by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night the “Vintage Sci-Fi” series entry was a double
bill containing an acknowledged masterpiece plus a clumsy “B” movie with virtually
the same plot and even one of the same stars. The masterpiece was the 1951
version of The Day the Earth Stood Still,
directed by Robert Wise from a screenplay by Edmund H. North that, while
ostensibly an adaptation of a 1940 magazine story by Harry Bates called
“Farewell to the Master,” was largely original. All North took from Bates was
the basic idea of a spaceship landing in the middle of the Capitol Mall in
Washington, D.C. with a two-entity crew: a living male named Klaatu and his
robot assistant, Gort (“Gnut” in Bates’ original story but obviously changed to
give the actors something easier to pronounce — perhaps Scandinavians would
have had no trouble saying “Gnut” but the Americans, along with Britisher
Michael Rennie in the lead, would have found it too much of a mouthful), land
their spaceship on the White House lawn. Klaatu is shot almost as soon as he
lands but is eventually revived by Gort/Gnut, though only temporarily, and
about the only specific scene from Bates’s story that North put into his script
was one in which, to immobilize him, the U.S. military decides to encase him in
high-tech plastic — which he gets out of by heating his body temperature so
high it melts. I’ve loved The Day the Earth Stood Still since I first saw it in the 1960’s on the old NBC Saturday
Night at the Movies program, and I still do
— not even the mediocre remake from 2008 with Keanu (The Matrix Man) Reeves as Klaatu could dim the beauty of the
incandescent original — and by showing the other movie on his double bill, a
1954 British production called Stranger from Venus, right after The Day the Earth Stood Still the organizer of the showing made Stranger
from Venus seem even worse than it was. Not
only did the writers of Stranger from Venus, Desmond Leslie (“original” story) and Hans Jacoby
(script), blatantly rip off The Day the Earth Stood Still, they even cast the same leading actress, Patricia
Neal, as the interlocutor between the visiting alien and the earth authorities.
In the opening scene she plays a tourist driving through a remote area of
England (in a Cadillac with its steering wheel on the left side, American-style — though she’s driving on the
left side of the road, correct for the U.K., her car is set up for the American
system of driving on the right, and
so is a Packard we see later being used as an official car by some of the
authorities) when she’s blinded by the lights of the Venusian spacecraft coming
in for a landing. At least we’re told that’s what happened, since producers Roy Rich, Gene Martel and Bob
Balaban (Balaban also directed) had virtually no effects budget (what they had
seems to have been blown by the ending sequence in which the Venusian
“mothership” flying saucer disgorges a smaller, similar craft for a landing on
earth that is eventually aborted) and therefore couldn’t show us anything that elaborate.
The film is basically a
lot of long, talky dialogue scenes in a bar between the mysterious stranger
(Helmut Dantine, who plays his entire role much the way he played the Nazi
pilot forced down over England and forced to interact with the Miniver family
in Mrs. Miniver) and Mrs. Susan
North (Patricia Neal), who like her character in The Day the Earth
Stood Still lost her husband in World War
II but had a son (a typically obnoxious movie-brat son, at that). Occasionally
they go out and hang out in front of a lake, and in one such scene Dantine’s
character from Venus (the planet
Venus?) gets to kiss Patricia Neal — “He got farther with her than Michael
Rennie did!” said one person at the screening. Like Klaatu, “The Stranger”
(that’s how Dantine’s character is billed in the credits, since it’s explained
that Venusians don’t use names — which begs the question how they can tell each
other apart back home) has come to Earth because the Earthlings’ development of
atomic energy while they still remain a warlike people with a penchant for
thinking all their problems can be solved with violence poses a direct threat
to Venus’s continued existence and requires the Venusians to intervene and
impose a pacifist regime on us before we blow both ourselves and Venus up with
nuclear weapons. Alas, while Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth
Stood Still looked like an alien even out
of his spacesuit, we see Helmut Dantine only as a normal-appearing person and his sole concession
to “alien-ness” is to play his role with the same kind of off-handed
ill-mannered not fitting in he used in his marvelous turn as the German pilot
shot down over England in Mrs. Miniver — and somehow the stand-offishness he cultivated in that role as
someone we’re not supposed to like (it’s ultimately established that he’s
repaying the Minivers’ kindness by still trying to help the Nazis bomb England)
doesn’t work for him in Stranger from Venus as someone we are supposed to like and be rooting for. As in The
Day the Earth Stood Still, Patricia Neal is
at the apex of a love triangle between her, the alien and her rather boorish
Earthling boyfriend (Hugh Marlowe in The Day the Earth Stood Still and Derek Bond here), and with the help of a dotty
scientist (Sam Jaffe in The Day the Earth Stood Still, Cyril Luckham as “Dr. Meinard” here) the earthers
are able to figure out the alien’s mission.
Indeed, Meinard is able to figure
out how the Venusian spaceship was powered — not by nuclear energy itself but
by magnetism (which couldn’t help but make me think of the Dick Tracy comic strip’s odd turn towards science-fiction in
the 1960’s and the proclamation of Tracy’s multimillionaire industrialist
friend Diet Smith that “the nation that controls magnetism will control the
world”) — and when “The Stranger” tells them that he’s merely the advance guard
for another Venusian ship that is bringing four more Venusians, and a
“mothership” above it that will retaliate by blowing up and/or burning down
(Messrs. Leslie and Jacoby weren’t altogether clear which) the entire
surrounding area, incinerating the entire local population, if the Earthlings
set off their planned trap and use their own magnets to immobilize the second
Venusian ship when it arrives. There’s also a serial-style MacGuffin in the
“communications disc” the Venusian needs to warn his fellow invaders that
they’re about to land in a trap, which is confiscated by the authorities and
Cyril Luckham’s character, depicted as a Captain Vere-like character who’s
disgusted by the orders he’s getting but is determined to follow them anyway,
recovers it for him, enabling him to tell the Venusian ship not to land even though that means his death. It seems
that “The Stranger” went through some sort of operation on his respiratory
system before he left so that he would be able to breathe Earth’s atmosphere,
which otherwise would be toxic to Venusians (according to the space.com Web
page on Venus, http://www.space.com/44-venus-second-planet-from-the-sun-brightest-planet-in-solar-system.html,
its atmosphere is “96.5 percent carbon dioxide, 3.5 percent nitrogen,
with minor amounts of sulfur dioxide, argon, water, carbon monoxide, helium and
neon” — note that one of the items it doesn’t contain is oxygen — and also its surface temperature
is 800 degrees because that awful atmosphere does such a great job of trapping
the heat from the sun, though as one of the attendees at last night’s screening
noted, when Stranger from Venus
was made scientists didn’t yet know just how hot Venus is); when I saw Helmut Dantine collapse on
screen after an unsuccessful attempt to chase down a car I wanted to joke, “Get
that man a respirator and a tank full of carbon dioxide at once!”
The final scene is supposed to be bitter and
poignant in that the Venusian is sacrificing his own life by waving the
spaceship away, since without the intervention of fellow Venusians his
respiratory system is going to return to normal and all that oxygen in Earth’s
atmosphere is going to kill him. The science-minded audience also got a hoot
from the film’s biggest scripting mistake: the stranger says he had to travel
“25 million light-years” to get from Venus to earth, when in fact Venus is an
average of 67 million miles from the sun and Earth is 93 million miles away —
but I guess “25 million light-years” sounded cooler to the writers and director
Bob Balaban than “26 million miles.” There are a few clever bits in Stranger from Venus, including the one in which the Stranger is asked to
demonstrate his ability to speak all known Earth languages (like the folks on
Klaatu’s home planet, the Venusians have learned Earth’s languages by
monitoring our radio and TV broadcasts) and he successively translates each
paragraph of a minor newspaper story about oil drilling into Italian, German,
Russian, French and Spanish. For the most part, though, Stranger from
Venus is just boring, the sort of movie
that isn’t really outright bad
but isn’t particularly good either, and though it’s 17 minutes shorter than The
Day the Earth Stood Still it seems about
half an hour longer simply
because it’s so dull. Pairing the two films on one double bill would be like
showing The Maltese Falcon and
then running The Green Glove —
the comparison makes the later, inferior knockoff seem even worse than it is!
And to make it even odder, the imdb.com Web page on this film lists it under a
reissue title, Immediate Disaster
— which makes it sound like it’s about a tornado or a terrible multi-car auto
crash and doesn’t really speak “science fiction.”
