After a potential couple makes it over the hump by clumsily professing their true feelings for one another, they celebrate this momentous occasion by moving things outside for a romantic stroll under the stars.
And since her beau is an amateur astronomer by trade, these budding lovebirds mosey on over to his telescope, arm in arm, for a little star-gazing and general mooning over each other.
Then suddenly, their courting ritual is rudely interrupted by a streaking meteor that shrieks across the night sky and then disappears over a clump of nearby bluffs, where the former celestial body seemingly detonates on impact.
Tracking its blazing course, our astronomer, John Putnam (Carlson), deduces the meteorite -- the largest he’d ever seen -- most likely impacted not all that far from their sleepy little desert town of Sand Rock; and more succinctly, somewhere near the old Excelsior mine as he zeros in on the smoldering impact site with his telescope.
Putnam then easily cajoles his girl, Ellen Fields (Rush), into interrupting their plans for the evening to check out the resulting crater instead, and perhaps stake a claim to what caused it.
Meanwhile, at said smoldering crater, turns out it wasn’t a meteor at all that crashed but an enormous craft of unknown origin. And when one of the hexagonal nodes slides open we realize this thing is definitely not of this Earth given the advanced doodads and control panels found therein.
This is confirmed when one of the occupants, told from its point of view, oozes its way outside and takes in the lay of this strange new land.
Above, and first on scene via a friendly crop-duster’s helicopter, Putnam leaves Ellen and the pilot (Willock) at the rim and begins a treacherous descent down to the bottom, where he soon makes a startling discovery -- the ship, with the hatch still open!
And not only that, but closer inspection by the initially incredulous witness spies something inside the shadowy recesses staring back at him! But these occupants prove a little shy and quickly slam the door. And not only that, but they sonically trigger a landslide, burying the ship under tons of rubble.
Somehow, Putnam manages to escape this avalanche unscathed; and when he finally crawls back to the top he sees some other curious locals have arrived, too, including the Sheriff of Sand Rock, Matt Warren (Drake).
In his excitement, even though Ellen tried to warn him against it, Putnam conveys to everyone about what he just saw at the bottom of the crater. But with the proof now buried, no one believes him. Worse yet, the others quickly begin to question his mental capacity.
But after beating a hasty retreat from the crater, while driving back from the airfield, Putnam and Ellen have a close encounter of the third kind when a large, luminescent one-eyed cephalopod-like creature suddenly appears in the middle of the road!
The car swerves and they miss it, but when the couple looks back the creature has seemingly vanished into thin air, leaving only a glittering trail of some unknown substance marking its path.
The following morning, the wary couple return to the crater. Now swarming with investigators, including an old colleague of Putnam’s, Dr. Snell (Eldredge), along with dozens of rubberneckers and the media, but no trace of Putnam’s alleged spaceship can be found.
It gets worse when Putnam fails to convince Snell, a man of science, of what he saw. All physical evidence points to the object being nothing more than a run of the mill meteorite. And the final nail in the coffin on the lone witness's claims of a flying saucer comes when Snell says no traces of radioactivity can be found. The argument being that no craft of Putnam's description could run on anything less than a nuclear reactor.
And so, our young astronomer is written off by the locals as a crackpot or publicity seeker -- while the town newspaper is convinced he’s a combination of both, according to the latest headlines at least.
Having witnessed something otherworldly on the highway, Ellen tries to defend him. This brings a strong rebuke from Warren, who used to be a deputy for Ellen’s father when he was the Sheriff. There are also inklings that he has a thing for Ellen, too, who warns Putnam to leave her out of his delusions of grandeur.
Frustrated and on the defensive, Putnam and Ellen head back to town. On the way they come across a couple of linemen for the local phone exchange, Frank Daylon (Sawyer) and his assistant George (Johnson), out repairing the telephone lines.
Frank is up on one of the poles, tapped into a line, and listening to the “darndest of noises” coming over the wires. He gives Putnam a listen, too. And while Frank admits the wind can cause the wires to sing like that, he then gives everybody the heebie-jeebies by waxing about the strange mysteries of the desert, ending a truly eerie and effective sequence.
Sufficiently creeped-out, the two groups part ways and head off in different directions, one toward town, the other deeper into the desert, as they scour the lines running perpendicular to the highway, trying to trace the source of said disturbance.
Soon enough, Frank and George are confronted by an alien, who once again looms up in the middle of the highway, forcing the men off the road. Only this time, it doesn’t disappear.
When a dazed George stumbles out of the truck, the alien quickly draws a bead on him. Then, as the man back-peddles away in fear, he is soon enveloped in a thick fog as two monstrous arms reach out and capture him. And for George’s sake, he’d better hope it’s not because the alien is hungry…
Back in July of 1947, news broke that a ‘Flying Saucer’ had crashed in the desert scrublands about 100 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, with tantalizing reports saying the wreckage had been recovered and secured by the United States Air Force.
“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Atomic Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of the disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the Sheriff’s office of Chaves County,” said a press release from Lt. Warren Haught, who served as the 509th’s public information officer.
The Roswell Daily Record (July 8, 1947).
Quoting from The Chico Enterprise (July 8, 1947), Haught continued, saying, “The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell … Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Airfield and subsequently loaned by Major Jesse A. Marcel, of the 409th intelligence office, to a higher headquarters.” The statement would also reveal the object in question had been flown to the Fort Worth Army Air Base in Texas on a B-29 for further study.
At the time, the American public was already abuzz, and on the prod, about unidentified flying objects littering the sky ever since Kenneth Arnold had reported seeing a string of nine, shiny flying discs rocketing past Mt. Rainer at speeds the pilot estimated to be over 1,200mph in June, 1947; claims that were sort of corroborated later on July 4th when the cockpit crew of United Airlines Flight 105 reported seeing similar flat and circular objects crossing their flight path while en route from Idaho to Oregon.
The Omaha Evening World-Herald (July 7, 1947).
And in those few short weeks some 800 reports of flying saucers were filed, some genuinely unidentifiable, some identifiable but misconstrued, others deliberate hoaxes. Thus, things were at a fever pitch when the Roswell story broke. But before things could really catch fire, it was swiftly debunked by military authorities that this flying saucer was nothing more than a downed weather balloon.
For some that was enough of an explanation, others, well, not so much. Other sightings were likewise debunked, with innocuous explanations ranging from mass hysteria, to misidentifying the planet Venus in the night sky, and my personal favorite: swamp gas.
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The Grand Island Independent (July 10, 1947).
But the Roswell conspiracies and alleged cover-ups really didn’t take root until the late 1970s, when Marcel, who had been in charge of the recovery back in 1947, and who took the brunt of the backlash and blame as a scapegoat for the alleged flagrant misidentification, told ufologist Stanton Friedman that he felt the debris was of extraterrestrial origin and the resulting obfuscation of the truth.
“They wanted some comments from me [at the time], but I wasn't at liberty to do that,” said Marcel in an interview for the TV-series In Search Of… (S5: E1, 1980). “So, all I could do was keep my mouth shut. And General Ramey is the one who discussed -- told the newspapers, I mean the newsmen -- what it was, and to forget about it. ‘It was nothing more than a weather observation balloon.’ Of course, we both knew differently … It was not anything from this Earth, I’m quite sure of it. Being an intelligence officer I was familiar with all materials that were used in aircraft and air travel. This was not like that. It could not have been.”
(September, 1939).
Of course, tales of space travel, aliens from other worlds, and hostile extraterrestrial invaders had been around for decades in the pulps. Alex Raymond took us to the planet Mongo alongside Flash Gordon in the Sunday papers in 1934 and the later serial adaptations starting in 1936. And in 1938, Orson Welles had sent the country into an outright tizzy with his radio-broadcast adaptation of a contemporized version of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (1938), resulting in one of the largest cases of mass-psychosis ever recorded.
But it took Hollywood a couple of years after the Arnold incident, and countless other UFO sightings, to finally cash in on this current phenomenon, starting with the independently produced The Flying Saucer (1950). A rather inert, tell don’t show venture, the film was written, produced, directed, and starred Mikel Conrad; but, turns out, the titular flying saucer was of terrestrial origin all along and the crux of the plot concerns some spy shenanigans and a race to beat the communists to this new secret weapon of mass destruction.
Thus, it was the serials who first dealt with an extraterrestrial threat in Republic Pictures’ Flying Disc Man from Mars (1950), where our neighbors from the Angry Red Planet, worried about Earth’s burgeoning atomic age, send an emissary to put the kibosh on this, take over, and rein us in before we blow up the galaxy. This was followed up by a couple of Commando Cody adventures, Radar Men from the Moon (1952) and Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952), where the original Rocketeer respectively thwarted a lunar invasion and a Martian attempt to blow Earth out of its orbit.
And so, since Rocketship X-M (1950) sees an expedition that winds up on Mars, the first feature (to my knowledge) that dealt with an actual alien invader was Edward G. Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X (1951). Another independent, low budget feature that was distributed by United Artists, sees an alien land on the fog enshrouded moors of Scotland. In the tempest without, the alien is an advanced scout for an impending invasion, allegedly, in the crisis within, a greedy witness tries to force the alien to reveal his industrial secrets to cash-in.
That same year also saw the release of two more films on the subject of alien visitors but came at them from totally polar opposite directions, narratively speaking.
20th Century Fox would release Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which was based on the Harry Bates short story Farewell to the Master. A treatise on the runaway nuclear arms race, in their version, the alien visitor, Klaatu (Michael Rennie) and his trusty robot Gort, have been sent as emissaries to Earth by some intergalactic council to talk some sense into our world leaders before we nuke ourselves out of existence. And while their motives are ultimately altruistic, his final ultimatum is tinged with menace: "Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration."
But there was nothing altruistic about the intentions or motives of the alien who accidentally crash-lands in the arctic circle in the Howard Hawks’ production of The Thing from Another World (1951). Released by RKO and loosely based on John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes There?, later adapted more faithfully in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), the Hawks version is a rip-snorting adventure yarn about an isolated outpost under siege by a defrosted “alien carrot” that needs human blood to hatch-out the seeds for its world conquering army. And while the enemy is ultimately defeated and its progeny burned, the film ends with a dire warning “to keep watching the skies.”
These two productions would lay a strong foundation for the sci-fi boom that was about to detonate in theaters as the 1950s progressed from there. These features would combine America’s growing fascination with flying saucers and alien life, and all the while tapping into increasing Cold War tensions and the deep-seated fear of nuclear annihilation and the effects of radiation, exploiting these anxieties through tales of invasion or paranoia and surrendering control; sometimes both, either being forced under the boot of our new alien overlords or a fear of infestation from within, when those around you, family and friends, suddenly become unfamiliar and, well, foreign.
And while 1952 would prove a little thin, 1953 would be a banner year for alien invaders. For the minors you had the gonzo classic Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), which contended our lunar neighbor was inhabited by giant spiders and feline-women decked out in unitards and beehive hairdos; and Phil Tucker’s magdumb opus, Robot Monster (1953), where you will believe an alien gorilla / cyborg hybrid’s plans to conquer the world are undone when it falls in love with an Earth Wo-man, with all the pathos of Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which I contend, when relatively compared to its budget, is one of the greatest films ever made. Of course I’m serious.
For the majors, Fox would release Invaders from Mars (1953), with director William Cameron Menzies’ surreal treatise on mounting paranoia and trippy production design through a juvenile’s perspective; and Paramount was gearing up to unleash the sturm und drang of George Pal’s lavish film version of War of the Worlds (1953), whose Martian warships set the gold standard, FX wise, for the next fifteen years.
Universal-International, meanwhile, in an effort to puff-up the brand, had pretty much abandoned this type of genre filmmaking since Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) put their long running monster franchises to bed, relegating what little there was left to exploit as comedic foils for the further adventures of Bud and Lou in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951); and in 1953 they were ready to trot them out again in Abbott and Costello meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953); and would do so yet again, again, in Abbott and Costello meet the Mummy (1955).
But while Universal-International left their monsters behind to molder, they did make a couple of token efforts at a classier form of gothic chiller -- well, more like period-piece melodramas -- with The Strange Door (1951), a tale of revenge, secret dungeons and deathtraps, and The Black Castle (1952), a delightful tale of the macabre, intrigue, romance, double-crosses, and a climax that sees our hero and heroine's escape attempt derailed when the bad guy discovers their deaths were staged, decides to play along, and has them buried alive.
The former had Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff, the latter had Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. and featured Stephen McNally out of his usual western duds as the dastardly Baron. But William Goetz, the head of production at U-I, felt the studio needed to modernize their chills and thrills for this new Atomic Age -- mostly to not get plowed under by the slate of their rival studios’ oncoming horde of invaders from outer-space. They needed to adapt, or fall behind permanently. And to get this done, he turned to one of his novice producers, William Alland.
Now, Alland had been part of Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast back in ‘38 as one of the Mercury Theater regulars. And he would earn a Peabody Award for his radio series Doorway to Life. He would then follow Welles to Hollywood, where he would star as the crusading reporter trying to decipher a dying man’s last words in Citizen Kane (1941). He would also appear in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Macbeth (1948) alongside Welles after serving as a combat pilot in the Pacific Theater of World War II, flying some 65 missions all over the South Pacific.
But after the war, with a face made for radio, Alland would switch gears, co-writing scripts for a couple of U-I films: the boxing drama Flesh and Fury (1952), and a western, The Lawless Breed (1952); the second of which he would also produce after a couple of associate producer gigs on Cave of Outlaws (1951) and The Treasure of Lost Canyon (1952). These efforts would land him a deal at U-I for four pictures a year for the next seven years.
William Alland.
“Many of my films were based on one or two page ideas that I would submit to the studio,” said Alland in an interview with Tom Weaver (-- quoted from Universal Terrors, 1951-1955: Eight Classic Horror and Science Fiction Films, 2017). “They gave me carte blanche -- they knew that I would always come in under budget, they knew my pictures always had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that they worked.”
Alland also served as a producer on The Black Castle, and feeling he could handle this kind of genre-picture and keep it on time and budget, Goetz gave him the go ahead on U-I’s new breed of sci-fi thriller.
What happened next depends on the teller and when they told it. And so, to start, we will begin with Alland’s version of the genesis of The Strangers from Outer Space.
Said Alland (Weaver, 2017), “I had an idea to make a science fiction film, and the very simple idea was this:
“A space ship accidentally crashes on Earth and the beings in it take one look around at this place and sense that we are an inferior breed; savage; brutal; stupid; beastly. They understand that we are a species that destroys anything that frightens us, that destroys anything we don’t understand. They crash here. They want to get out. They realize the Earth-beings only want to destroy them. They have the power to destroy us -- if they have to. But they don’t want to do that, they just want to get out.”
Goetz was immediately sold on the idea. “In fact,” said Alland (ibid), “I don’t think I even had to show [him] my outline. I just told him about it and he said go.” And go he did.
Ray Bradbury.
To expand his idea and give it some clout, since Paramount had H.G. Wells and RKO had John W. Campbell, two stalwarts of the genre as the basis of their sci-fi film adaptations, Alland thought U-I needed one, too. And to those ends, he decided to reach out to a relatively new face on the sci-fi scene: Ray Bradbury.
“The secret of science-fiction writing is exploring the human element rather than the mechanical,” said Bradbury in an interview with Fred Russell (The Visalia Times-Delta, July 3, 1953), who described the author as "a broad-shouldered, owlish-eyed young man." Bradbury, 33 at the time, had several books published by 1953, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, as well as countless articles for Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post -- one of which, The Foghorn, would provide the basis for another seminal release that very year, Warner Bros’ The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), officially ushering in the era of giant rampaging monsters.
The Saturday Evening Post (June, 1951).
“Science-fiction writing is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together,” said Bradbury (ibid). “A logical or mathematical projection of reality.” Unlike fantasy, a term the author bristled at when applied to his work, because, “fantasy is dream-world stuff you can’t believe has a chance of ever happening.”
“There’s more originality and more excitement in science-fiction,” added Bradbury (The Vallejo Times-Herald, June 4, 1953). “When they say, ‘they went that-a-way’ in a western, they can point only right and left. When you say it in science-fiction, they can point anywhere. Much more directional latitude, if you know what I mean.”
Alland would invite Bradbury to lunch in August, 1952, where he would pitch his idea, hoping the writer would sign on to embellish it into a full treatment. As the meeting progressed, Alland discovered that he and Bradbury were in sync with the general idea of the movie’s premise and the author quickly signed on for $300 a week.
“I was so thrilled to be working at the same studio that had made The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933) -- movies that changed my life in the 1920s and ‘30s,” Bradbury told Terry Pace (Monsters from the Vault, 1982). “As soon as I moved into the studio bungalow and started to work, I went over to The Phantom of the Opera stage and stood in the middle of the theater where they had filmed the opera house scenes. It was so glorious to be there in person, standing at long last with the ghost of Long Chaney, my childhood hero. I felt like I was five years old all over again.”
Said Alland (Weaver, 2017), “[He] came back about two weeks later with an absolutely, incredibly beautiful treatment. Actually, you could have shot it, it was so photographic, so complete. It was almost like a silent movie -- there was very little dialogue in it.”
Again, this was Alland’s version of events. Bradbury’s recollection of the same was, well, a tad bit different.
“All Universal knew was that they wanted something to arrive from Outer Space: a grisly monster, a proper fright that the Westmore brothers could have fun with in the makeup department,” wrote Bradbury in his piece The Turkey that Attacked New York, part of the anthology book They Came from Outer Space: 12 Classic Science Fiction Tales that Became Major Motion Pictures (1981), where he discussed his experience in making their “mildewed idea” into a film, hoping to shed some light on “why fiction is so often excellent and films so often shoddy.”
“In my preliminary talks with the producer and director, I could see we were light years apart. I wanted a more subtle approach, something with a real idea in it. They saw only the obvious -- and the vulgar obvious at that.”
“They put me to work on an idea of theirs which I didn't like very much at the time … They really didn’t know what they were doing,” Bradbury expanded further in an interview with Jeff Szalay for Starlog (Issue 53, December, 1981). “But I tried to do something halfway decent with it and as time went on, I finally had to voice my opinions to producer Alland.
“I told him that I didn't think too highly of their original idea and that I would write two versions of it. One to please me, one to please him, and then two weeks from now I'll turn in 30 or 40 pages of each idea and I'll do my best with both. Naturally, it's hard to do something well that you don't believe in.”
“They thought I was crazy,” Bradbury told Weaver. And after two weeks of writing, Bradbury turned them both in, telling Alland (Szalay, 1981), “Now you have a choice. If you go your way, I quit! If you go my way, I'll stay on and work on it … Because I won't take money under false pretenses.”
And as the legend goes, merely 48 hours after turning these treatments in, Bradbury received word that the studio had decided to make his version. “Frankly, I was stunned. I wrote the two versions, turned them in and the studio had enough sense to see that, indeed, my version was better than theirs (Weaver, 2017).”
But Alland would deny any of this ever happened, rather vehemently, in a 1995 interview with Weaver. He had no memory of this dual treatment or ultimatum, saying, “I’m too old and too tired to call him up and say, You’re a [expletive deleted] liar, what’s the matter with you? He denigrated us, didn’t mention our names, and wrote with contempt about the whole experience -- outrageous.”
As usual, the truth of the matter lied somewhere in between both versions. Weaver stated there were indeed two initial treatments turned in by Bradbury, which still exist, but that they were essentially the same treatment except for the last few pages, whose climaxes differed greatly. Said Weaver (2017), “It’d be more accurate to say that Bradbury wrote one story and gave Universal two endings to choose from.”
Turns out there were actually four total treatments written for the film, which were later published en masse by Gauntlet Publications in the book It Came from Outer Space (2004), with page ranges varying from 38 to over a 100 and titles ranging from Ground Zero to The Atomic Monster. I have not read them and the book, long out of print, is terribly expensive, so we’ll have to take Weaver’s word on this (-- which I trust implicitly), who described them as “three nearly word for word identical ones and then a much longer fourth one based on Bradbury’s ‘better concept’ -- i.e. the same story as the others but with a different ending.”
Originally, Alland wanted Bradbury to adapt this final treatment into a full blown screenplay but this was quickly nixed by Goetz, who felt they needed an experienced screenwriter to pull it off and perhaps avoid any hassles with the union. Said Bradbury (Szalay, 1981), “They weren’t sure I could do it, and I, of course, knew I could.”
“In those days my guts were in my butt,” said Alland (Weaver, 1995). “I rarely stood up and fought for anything. If Goetz didn’t want him, he didn’t want him. So then, the next question was: What do I do to preserve this beautiful piece of writing?” Alland’s answer was Harry Essex.
Essex was a one-time social worker and publicity man, who also worked as a reporter out of New York City for The Daily News and Daily Mirror. He wrote his first stage play, Something for Nothing, in 1938, which wound up on Broadway, but the author would admit it was "a resounding failure.”
He broke into Hollywood co-writing the screenplay for Man Made Monster (alias The Atomic Monster, 1941) for Universal (before the International); which was the horror debut of Lon Chaney Jr., who would become a staple / workhorse for the studio in the 1940s, playing The Wolf Man (1941) as well as the Monster in Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), the Son of Dracula (1943), and the Mummy in The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), Ghost (1944) and Curse (1944).
“That was written while I was still working at the Daily Mirror,” Essex told Weaver for Interviews With B Science Fiction And Horror Movie Makers (1988) “There were three of us sitting around an office … We were bouncing story ideas around, and I came up with the notion to do a thing called The Electric Man … The three of us sat there and developed the story. It was submitted to an agency and sold to Universal (-- who would release it as Man Made Monster). We didn’t get much money for it at the time -- I think we got something like $3300 -- but it was my first sale. That was my very first screen credit.”
Essex’s burgeoning screenwriting career was then derailed when he got drafted during World War II; but when he mustered out in 1947 he managed to latch on at Columbia and his career really took off from there, writing or co-writing some outstanding noir films or procedurals like Dragnet (1947), The Killer that Stalked New York (1950), a tale of diamond smugglers and a smallpox outbreak, Kansas City Confidential (1952), and I, the Jury (1953), which he wrote and directed, adapting Mickey Spillane’s seemly and steamy Mike Hammer novel of the same name.
“I work at writing and I love to work,” Essex confessed to Howard McClay of The Los Angeles Daily News (July 8, 1953). But with only one monster movie under his belt at the time, Essex seemed like an odd choice. And when he got involved with the nascent picture, we get the third version of events on the story's origin, where Essex stakes his claim for the lion’s share of credit.
At first, things were very cordial. “My meetings with Harry Essex were very pleasant,” Bradbury reported (Gauntlet, 2004). “When I first had lunch with him, the film was in production. The first thing he said to me was, ‘What a fool you were to let your long treatment go through because the studio hired me and mainly what I did was re-type your treatment and turn it into a screenplay. You gave them 80 or 90 pages and a treatment is only supposed to be 30 or 40. But thank you for the gifts.’ He was very kind about it and very generous.”
But as the years wore on, Bradbury could see that he’d made a mistake, telling Szalay, “I proceeded to do not just a short outline, or even a short treatment, but a 90 to 100 page treatment and that's a screenplay, isn't it? You're giving the screenwriter everything he needs and I wasn't being paid to do that so it was very foolish of me.
“I'm an enthusiast, when I get excited about things I can't stop myself, I just go all out and my agents have to watch me and make sure I have a contract first. If I get excited, I'll get things done in a couple of days. And wouldn't you know, they pulled me off the project and brought someone else in to write the screenplay … But that's OK, you learn from those things. You learn about your own enthusiasm and good business sense.”
But Essex would later claim this was all false, saying (Weaver, 1988), “Ray never did a treatment, he did a three page short story.” And despite all the solid preponderance of evidence to the contrary, Essex still insisted, “No, it's my treatment. Ray’s story was a very short piece, and I did the treatment, which was accepted.
“Some time later, when we were invited to attend the preview, there was Ray Bradbury’s name above mine, which would generally not be the case. But of course I could understand what the situation was -- I mean, we’re talking about an internationally popular writer, a famous man. When Bernard Shaw and Joe Blow write something, they’re going to give all the credit to Shaw. There was nothing I could do about it, but it did bother me (-- that Bradbury was getting all the credit). (But) there was enough credit for everybody; the people inside the business knew that I had written the screenplay, and that was all that mattered.”
Essex even told Weaver that Bradbury made an attempt at writing the screenplay first. “He tried to write [one], and it was just no good,” claimed Essex. “He’s not a screenplay writer. Ray is primarily a novelist and a short story writer; and there’s a difference between dramatization and just pure narrative writing.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Harry Essex is trying to take the credit?!?” said an apoplectic Alland (Weaver, who ratted Essex out, 1995). “Isn’t that sad, that he needs to do that? What would a man want to do that for? Oh, that’s an outrage! Harry called me maybe a year ago ... And if I knew this then, I would have chewed his ass out! That’s sad, that’s really sad … Harry must be 80 years old by now, so, who the hell knows? Maybe by this time he’s talked himself into it.”
Thus, Alland gave Bradbury full credit on the treatments, saying (Weaver, 1995), “I’ve told Ray several times he ought to publish that treatment. It was marvelous, it was just beautiful. As I said, you could actually shoot it, almost!”
Thus, as Weaver would explain (2017), “Essex most certainly was not the author to the extent that he wanted me to believe. But if indeed he told Bradbury that pretty much all he did was re-type Bradbury’s final treatment, he was hugely minimizing his contributions.”
One of the biggest changes Essex made was to have Putnam be the only one to witness the alien ship at the bottom of the crater in the opening act. In the treatment, Ellen sees it, too. This isolated Putnam even further and to better effect. And he completely changed the tone of Putnam’s final speech, which we’ll get to in a bit. He would also scuttle several scenes, including an interview at the Pentagon, a squabble between the local school board and Ellen, and a lengthy piece of sci-babble about the alien craft’s shock-absorbers, according to Weaver.
Also making contributions to the screenplay was editor Ernest Nims. Alland knew Nims, now head of post-production at U-I, through Welles. Nims had cut some 30 pages out of the script for Welles’ The Stranger (1946). For Alland’s film, Nims suggested a lot of POV shots of the aliens spying on the protagonists, and then gliding along silently across the desert unseen, save for the glittering substance marking the trail left behind them.
It was also Nims who suggested the film’s best jump scare, when the alien hand reaches out toward an unsuspecting Ellen from behind, only to have transformed into Frank when they spin around. But Nims’ biggest and most contentious suggestion saved the film for some, while ruining it for others, which, again, we’ll be addressing later in a blatant attempt to make sure you come back for Part Two of this (rather lengthy) retrospective.
Again, the truth on how exactly the screenplay for U-I’s first Atomic Age thriller came together has been occluded by time and fading memories. And here, we will give Bradbury the last word on the subject:
“Speaking as a writer who has just done his first 120 page film treatment and turned it over to the studio, who turned it over to Harry Essex, who wrote the final screenplay, I find that I am in a good humor about the entire adventure. 80-percent of my original storyline carried over to the picture, which is an amazingly high percentage. Very little of my dialogue survived, but that is the grumble you will get from every writer who worked for Hollywood. If I had wanted more of my dialogue to survive, I could and should have insisted from the beginning that I do the final screenplay. I did not do this, and so, I have no grounds for comment at this time.”
It was also around this time that another angle entered the production -- more like an added dimension.
Truthfully, 3D films had been around since the 1920s. But it didn’t really take root in Hollywood until the 1950s, when studios glommed onto the gimmick in an effort to combat thinning theater crowds, giving audiences something they couldn’t experience on television, a growing threat, compounded by the recent anti-trust decision that split studios from their theater chains. We get into this more in a very deep dive into this tumultuous era in our review of Beginning of the End (1958) for those who would like to know more.
The Grand Island Independent (May, 1953).
This notion was cemented with the financial success of Arch Oboler’s independently produced Bwana Devil (1952), which documented the deadly attacks and the eventual hunt for the Lions of Tsavo, with its outstanding tagline, “A Lover in Your Arms, a Lion in Your Lap.”
Filmed in Natural Vision 3D with a camera and technique invented by M.L. and Julian Gunzburg, somewhat ironically, the Gunzburgs had shopped their innovative technique around the major studios first but found no takers. Now they were all tripping over themselves to get a StereoScopic feature into theaters.
The Grand Island Independent (August, 1953).
Both Cat-Women of the Moon and Robot Monster were shot in 3D, and it was rumored that Pal wanted to shoot his climax for War of the Worlds in this new process, too. (He eventually didn’t.) But it wasn’t just science fiction or horror films as 1953 also saw the release of the westerns Hondo, The Charge at Feather River, Fort Ti, and Devil’s Canyon, war films like Cease Fire!, and a wide range of musicals with The French Line, Kiss Me, Kate, and Miss Sadie Thompson, as well as two-fisted noir like Man in the Dark and Essex’s own I, the Jury all shot and shown in Three-Dimensions.
But to my understanding, U-I decided their new film needed to be shot in 3D, too, when another rival picture entered the fray: Warner Bros. House of Wax (1953), which was also slated to be shot in 3D and in bloody red color. But the studio would eschew the use of the Gunzburg equipment and decided to invent their own, in-house technique instead, according to the January, 1953, edition of Film Bulletin:
“Very hush-hush. Universal-International has been working on a third-dimension camera which company executives hope to have in operation by early spring. Sources close to William Goetz says he expects to employ the new gimmick on at least three productions this year.”
And the first production would be Alland’s Strangers from Outer Space. These efforts were spear-headed by Clifford Stine, head of their camera department, who, under an enormous time crunch, worked the bugs out of the new, two camera system during the film’s pre-production phase. Remember, Bwana Devil came out around Thanksgiving in 1952, giving them only mere weeks to get the thing built and working.
And so, with the screenplay taking shape, and another dimension added, the production’s next step would be to assign a director to make all of this work.
“At the time, Warners happened to have made House of Wax. So Universal said, ‘We have to do something, too,’ and for some reason they came to me,” said Jack Arnold, telling John Landis how he managed to get involved with the picture (-- quoted from Weaver, 2017).
Jack Arnold.
Arnold started out as a stage actor in New York in the 1930s, who had a side-hustle of filming highlights from the plays with a 16mm camera. Arnold was starring in the Broadway hit My Sister Eileen when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. With that, Arnold left the show and enlisted, wanting to be a pilot. Slight of build, he had his mother secrete pieces of lead sewn into his clothes so he would pass the physical.
But Arnold’s entry in the service was delayed several months due to a shortage of airplanes at the time. And so, after a crash-course in cinematography, he would volunteer as a civil servant in the Army Signal Corps, where he was designated as a cameraman and assigned to work with the noted documentarian, Robert J. Flaherty; the man responsible for the proto-Mondo movies Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926) and Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931). Said Arnold to Dana Reemes for the book Directed by Jack Arnold (1988), “When they told me Robert Flaherty needed a cameraman, it was like telling me God needed a cameraman.”
Arnold would then leverage this experience once he mustered out of the service in 1944, when he teamed up with Lee Goodman, a former squadmate, and formed Promotional Films Company, which would focus on mini-docs and short subjects. They got things rolling with a fundraising film for the The Jewish Consumptive Relief Society (-- now known as The City of Hope), in which Arnold would direct and star in.
More jobs would follow for businesses ranging from Madison Avenue to the Department of Agriculture, where Arnold famously directed the industrial film short The Chicken of Tomorrow (1948), which touted the use of genetic engineering to produce larger chickens that laid bigger eggs and the resultant economic impact.
But Arnold would start to gain traction in 1949 when his company was commissioned by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union for a documentary that told the history of their organization through the eyes of a retiring member, highlighting the courage and sacrifices made to unionize during a strike in 1911 and the tragedy of the Triangle Shirt-Waist Company fire, which cost the lives of 146 women, who were locked inside the burning sweatshop with no means of escape.
Originally, With These Hands (1950) was intended to only be shown to the union delegates at a convention. But David Dubinksy, who financed the production, was so pleased by Arnold’s efforts he managed to get it a wide theatrical release, which eventually netted the film an Academy Award Nomination for Best Documentary.
And while Arnold didn’t win, losing to his old mentor Flaherty’s The Titan: Story of Michelangelo (1950), his efforts were enough for a contract offer from Universal-International in February, 1952. He quickly signed on, and his first feature assignment was Girls in the Night (1953).
A sudsy melodrama / morality play rife with social commentary, Girls in the Night focuses on a particular family barely eking by in the slums of New York and their desperate attempts to start over someplace else -- and by any means necessary. Things get complicated when the eldest son (Harvey Lembeck) is framed for the murder of an old miser, whom he admittedly tried to rob but didn’t kill. His girlfriend then leads the effort to exonerate him and out the real killer.
The cast of Girls in the Night with Arnold (center).
Girls in the Night predates Blackboard Jungle (1955) in the troubled teen department. Arnold’s efforts are solid and the film is buoyed by a rare non-comedic turn by Lembeck, probably best known for playing the bumbling Erik Von Zipper in the Beach Party movies (1963-1966). But the film is stolen out from under everybody by Jaclynne Greene as the scheming and psychologically damaged Vera, who witnessed the murder but instead of turning the killer in, blackmails him into being her boyfriend. Sounds silly, but in context, holy hell.
Girls in the Night would be released as the bottom bill for Alland’s The Lawless Breed to mixed reviews and middlin’ box office. But it was enough to get Arnold a contract extension in January, 1953, and a new assignment. Again, given his background in documentaries, social commentary, and with only one other feature on his resume, Arnold seemed to be yet another odd choice to direct Strangers from Outer Space.
“I love science fiction,” said Arnold (-- quoted from the IMDB). “As a youngster, I used to buy all the pulp magazines. I loved them. I was very pleased when I was assigned to direct my first sci-fi film because I was still an avid fan. … Fortunately, no one at that time at the studio was an expert at directing sci-fi films, so I claimed to be one. I wasn't, of course, but the studio didn't know that. So they never argued with me.”
But even with the film's outre trappings, Arnold still saw an opportunity to say something about the human condition. “When I got the assignment to direct the film, it gave me a real opportunity. First of all, because it was a story by Ray Bradbury, whom I respected and whose stories always had some meaning and substance to them,” said Arnold (Reemes, 1988).
“The main point was that we are prone -- all of us -- to fear something that is different than we are, whether it be in philosophy, the color of our skins, or even one block against another block in the big city. Because your form is different than theirs you want to hate, you want to kill. That is your first reaction. Until we are mature enough to meet something different than ourselves on a higher level without being afraid of it and without recoiling in horror … Only then will we be worthy to meet whatever else is out there in the cosmos, and there must be people out there.”
“I started from the premise that there will be conflict if the inhabitants of two planets meet,” Bradbury explained to columnist Bob Thomas (The Evening Express, March 25, 1953) “My reasoning is this: If there is any life on other planets, it is doubtful if it has developed into human form. Even if these creatures are intellectually developed beyond humans so that they have abolished war and conflict, there will be a shock when they meet Earth people. The two races will be so dissimilar that conflict is bound to happen. So I envisioned creatures landing here by mistake in a rocket ship. They work feverishly to keep out of sight of humans until they can repair their ship and continue on their way.”
And who could blame them? Said Arnold (Reemes, 1988), “One must also remember the era in which this film was made. This was the height of the McCarthy era, when we were running scared of everything and you didn’t have to be a communist to be a suspect. It may have been the worst period this country has ever gone through. (2026 says, Hold my beer.) The whole political climate was one of a witchhunt. And if there were important things to be said about our society and its mores, they certainly weren't being said in the [standard] film-fare at the time.
“So that was the kind of thing I wanted to express, especially in those political times we were living in. We could do it, and get away with it, because it was fantasy. On the face of it, they wouldn’t relate it to the problems of the day -- those who weren’t keen enough intellectually and especially those who were running the studio. They were only interested in the special effects and whether the picture would sell or not.”
The Atlanta Journal (November 24, 1953).
Somewhat ironically, that very same year, on November 3, 1953, Alland, a former member of the Communist Party, would appear as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and gave a performance that Clancy Sigal, author of Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal & Raging Egos (2016), called completely demented.
"When I was released by the Air Force after serving all the way from New Guinea to the Philippines, I was lonely and depressed," testified Arnold (The Independent, November 24, 1953). "The Communists were friendly and appeared to be do-gooders, and I allowed myself to drift into the party."
But when Alland sought professional help when dealing with his lingering depression, that, apparently, was a big no-no to the Party, who kicked him to the curb in 1948 once they found out about it. Said Arnold (ibid), "I found psychotherapy very helpful. As a matter of fact, 95-percent of the Party membership is emotionally disturbed the way I was and they all belonged on a psychiatrist's couch."
Weaver, who would come to Alland’s defense given the tenor of the times, revealed he didn’t have much choice, saying how U-I’s Edward Muhl summoned the producer to his office and said, “Bill, we love you, but I have to tell you: if you don’t cooperate with that committee, you’re through.”
Alland would name names and ruin several careers, including Bernard Gordon, who co-wrote Flesh and Fury and The Lawless Breed with him. Gordon would spend the next decade penning screenplays under the pseudonym Raymond T. Marcus, mostly genre films like Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) and The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957). But the one I find most hilarious was Hellcats of the Navy (1957), which starred Ronald Reagan, the biggest Commie-Basher of ever.
Also thrown under the bus were actors Stanley Waxman and Virginia Mullen, the latter of which first encouraged Alland to join the Communist party in 1946. Somewhat dastardly, Mullen would have a small part in It Came from Outer Space as the wife of Frank Daylon. But as Weaver pointed out, these two had already been named and Alland’s apparent strategy was to only implicate those already outed.
The production of The Strangers from Outer Space was first announced by The Hollywood Reporter on November 3, 1952, who referred to the pending U-I film as From Out of this World. In the run up to filming the feature was renamed several times, including The Meteor, Ground Zero, The Atomic Monster, The Man from Outer Space, and The Strangers from Space before finally settling on It Came from Outer Space (1953), which was the title Bradbury had written his final draft treatment under.
But even before cameras rolled, U-I threw a tight security blanket over the production. Said Weaver (2017), “Universal-International surrounded it with as much secrecy as they could -- partly in an attempt to whet the curiosity of the press and the public, but perhaps also out of genuine concern that some other outfit might get wind of what they were doing and beat them to the punch.”
What Weaver was referring to were a couple of notorious releases that not only wanted to cash-in on like-minded and bigger-budgeted studio productions, but to also beat them into theaters, too, like Robert L. Lippert’s Rocketship X-M beating Pal’s Destination Moon (1950), and the aforementioned The Man from Planet X cutting in line in front of The Thing from Another World.
Added U-I’s studio manager M.W. Weiner, “In view of the unusual nature of this production and the newly developed techniques which are being employed in its filming, it is requested that you refrain from any discussion of this picture. The studio has taken precautionary measures to keep unauthorized personnel from visiting the set for this reason. We are counting on your cooperation to maintain this necessary secrecy in order that the processes used in the production may not be copied by others before this picture is released.”
Thus and so, to keep the production Top Secret -- even the fact that it was being shot in 3D was kept under wraps -- “We are now making rather elaborate plans to accomplish this,” read a memo from Sam Israel, U-I’s assistant publicity director (January, 1953). “This involved special badges for cast and crew with “a general order to all studio personnel against discussing the picture or attempting to get on set.”
A follow up memo asked all studio personnel without the special badge to refrain from visiting the sets while It Came from Outer Space was being filmed. No exceptions. Thus, as Israel concluded, “I am confident that all this will get us a great deal more publicity and certainly more provocative publicity than would otherwise be the case."
Charles Drake pins a security badge on co-star Barbara Rush.
And for their part, the press took the bait. “It Came from Outer Space was made in great secrecy,” reported William Hogan for The San Francisco Chronicle (April 14, 1953). “Even Universal’s publicity crew didn’t know what it was about until the picture was finished. Bradbury’s project, Universal reports, was kept hush-hush in order to prevent some quickie producer from copping the idea and getting out with it first.”
“Today the wraps were taken off a super-secret science fiction film, the first in three dimensions,” said Bob Thomas (March 25, 1963). "It was filmed in its entirety with a No Visitors sign on the stage door. Usually the sign is merely to keep the riff-raff out, but this time it was for real. Even the studio’s press agent was not allowed on the set, and that is being drastic.”
“Defense plant security hearkening back to the aircraft production plants of World War II was reactivated by Universal-International during the filming in Apple Valley of the studio’s first Three Dimension film It Came from Outer Space,” revealed The Apple Valley Victor Press (August 27, 1953). “The reason for the top-secret stemmed from the nature of the plot itself and the secret technical means employed to create creatures from the outer space realm … So that no leaks would emerge about the highly secret film, all actors, set technicians, and other persons necessary for the filming of the story were called upon to sign a ‘loyalty pledge’ binding them to absolute secrecy until the release of the picture.”
With a budget estimated between 600 to $750,000, filming on It Came from Outer Space began on February 4, 1953. Locations included the Mojave Desert, where you could get frostbite before breakfast and die of sunstroke by noon, Santa Clarita and Victorville, California, and Dead Man’s Point located in Lucerne Valley. But the majority of it would be shot at the studio on Stage 12, their biggest soundstage, and the familiar environs of Court House square on Universal’s backlot.
“You have to create tension, create the right mood, atmosphere,” said Arnold (Reemes, 1988). “If you’re asking an audience to believe something that does not correspond to reality, and if you want the audience to ignore reality, you need to create an atmosphere in which anything can happen.”
But would he succeed? Would audiences buy what Arnold, Alland, Essex, and Bradbury were selling? For that answer, Boils and Ghouls, you will have to tune into Part Two of our Two-Part Retrospective on It Came from Outer Space.
Originally posted on April 1, 2000, at 3B Theater.
It Came from Outer Space (1953) Universal International / P: William Alland / D: Jack Arnold / W: Harry Essex, Ray Bradbury / C: Clifford Stine / E: Paul Weatherwax / M: Irving Gertz, Harry Mancini, Ronald Stein / S: Richard Carlson, Barbara Rush, Charles Drake, Joe Sawyer, Russell Johnson, Kathleen Hughes
