1953

DIRECTOR: JACK ARNOLD PRODUCER: WILLIAM ALLAND SCREENPLAY: HARRY ESSEX, BASED ON A STORY BY RAY BRADBURY STARRING: RICHARD CARLSON (JOHN PUTNAM), BARBARA RUSH (ELLEN FIELDS), CHARLES DRAKE (SHERIFF MATT WARREN), JOE SAWYER (FRANK DAYLON), RUSSELL JOHNSON (GEORGE), KATHLEEN HUGHES (JANE)

It Came from Outer Space

UNIVERSAL • BLACK & WHITE, 81 MINUTES

After witnessing a spacecraft crashing in the desert, a writer tries to convince his small community that benign aliens have landed.

Charles Drake, Barbara Rush, and Richard Carlson

“Excitement that can almost touch you!” This was one of Universal’s taglines for the first 3-D science-fiction movie, It Came from Outer Space. Besides eye-popping 3-D thrills, the film boasts Clifford Stine and David Horsley’s deep-focus cinematography, an atmospheric desert setting, a thought-provoking message of tolerance by fantasy author Ray Bradbury and director Jack Arnold, and a monster with his own point-of-view shots. It may have started as a gimmicky B movie, but It Came from Outer Space has come to be regarded as a classic.

Writer and stargazer John Putnam, played by stalwart 1950s sci-fi hero Richard Carlson, is the only citizen of Sand Rock, Arizona, who realizes the “meteor” that falls is actually a spaceship. Once he convinces others, it’s too late. The aliens have already abducted and duplicated several people, including John’s girlfriend, Ellen (a role that earned Barbara Rush a Golden Globe as Most Promising Female Newcomer). John discovers that the monstrous-looking xenomorphs are simply cloning people to help repair their ship so they can leave; they mean no harm. Or do they? It’s difficult to trust them when his friends begin to disappear, and then reappear as emotionless clones, a plot twist that predicts the storyline of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Kathleen Hughes

Though Ray Bradbury’s attempt at a script was rejected by the studio, the bulk of his original story—and some of his poetic dialogue—made it into Harry Essex’s final screenplay. As opposed to the malevolent Martians in the H. G. Wells classic The War of the Worlds (which was being adapted for the screen at Paramount while this film was shot and released), the aliens in It Came from Outer Space crash into Earth by accident, with neither good nor bad intentions. Instead of battles, Bradbury focuses on the townspeople’s reactions to the creatures, raising questions about the way humans behave toward strange or different cultures. “They don’t trust us,” our hero says of the aliens, “because what we don’t understand we want to destroy.”

This was a lesson for the Cold War era, a time of fear and hostility beneath the placid surface. The United States was on high alert against a Communist takeover, and racial segregation was still the norm. “We are all prone—all of us,” said director Jack Arnold, “to fear something that’s different than we are, whether it be in philosophy, the color of our skins, or even one block against another.” This same underlying message would also find its way into Arnold’s later works of science fiction, including The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). John Baxter, author of Science Fiction in the Cinema, characterizes Jack Arnold as “the great genius of American fantasy film,” and compares his clarity of vision and craftsmanship to those of Alfred Hitchcock.

Keeping the 3-D effects natural and restrained, Arnold opts to use desert settings (shot in the Mojave Desert and the Universal back lot) to set a tone of quiet menace. Aside from the aliens that have landed there, the desert poses its own threats: the beating sun, the harsh landscape, the landslide that buries the spacecraft and almost kills John. Some of the most memorable dialogue is about the power of the desert. “It’s alive and waiting for you,” John warns Ellen, “ready to kill you if you go too far.” A striking shot of Ellen’s clone draped in a black evening gown atop a craggy hill is beautifully unsettling.

The alien, or as the crew called it, “the fried egg”

The film’s premiere at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood

The xenomorphs were originally shot only from their point of view, accompanied by an eerie Theremin trill and a globular visual effect. None of the film’s creative forces ever intended the creatures to be seen, but Universal panicked and decided to construct a monster at the last minute. Their creation resembles an amorphous fried egg with one eyeball in the center, and leaves a trail of sparkly space dust in its wake, like an intergalactic slug. Ray Bradbury, for one, felt the aliens were better left to the viewer’s imagination. “I told the studio in my treatment that the suggestion of terror would be better than showing the monsters,” Bradbury said. “But they insisted on showing the monster and, sure enough, there it is.”

FAR-OUT FACTS

Producer William Alland had worked with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre group in the 1930s and ’40s, and played reporter Jerry Thompson in Citizen Kane (1941).

Stereoscopic three-dimensional film was so new in 1953 that the technology was still in the experimental stage. Effects photographer David Horsley worked for months to devise a 3-D system that basically consisted of two cameras side by side, one turned upside down.

When It Came from Outer Space was originally screened, the bosom of actress Kathleen Hughes was 3-D-enhanced in one scene. Variety noted that this use of the 3-D process showed “that sticks and stones are not the only things that can be projected into the auditorium.”

MIND-BLOWING MOMENT

When John asks the xenomorph to show itself, he recoils in disgust as the hideous beast emerges from a cave. The creature was reportedly built, filmed, and destroyed in a single day to prevent word from leaking out about its appearance.

KEEP WATCHING

THE FLYING SAUCER (1950)

THE SPACE CHILDREN (1958)