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WE DO NOT COME IN PEACE: This advertising poster—original copies of which are now valuable collector’s items—incorporates various elements of the low-budget classic from filmmaker William Cameron Menzies, who had earlier helmed the lofty Things to Come (1936). Courtesy: 20th Century-Fox.
CREDITS
Twentieth Century-Fox/National Pictures; William Cameron Menzies, dir.; John Tucker Battle, story; Richard Blake, scr.; Edward L. Alperson, pro.; Raoul Kraushaar, Mort Glickman, mus.; John F. Seitz, cin.; Arthur Roberts, ed.; Menzies, prod. design; Boris Leven, art dir.; Anatole Robbins, makeup F/X; Jack Cosgrove, Irving Block, Howard Lydecker, Jack Rabin, visual F/X; 78 min. (U.S.), 83 min. (U.K.); Color; 1.37:1.
CAST
Helena Carter (Dr. Pat Blake); Arthur Franz (Dr. Stuart Kelston/Narrator); Jimmy Hunt (David MacLean); Leif Erickson (Mr. George MacLean); Hillary Brooke (Mrs. Mary MacLean); Morris Ankrum (Col. Fielding); Max Wagner (Sgt. Rinaldi); William Phipps (Sgt. Baker); Milburn Stone (Capt. Roth); Luce Potter (Martian Intelligence Being); Janine Perreau (Kathy Wilson); Barbara Billingsley (Secretary).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
David says something landed in the field out back.
GEORGE MACLEAN TO HIS WIFE, MARY
BACKGROUND
On January 27, 1948, Captain Thomas F. Mantell crashed his plane while following what he referred to as a UFO. That incident caused an uproar: such spacecraft, until then considered preposterous, began to be taken seriously. Not surprisingly, Hollywood hurried to cash in. The script for this little film was the first written on the subject, though a series of production delays caused Invaders from Mars to be released after Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World (1951) and Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
Writer John Tucker Battle scrawled down the idea when his wife, having heard about UFO sightings, woke from an awful dream. He at first considered telling this tale from a woman’s point of view, but his previous work as a screenwriter on Walt Disney’s So Dear to My Heart (1948) convinced him and co-writer Richard Blake that they should tell the story through the eyes of their target audience.
THE PLOT
One starry night, little David MacLean awakens from bad dreams to spot a flying saucer descending into a sand pit behind his house. His scientist dad heads out to investigate only to return later with a cold glint in his eyes and a deep incision on the back of his head. David realizes that other people in their town are likewise acting strangely, but no one believes his story until he visits Dr. Kelston. Together, they convince the government to surround the area in hopes of containing an imminent invasion from Mars.
THE FILM
National Pictures (not to be confused with First National) was created by Brooklyn-born Robert Emmett Tansy (1897–1951). From an East Coast vaudeville family, he headed for Hollywood, hoping to write, direct, and star (as “Al Lane”) in low-budget “oaters,” as B Westerns were called at the time. The commercial failure of his first (and last) Western, The Galloping Kid (1932), however, ended that dream. For twenty years he worked for Poverty Row companies, including Monogram Pictures. In the early 1950s, Tansy put Invaders into pre-production, but he died before its completion.
What might have emerged as a routine thriller became something special when William Cameron Menzies (1896–1957) agreed to direct. The Connecticut-born talent had been educated at Yale and the University of Edinburgh, worked as art designer for such classics as Gone with the Wind (1939), invented the very concept of “production designer,” and was the first person to win an Oscar (1928) in that category. He directed the masterwork Things to Come (1936), but by the early 1950s, his career was in decline. Menzies saw Invaders from Mars as an opportunity to do, on a tight budget, what he had already achieved on a huge one.
At $290,000, Invaders cost $50,000 more than the amount then ordinarily allocated to indie films. These additional funds allowed for lavish color photography and Menzies’s intricate sets. Sensing this was indeed something unique, Fox picked up the film for distribution.
THEME
A character being trapped in a dream within a dream, raising existential and metaphysical issues as to the nature of reality, was a premise that would shortly thereafter influence Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Another theme, left implied, is the Red Scare mentality of the 1950s. Many children were taught to suspect that all adults, even their own parents, might possibly be Communist agents. Some turned grown-ups in to the authorities for uttering mild statements that had been misinterpreted. Just such paranoia is present in the film, notably when little David becomes terror-stricken after seeing his sexy teacher in a bright red dress. (Lest we forget, the 1950s was the decade when Freudianism overtook the Hollywood product, and not only in science-fiction films.)
TRIVIA
Originally, this was to have been the first film shot in 3-D, but that process was scrapped owing to the difficulty of adjusting it to the complicated F/X scheme. A mediocre-at-best African lion thriller, Bwana Devil (1952), would have the (dubious) honor.
Invaders would have a significant impact on the tradition of sci-fi. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is an unofficial remake, presented on a more adult level. That film revisits the idea of ordinary people becoming emotionally detached when taken over by aliens. The area where a girl disappears into the ground near an oddly shaped fence would later be visually referenced as the set for a saucer sighting in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Steven Spielberg’s decision to have cinematographer Allen Daviau shoot E.T. (1982) almost entirely from a child’s point of view recalls the effective use of that approach in Invaders, expressionistic angles and surreal color adding to the ingenious formalism.