change reels, not two as described in Universal’s older disc commentary and docu. The trailer and the cast run at the end of the movie give rather ungallant attention to Kathleen Hughes, encouraging the expectation that the 3-D effect wouldn’t just be used for monsters. Ms. Hughes proved her acting ability in other Universal pix of the time, yet she’s most remembered in her one scene from this picture as the ‘girl with the 3-D figure.’
