It Came from Outer Space (1953) Part Two

As always, this will make a lot more sense if you've read Part One of our Two-Part Retrospective on It Came from Outer Space (1953), where myriad players and influences managed to collide and come together for one of the seminal films that officially kicked off the Sci-Fi Creature Feature boom of the 1950s; and perhaps more importantly, reignited Universal / Universal International’s stagnant genre output.

Now, when we last left the plot, the two telephone linemen, Frank and George, had been confronted and seemingly captured by the alien visitors for reasons that begin to unravel when Putnam (Carlson) and Ellen (Rush) circle back and find their truck run off the road. But the only trace of their friends is some blood smeared across the passenger side door.

As they examine it, something stealthfully stalks them from the rear; and then a ghostly hand enveloped by a familiar fog reaches out for Ellen and touches her shoulder. 

A startled Ellen screams as they spin around. But it's only George (Johnson) -- well, sort of, who looks extremely pale as he rather stiffly assures them all is well before he resumes staring blankly, and without blinking, into the blazing noon-day sun. (This jump scare was one of Ernest Nims suggestions I alluded to in Part One.)

Finally noticing the same glittering trail around the wreck, the alien visitor’s call sign, the couple then spot a bloodied human arm protruding out from behind a nearby rock. Assuming it belongs to Frank, and since there is obviously something really, really wrong with George, fearing one has killed the other, the couple quickly hightails it out of there to inform the Sheriff.

But after they’ve cleared off, it’s revealed George wasn’t really George at all as Frank (Sawyer) regains consciousness and spots the real George, still knocked out, lying beside him. (That bloodied arm the others saw was actually the real George's.)

Obviously, these aliens are shape-shifters, and Alien George freely admits this as he assures these two men they have nothing to fear; and how they are a benevolent species that wouldn't suck Frank's brain dry even if they could. But Alien George warns it will be necessary for them to be detained and replaced indefinitely for reasons they’re not ready to reveal just yet.

Now, by the time Putnam, Ellen and Sheriff Warren (Drake) return to the scene of the alleged crime, everybody, including the truck, is long gone. (Even the alien trail has evaporated.) 

With no evidence of foul play, a steamed Warren is getting a little fed-up with Putnam and all of his wild speculations and accusations. This is compounded when they return to town and spot Frank and George, alive and well, walking down the street -- admittedly rather stiffly.

With the couple at a loss for words, the Sheriff mocks them as he returns to his office. Leaving Ellen behind, Putnam chases the errant repairmen down an alley. Cornered in a shallow entryway, these alien doppelgangers drop the act and reveal themselves to him. 

Once again, they stress they mean no harm, how the real Frank and George are fine, and the reasons for these drastic measures are to procure the needed materials to repair their ship in plain sight without drawing attention.

When asked why the subterfuge, seems these alien visitors feel the human race just isn't quite ready for them yet in their true form. And so, all they ask for is sufficient time to complete the repairs so they can vacate the planet without any hassle. And once they’re done, before they blast off, they will release these two and all the other hostages.

Wait. Other hostages? What other hostages? Yeah, they’ve been busy, having abducted Dr. Snell and several of his assistants, as well as a trio of miners, who were working the old Excelsior mine, whose main shaft conveniently leads to the buried spaceship. All duplicated and replaced and out scrounging for parts.

Reluctantly, Putnam agrees to keep quiet. But later that night, he’s summoned to the Sheriff’s office. Apparently, Frank’s wife (Mullen) is a bit frantic because her husband hasn’t been acting right lately; and she’s convinced whomever that was who came home for supper last night was not her husband. 

Meanwhile, George’s girlfriend, Jane (Hughes), is there, too, sharing the same story, and how George broke a date with her. And believe me, with what she’s packing in that rocket bra, no one in their right mind would ever do that.

After the ladies leave, Putnam breaks his word and reveals the alien’s plan to Warren, who finally starts to come around because it's all starting to fall into place with the other strange events of the day: the hardware store being robbed; the disappearing lineman -- and their truck, with all its tools and equipment; coupled with several other missing persons reports can only mean one thing -- Putnam was right all along.

But despite all the mounting evidence, Warren still can't wrap his head around how aliens from outer space are behind all of this. But the clincher comes when the aliens telephone them, who report they have now taken Ellen hostage, too, grabbed on the open road by Alien Frank, and want a palaver with Putnam alone. Warren doesn’t like it but agrees to let Putnam go to this rendezvous.

Lured to the mine entrance by an alien disguised as Ellen, who quickly retreats inside, into the shadows, but it instructs Putnam to remain outside in the light. He complies, but has a ton of questions about motive and opportunity. 

Once more reiterating how they don’t want any trouble, the alien emissary promises its comrades will free the others once their task is completed; and then begs for more time to finish the repairs without interference, saying they will only need a few more hours to do so. Then, they can get the hell off this planet before they’re discovered and wind-up in a test-tube.

Here, the alien also reveals their mission wasn’t to visit the Earth at all but they essentially broke down on their way to another world, and how a navigational error saw them crash-landed here. Then, Putnam demands to see the alien, the real alien, in its true form, as a show of good faith or he’ll refuse the responsibility of protecting them.

And here, we finally get a good look at the mono-optical blob alien as it undulates out of the darkness, off-gassing the whole way. Putnam, of course, is horrified by what he sees and has to turn away, basically proving the alien’s point that we terrestrials aren’t yet ready to embrace anything extraterrestrial.

Once back in town, Putnam lays it all out to Warren, who rejects the idea of waiting and wants to barrel in and rescue Ellen and the others by force. Putnam protests and it comes to blows when they spot the fake Frank loading up the truck and leaving town with more needed parts. 

And while Putnam wins the fight, despite the warnings of deadly consequences if he interferes with the aliens, the Sheriff ignores all of it and starts rounding up an armed posse.

Said mob soon catches up with Alien Frank and forces him off the road at speed in a hail of gunfire, where it dies in a fiery explosion. 

Meanwhile, Putnam manages to beat the others to the mine entrance where he finds Alien Ellen waiting for him.

Feeling betrayed, the alien tries to trick Putnam into falling to his death in a deep crevice. When that fails, it produces what turns out to be a deadly weapon. Its intentions clear, Alien Ellen opens fire and a deadly beam cuts through the cave. Luckily, Putnam proves a better shot and Alien Ellen plunges to its death instead, reverting to its true form as it expires and plummets into a pool of water below.

Then, with Warren and his posse closing in, Putnam presses deeper into the mine until he finds the alien spacecraft in a large cavern -- and is startled to come face to face with himself! Their leader has taken on his appearance, explaining the disappearance of all his clothes in an earlier scene.

Unfortunately, the aliens don’t have enough time to escape and have decided to just destroy everything to prevent their technology from being discovered and compromised by the Earthlings, including all native witnesses, with some kind of giant ray-gun -- we assume the same device that caused the landslide, presumably on the lowest setting.

Thus, as it warms up to the highest setting, Putnam pleads for a second chance and goes to bat for humanity. He then tries to convince the alien leader that he can hold-off the vigilantes long enough for them to escape if they’ll just release the hostages to him now.

Reasoning that if he fails they can always use that big ray-gun anyway, Putnam's logic works, all the hostages are released, and they head back to the surface while the aliens get back to work.

Once they reach the mine entrance, Putnam conspires with the freed miners to dynamite the entrance shut, sealing it off before the Sheriff arrives. This drastic maneuver works splendidly as a delaying tactic, giving the aliens the last few precious minutes they needed.

And after they blast off and head back to the cosmos, Putnam and Ellen embrace. When Ellen asks if they’re gone for good, Putnam says no. They just came to Earth at the wrong time. He then wistfully hopes that when they do come back, when that day comes, hopefully, mankind will be better prepared to greet them, which brings us to...

The term Xenomorph originates from a mash-up of the Greek term Xenos, meaning stranger, guest, or something foreign, and Morph, which means to physically change from one form to another. Xenomorphic translates as “pertaining to something having a form other than its own.” And while it’s mostly associated with the alien from Alien (1978) and the resulting franchise, It Came from Outer Space actually beat them to the taxonomy-punch by more than 25 years.

In Bradbury’s treatment, the alien Xenomorphs are never fully realized, describing them, as only Bradbury can, as “a hint, a suggestion of something black moving against black. A faint whirring of sparks, like fireflies, glitter, a whisper of steam, a soft breathing.” There’s also a brief mention of “a phosphorescent, elongated eye” reflected off a car’s windshield. And when Putnam confronts the alien at the mine entrance, “We get the merest glimmer, a suggestion only, of something from a nightmare, something that suggests a spider, a lizard, a tiger, something dark and terrible, something that glistens softly.” 

The Richmond News Leader (July 9, 1953). 

In hindsight, it would appear Bradbury would borrow some ideas from a yet to be published short story, A Matter of Taste, written around 1952, where Earth-astronauts arrive on a mysterious jungle world inhabited by seven-foot tall spiders; and while benevolent, these arachnids just can’t get past the eye-test of their visitors.

Said Bradbury, “Until such time as we can differentiate between outward appearances and the creature in action, we will not be in a position to live peacefully on this world, or be prepared to accept visitors from Mars or any other planet. Before we start looking around to find a large 1000-pound boot with which to step on a nine-foot-tall, spider-like arrival from Mars, I think we should ready ourselves to consider whether this is really a spider or an intellect with an I.Q. of 180, peace-loving, and all-in-all a good-thinking creation of the Lord. We have stepped on too many spiders in the last 2000 years without stopping to look if we were not also stepping on our dreams.”

Said Alland (Weaver, 1995), “In a sense, that’s what It Came from Outer Space is about: Don’t destroy things just because you don’t understand them. Don’t try to read evil into what is not understandable. And don’t be afraid of the unknown. Those were the points the story was supposed to get across.”

Thus, Bradbury felt it was better to leave the alien visitors to the audience's imagination, feeling it would be far more effective than whatever Universal’s prop department could dream up. Luckily for him, both Alland and Arnold agreed.

“I never wanted [audiences] to see what these creatures looked like,” recalled Alland (Weaver, 1995). “What I wanted to show was our people taking a look at ’em and they’re absolutely appalled and dismayed and they scream and faint -- but we don’t show the creatures to the audience.”

Arnold echoed these sentiments during a later interview on a German TV talk show (-- quoted from Weaver, 2017), “I wanted no monster at all. I don’t think that one can invent anything that comes close to the imagination of the audience, especially in a film like I envisioned it … I did not want the monster to really come out. It should remain vague, shadowy. And I wanted to give him a different voice than the one in which they speak when they assume human form. The gist of the story was this: If something is different from us, then we hate it immediately. And that’s still true. That’s what was important to me, and not how the alien looks.”

As originally conjured, the aliens didn’t even physically transform to duplicate their human counterparts, but used a form of mental telepathy instead to implant suggestions or a delusion into the witnesses’ muddled minds to cloud what they were actually seeing. A method used to near perfection later in the TV-series Resident Alien (2021-2025) based on a comic book of the same name. “The aliens had originally been conceived as lizard-like creatures with the power to alter our perceptions of them,” recalled Arnold (Reemes, 1988). “In the final realization they are actually able to transform themselves into any shape, thus implying the ultimate primacy of mind over matter.”

Which is why, when filming on It Came from Outer Space officially wrapped on March 9, 1953, no aliens actually appeared on any of the exposed film -- just suggestive POV shots and brief glimpses of something moving around in the dark: “Black against black … whispers … soft breathing … Always, while we do not see specifics, we sense some presence … a mist, a series of whispering sounds.”

However, on March 27, 1953, after screening a rough cut, William Goetz and Ernest Nims and the rest of the U-I brass felt something was missing and ordered Bud Westmore and his design department to cook-up some concept art for the missing Xenomorphs. 

And according to Weaver, transcribing from the minutes of a follow-up executive meeting on March 30, “If the art directors come up with something better than the test scenes now in the picture, we will reshoot the footage in which the creatures appear.”

Said Alland (Weaver, 1995), “In those days films were made on very strict budgets. Time was also an element. There was only a certain amount of time I could utilize my energies in fighting for what I wanted in the film, and I had to make compromises.”  

Still, Alland would do his best to steer them in the right direction on these proposed changes, telling Weaver, “What I wanted to convey is that what they look like was so beyond anything we can accept that we couldn’t have (technically) achieved it. 

"But the studio insisted on making [an alien]. What I did when Universal insisted on a monster was go to a lab and shoot some pictures of amoebas, using an electronic microscope -- I wanted it to be a kind of an amoeba creature.” But when his bosses rejected this notion with prejudice, Alland essentially threw up his hands in surrender and told them to figure it out for themselves.

“We don’t want any of the conventional comic book spacemen who resemble a cross between deep sea divers and an octopus,” said Alland (The Valley Times, April 6, 1953). "So we’ve polled leading scientific minds around the country in an attempt to get a composite gander at a hypothetical space being."   

The Washington Daily News (June 23, 1953). 

Alland allegedly sent inquiries to some 40 scientists around the country. And as the answers rolled in, “It’s almost uncanny. So many outer space beings as sketched by these men are similar in so many aspects that I’m beginning to think the boys know a lot more about the infinite than we believe they do." Alland then turned these results over to Westmore and his crew, saying “a lot of ectoplasm and luminescence will be involved.” 

Said Arnold, “I only wanted to use its point of view. I only wanted to show a flash, something indefinable. But the studio, in all the science fiction films we made, were always looking for something exploitable. They wanted something for the three sheets and the ads. I balked … But the studio insisted on having it in. I wanted to keep it to a minimum, just the suggestion of something.”

Ergo, Arnold agreed, over protest, to let the special effects people draft a few mock-ups of the aliens and then he’d decide on one. “But I will make a maximum of two cuts, and none longer than a few seconds. I will not dwell on it; I do not want to see how this works, I just want a glimpse … Then they came-up with this great eye that I did not really want. That was for the box office. This allowed them to advertise, with this eye on the posters."

In he end, “It was a trade-off, letting me do what I wanted to do for the body of the film, which I thought was more important than one shot of what the alien being was supposed to look like. I figured I came out ahead anyway.”

Millicent Patrick. 

Like everything else, the lore on what happened next on who did what, when, and where has been muddled over time or victim to fading memories, ingrained recollections, attempts to glom onto credit whether it was earned or not, and sadly, a form of gatekeeping to preserve the narrative to match your own personal head canon. And to compound matters further, there’s not much physical evidence left on the making of the Xenomorphs thanks to U-I’s smothering blanket of secrecy on the production, which saw most of the FX materials immediately destroyed once filming wrapped to, well, keep it all under wraps.

According to studio publicity materials, one of the people tasked with visualizing the Xenomorphs was Millicent Patrick. “Let the other gals have the Hollywood wolves,” Patrick told Carlisle Carver for The Lansing State Journal (February 7, 1954). “I’m very happy, thank you, with my monsters.”

The Kalamazoo Gazette (February 14, 1954). 

Patrick broke into Hollywood in 1939 through Walt Disney Studios, tracing and painting animation cells in the drudging trenches of the Ink and Paint department. But by 1940 she had moved up to R 'n' D in the Animation and Effects division, which specialized in naturalistic animated effects on things like fire, smoke, moving water and rain, which is best personified by the Silly Symphony short The Old Mill (1937) and the “April Showers” sequence from Bambi (1942), where a gentle rain evolves into a terrifying thunderstorm, which, for my money, is one of the greatest domestic animated sequences ever committed to film.

She would then become one of the first female animators for Disney, and her work would be featured in four segments of Fantasia (1940), most notably the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence, where the demon Chernabog summoned his minions for a late-night hellish hootenanny. She would also work on Dumbo (1941) but would walk out in solidarity when the Disney animators went on strike in May, 1941, demanding better wages and working conditions.

When the strike was settled in September, Patrick would not return, citing health reasons in the form of crippling migraines. Then, after spending a brief period as a model, Patrick was spotted by a talent agent, which landed her bit parts in films like A Song is Born (1948), Westward the Women (1951) and Limelight (1952).

It was while working as an extra in U-I’s The World in His Arms (1952) when Patrick first crossed paths with Bud Westmore, who was so impressed by her artistic abilities he hired her on the spot to work for him in the studio’s makeup department. Her first assignment was designing pirate visages for the Errol Flynn vehicle Against All Flags (1952), and her second would be cooking-up some aliens for It Came from Outer Space.

Early drafts of the Xenomorph. 

“The writers tell me what they want and I’m supposed to sketch it so the designers can create the costume from my drawing,” said Patrick in an interview with Gloria Donaldson of The Honolulu Star Bulletin (June 30, 1955). “Sometimes I draw 70 pictures before the writer gets exactly what he wants.” And what the production wanted was something that suggested ‘a spider, a lizard, a web blowing in the wind, a milk-white something dark and terrible, something like a jellyfish, something that glistens softly like a snake.’

“I live with these monsters for many weeks before they go to work before the camera,” said Patrick (The Bay City Times, February 9, 1954). “They grow up on my sketch-board in front of me; and sometimes after I’ve seen them come to life in the finished movie version, they scare me just as much as anybody else.”

Design and mock-up of the rejected version. 

When all the sketches were submitted, Goetz selected two designed by Patrick for further development, which led to an eventual screen test for both before fully committing to one or the other. The choices were between a one-eyed, gelatinous mass while the other was more of a traditional bug-eyed alien with an exposed pulsating brain. Both were realized, but the cyclopean blob would be the one to pass the screen test and be anointed officially as the >It< that came from outer space.

“We made it out of all kinds of stuff, spun glass, spun sugar, all kinds of odd things, anything to make it look not-human,” said Robert Boyle, the film’s art director (Weaver, 2017). “It was not very big, maybe the size of a basketball. I’ve forgotten exactly how it was manipulated, but I think it was suspended by filaments.” (This tracks.)

But even Boyle thought they were making a mistake, telling Weaver, “It was my feeling we should never see the people from outer space. No, never show these people, just show the effect they have on the characters who do see them.” But the studio insisted, said Boyle, “Because audiences expected to see them.

“I struggled against making it at all, but my arguments were to no avail and I finally gave in because the studio insisted on having scenes in which we saw the creatures from outer space, which I always hated. We did it, and it wasn’t very good.” And for that, he laid the blame mostly on Alland and Arnold. “That was another disappointment. They sort of buckled under the studio’s request.”

And so, on April 17th, four principals, Carlson, Rush, Sawyer and Johnson, and the three actors who played the miners, were put back on the payroll for a round of re-shoots. The first completed test shots were of the alien coming out of the mine. It was shot at several speeds, with or without smoke, to see which approach worked best. As for their new co-star, Carlson referred to it as Junior, screenwriter Harry Essex referred to it as the Fried Egg, but the name that stuck was the Glob, and those who were attacked were referred to as being Globbed.

Bradbury, of course, was livid over this fateful decision. “I warned them not to bring the monster out in the light -- ever. They ignored my advice. The bad moments in the film come when the monster does just that -- stops being mysterious, steps out, and becomes a laugh-riot.”

And the author continued his lament in an interview with The Perfect Vision (-- quoted from Weaver, 2017), “I learned all my lessons from Val Lewton. Use darkness; use suggestion. Well, Universal thought they had to bring the monster up in the light and they did, stupidly. The film can be improved by cutting 20 seconds out of it.”

Even Essex chimed in on the subject (Weaver, 1988), “I don’t know why Arnold decided to show [the alien] several times; I will say he was a very bright, very careful man, and I’m sure that if he thought it had to be seen several times, then it was probably to the picture’s benefit.”

On top of the drama over the inclusion / exclusion of the Xenomorphs, the production of It Came from Outer Space was fraught with danger. Actor Joe Sawyer would cut his leg open up on the telephone pole while filming the 'wind in the wires' scene, resulting in several stitches. But that pales in comparison to what happened to property man Carl Lawrence, who accidentally walked into the still spinning rear rotor of the helicopter used to transport our heroes to and from the impact site, resulting in a fractured skull and a broken jaw. Lawrence would also lose an eye. As to who was at fault, the victim would later settle with the owners of the helicopter for his injuries.

And on top of all of that, the production would get caught up in a nasty worldwide influenza outbreak. “Hollywood’s glamour citizens began to find themselves in new roles today -- they’re being cast in The Great Flu Outbreak along with the rest of the nation,” reported Aline Mosby (The Times-Union, January 28, 1953). “With millions around the world down with the sniffles, celebrities like Marilyn Monroe to Jane Russell were resting in their mansions or recovering weakly by their swimming pools.

“City health officials say the outbreak probably will hit this area in full force next month. But already cameras were grinding to a stop as stars, movie-makers, and technicians wobbled home from the flu. 20th Century-Fox studio was hardest hit with three pictures closed because of illness.” Along with Monroe and Russell, Mosby also listed Jeanne Crane, Robert Cummings, Alan Young, Donald O’Connor, Gail Storm, Richard Widmark and Debra Paget as being knocked out by the virulent bug, and the resulting delays in production on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), The Robe (1953) and Dangerous Crossing (1953).

Richard Carlson was also hard hit by the bug about halfway through filming on It Came from Outer Space. And while Carlson was sent home early after shooting a scene with co-star Charles Drake, the production did not stop as shots were shuffled to shoot around the missing star, which wasn’t easy because he appears in nearly every scene of the movie. But ever the trooper, Carlson would return to work the very next day.

In her February 27, 1953, column, industry gossip Hedda Hopper gushed about how “Carlson was cutting himself out a whole new career with pictures concerning adult science fiction themes. The first, The Magnetic Monster (1953), is an interesting film, done in a documentary fashion, and made at an amazingly low cost … Meanwhile, Dick is starring in It Came from Outer Space. Universal-International is keeping that one so tightly under wraps that Dick tells me even he has to wear an identification badge to get on the sound stage where it’s being shot.”

But Carlson needed no ID badge amongst the B-Movie Brethren or Creature Feature Aficionados, who set the prototype of many a sci-fi square-jaw to come with his portrayal of Dr. Jeffrey Stewart in The Magnetic Monster and astronomer John Putnam in It Came from Outer Space.

“How come Richard Carlson appears in so many science fiction movies?" asked columnist Bob Thomas (The Flint Journal, August 7, 1953). The answer? "Oh, he’s part Martian ... The person who is most amused by this gag is Carlson. He can afford to laugh -- he’s the busiest actor in Hollywood, working like a beaver in such pseudo-science epics as The Magnetic Monster, It Came from Outer Space, Riders to the Stars (1954) and The Maze (1953) -- although he classifies the latter as more of a horror story.”

As to why the actor was in such demand for this type of role? “I guess it's because every science fiction story there has to be a scientist,” Carlson explained to Thomas. “I’m one of the few actors who look the academic type. People believe that I might have just stepped out of a laboratory.”

The Grand Island Independent (August, 1953).

And Carlson was a bona fide academic, too, who graduated from the University of Minnesota summa cum laude with a degree in English and European history. He would then further his studies for one semester at Harvard before dropping out to pursue a career in acting. After a stint in the theater, Carlson broke into Hollywood in the late 1930s courtesy of David O’Selznic, with notable roles opposite Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard in The Ghost Breakers (1940) and Abbott and Costello in Hold that Ghost (1941).

But just when it appeared his career was picking up steam as a leading man in A-Pictures like Little Foxes (1941) and B-Pictures like Fly By Night (1942), the actor lost some momentum while serving in the Navy during World War II. But he started fighting his way back up the call sheet after his discharge in 1947, appearing in a rather lame-duck role, sure, for King Solomon’s Mines (1950) but fared better in The Sound of Fury (1950).

But Carlson would finally find his niche, for good or ill, with his appearance in The Magnetic Monster, which was produced by Ivan Tors -- Gog (1954), Flipper (1963) -- and written and directed by Curt Siodmak -- The Wolf Man (1941), Creature with the Atom Brain (1955). Carlson, Tors, and Siodmak had formed a production company, A-Men Productions, with plans to follow up their first feature with two more in the same vein: The Meteor Hunter and Space Station. Not quite sure what became of Space Station, but Meteor Hunter would be released as Riders to the Stars, which Carlson also directed.

Said Carlson (Thomas, 1953), “That’s why I’m doing the same thing as [fellow actor] William Holden, who is my best friend. We’re learning everything we can about the production end of the business. You’ve got to have something to jump to when they get tired of you as an actor. It can happen overnight.”

Now, one of the most interesting tidbits I dug up about Carlson for this retrospective was found in a blurb for The San Francisco Examiner (June 8, 1953), where he referred to his home as The Richard Carlson Museum of Motion Picture Curiosia, which stored his “unique collection of motion picture souvenirs that overflowed into every room.” So much so the actor feared he might have to rent out space to hold said overflow.

Apparently a huge film buff, Carlson had been collecting Hollywood ephemera since 1943, when he held the winning ticket at a charity bazaar, which netted him the derby worn by Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush (1925). His second item was a false beard once worn by John Barrymore. “With a hat and a beard, I was in business,” said Carlson.

Other items in his ersatz museum included a leopard-skinned loincloth worn by Elmo Lincoln, the original Tarzan (1918); a pair of Harold Lloyd’s signature spectacles; a Klansman outfit from Birth of a Nation (1915); and an Arabian headdress worn by Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik (1921). But it wasn’t just costumes and props, as Carlson’s collection also included a 1909 movie camera, D.W. Griffith’s editing equipment, and one of the microphones used in capturing the sound of The Jazz Singer (1927).

Barbara Rush, meanwhile, was a last second replacement. Originally, Julie Adams was cast as Ellen Fields but the studio reassigned her to star in Wings of the Hawk (1953) instead.

A graduate of the Pasadena Playhouse, Rush first landed at Paramount and would make her big screen debut in Douglas Sirk’s The First Legion (1951), playing a cripple who’s miraculously healed through pious means. She would then get her feet wet in the sci-fi pool in the George Pal production of When Worlds Collide (1951), playing the female lead opposite Richard Derr in this race against the clock to get a space ark built and launched before a rogue star plows into the Earth; a film whose financial success in no small part finally got Paramount off the pot to give Pal a greenlight on his adaptation of War of the Worlds (1954).

And after a whirlwind trip to the wild west for Flaming Feather (1952) and the high seas for Prince of Pirates (1953), Rush reported for duty at Universal-International for It Came from Outer Space. “I was somebody who was just bent on being better,” Rush told Weaver (Classic Images, February, 2017). “I studied, I took classes, I worked with voice teachers, I did everything I could to improve.”

Sadly, through no fault of Rush’s, mind you, the character of Ellen Fields would also set the template for her type of character in this type of film, too; on the surface independent, but there mostly as a screamer, someone to be menaced and rescued by the square jaw. However, the chemistry between Rush and Carlson just crackles on screen. (I kinda see them as a proto-Rob and Lora Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show.)

And Rush was one helluva screamer, too, and was so good at her craft someone decided they should be saved in perpetuity -- at least according to The Los Angeles Evening Citizen News (May 30, 1953), who reported, “The spine-tingling screams of Barbara Rush during the eerie sequences of Universal-International’s It Came from Outer Space were so excellent that four of them have been placed permanently in the studio’s sound library.” (It'll be bigger than the Wilhelm, says I.)

“In so many of the films about outer space and the aliens coming, the aliens came to kill us,” said Rush on the tenets of the film (Weaver, 2017). “For some reason, they made them killers. And Ray Bradbury thought, as I thought, if these aliens were bright enough to get to our planet, they wouldn’t want to kill us. They’d be smart people! I had great admiration for Bradbury because he was a wonderful writer.”

Rush also concurred that showing the aliens in the film was a tactical mistake, telling Weaver, “The movie would have been much better without them. You have people in high places making decisions that make you think, ‘Arrrgghh. Why don’t they let us alone?’ So now the movie has several shots of the giant eye, and the [superimposed POV shots] of the eye fibrillating.

“A monster wasn’t necessary," Rush continued. "The unknown is always more mysterious. When they make it real, then you know what it looks like! It’s one thing to open the closet door and see where a mysterious noise is coming from; but to open a closet door and it’s dark and you can’t tell where the noise is coming from? … Now that’s scary!”

As for the third tip of the oddly defined love triangle in our tale of alien visitors, Charles Drake had one of those faces that kind of doomed him to roles of second bananas, sensitives, weasels, and guys who got pushed around a lot -- epitomized by his role as the cowardly milksop in Winchester ‘73 (1951).

Apparently, Drake won a contract at RKO after winning second place in a radio contest, which makes one wonder who got what for first place? This would land him a fairly steamy scene opposite Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (1942). But like with Carlson, his career would suffer a major reset button after serving in the Army as an engineer during World War II.

He came back well enough, playing Elwood P. Dowd’s psychiatrist, who learns a few things about the joys of co-existing with Pookas in Harvey (1950). And then he played the heavy in You Never Can Tell (1951), where, if you can get your head around this, Drake poisons a dog, who is reincarnated as Dick Powell, who gets revenge. That’s me shrugging right now.

The actor was completely serviceable in his role as Matt Warren, the alarmist, but Drake came off best in a couple of later films headlined by Audie Murphy: To Hell and Back (1955), a bio-pic about Murphy’s highly decorated time in the service; and the western No Name on the Bullet (1959), where Drake got to play the hero for once in another crackerjack tale of mounting paranoia, also directed by Arnold, which sees several town members convinced that bad guy Murphy has rode into town to gun them down over past sins -- but which one and which sin?

And while the three leads carry the film with ease, it is nearly stolen out from underneath them by Joe Sawyer and Russell Johnson, essentially playing dual roles in the film: human and alien versions of themselves.

Like Rush, Sawyer was a graduate of the Pasadena Playhouse. A lifelong character actor, he was one of those guys; instantly recognizable but hard to put a name to a face. He was a staple in Warner Bros. run of gangster films of the 1930s, playing both sides of the fence. And he turned in great performances for John Ford in The Informer (1935) and with Boris Karloff in The Walking Dead (1936). Not to mention he was part of Sterling Hayden’s doomed crew in The Killing (1956).

Sawyer also starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest (1936) and Deadline U.S.A. (1952) as a memorable enforcer for the local mob boss that Bogart’s newspaper is trying to take down before it folds. Still, one of his best performances might’ve just been in It Came from Outer Space. Sawyer’s delivery of the 'wind in the wires' scene really cements the eerie mood of the film.

“Joe Sawyer was the best,” Johnson told Weaver with much enthusiasm (Weaver, 2017). “He started in films in the late ’20s or the very early ’30s, he was in films for years and he was a real fine film actor. And, a great influence on people on set: He was a happy guy, and that showed, and he could tell stories starting in the morning and never repeat himself all day, about his experiences in the film industry … He was a great character actor, and he was wonderful, and I had great admiration for him.”

“The film took a lot of energy because we shot it twice, once with the 3D camera, which was manufactured right there at Universal, and again with the regular 2D camera technique,” recalled Johnson in his autobiography Here On Gilligan’s Island (1993), which also chronicled his career before he got typecast forever as the Professor, Roy Hinkley, a MacGyver before MacGyver was even a thing, and he only had coconuts to work with, who had the misfortune of taking the longest three-hour tour of ever.

Alan Hale Jr., Johnson, Bob Denver (Gilligan's Island). 

Johnson would tell Weaver that the film faced many technical difficulties, explaining, “The 3D cameras and all that stuff were built on the studio lot by the camera guys, and there were all kinds of camera problems and so forth that had to be solved in the midst of shooting.”

Johnson had enlisted in the Army at the age of 18, serving as a bombardier on a B-25 until his plane was shot down over the Philippines. After recovering from his extensive injuries, and a stint in the Actor’s Lab, Johnson made his big screen debut with a bit part in Rancho Notorious (1951), which was followed by a far meatier role as a sadistic frat-rat in Paul Henreid’s screed against pledge-hazing, For Men Only (1952). U-I was so impressed by his performance that they signed him to a contract, where the actor played mostly heavies in films like Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki (1952) and Law and Order (1953), where he played the derelict younger brother of Ronald Reagan’s crusading sheriff.

As the 1950s progressed, Johnson was also part of Roger Corman's unofficial stock company, appearing in films like Rock All Night (1957) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Johnson was all in on It Came from Outer Space, too, with only one caveat: “The pallor of that face!” said Johnson (Weaver, 2017). “The only thing I didn’t like about making that movie was, they put gray makeup on Joe Sawyer and me [for the scenes as their alien doppelgängers], and when we would walk into the commissary, everybody moved away from us.”

Said Arnold (-- quoted from Weaver, 2017), “I just had good actors. I said, ‘Look, you’re an alien. Everything seems somehow stilted. You do not know exactly how to walk, or greet, or talk to someone, although you can of course speak. But this culture is completely alien to you.’ I showed that in quite different ways.

“For example, when Sawyer (actually that was Johnson) took an unblinking look into the sun, or when one appeared in the form of Barbara Rush. She then stands up on a hill, and suddenly she's somewhere else. The actors played as if they were really aliens. I wanted the aliens to assume as much as possible of the personality and the physical characteristics of the people in whose shape they slipped into -- for their own safety, so that they were not discovered.

“For the actors, it was a difficult task, because they had to act almost like zombies,” Arnold continued. “We discussed the details on the set before we filmed, and tried various ways. Some things were simply bizarre, and I did not accept them. Every effort had to be very subtle, and I think that worked well. Exaggerations would have made the movie into a comedy.”

But Rush still thought it was kinda funny, recalling (Weaver, 2017), “Russ and that darling man Joe Sawyer, they were made up to look kind of chalky. And in the scene where they walk down the main street, they were playing aliens trying to look like what they thought a human being might look like … But they hadn’t quite learned yet. So they were just staring straight ahead like robots. They were trying to look natural and of course they looked just the opposite. If you saw them walking down the street, looking neither right nor left but straight ahead, you’d know right away, ‘Here come the aliens!’ You could spot ’em a mile away [laughs]!”

Which brings us to the curious case of Kathleen Hughes, who really put the rocket in the rocket-bra, and whose billing seems excessive when considering her brief screen-time.

Hughes had co-starred with Johnson in For Men Only, which also earned her a contract at U-I, who had visions of turning her into their own version of Marilyn Monroe.

“I heard that Universal was going to do their first 3D movie, so I got hold of the script,” Hughes told Weaver (Science Fiction Confidential, 2010). “I’d already heard that Barbara Rush and Richard Carlson were doing the leads, and so I looked through the script to see if there was anything I could play and I found this little part. I thought that would be fun. So I went to the front office and I said, ‘I want to play that part’ … I just begged and begged and begged.”

Hughes would land the role, which also gives some credence to the storied and sordid tales of Jack Arnold being a bit of a casting couch / skirt chaser. Either way, “They used me to test the 3D cameras -- because I was so three-dimensional,” laughed Hughes. “They had me in a bathing suit, parading up and down on a little platform -- that’s how they tested their cameras. And that’s why there’s a clip of me [in the end credits] of It Came from Outer Space in a bathing suit -- that was from the camera test. So I was glad that I had done that, because it gave me some extra footage!”

Commenting on her screen presence, Variety noted that Hughes showed “sticks and stones are not the only things that can be projected into the auditorium.” And Hughes would get a career boost, too, telling Emily Belser (June, 1953), “I had played so many small parts as sweet nothings and gotten nowhere that even my uncle, [actor Hugh Herbert], told me to get out of the business. Then I landed this sexy bit, and convinced ’em I could sizzle as well as simmer.” And Hughes would ride this momentum into a starring role in Arnold’s follow up 3D feature, The Glass Web (1953), billed as “That 3D sensation of It Came from Outer Space.”

And while Hughes added a lot of sex appeal, the unsung hero of It Came from Outer Space might’ve been Wilbur Mackle. Who?! That’s what I said, too, until columnist Howard McClary cleared it up in The Los Angeles Daily News (March 1, 1953), “He’s a groaner. Literally, that is.”

Apparently by day, Mackle was a busboy in the studio commissary, but at night “he quite often augmented his salary by some high class moaning and groaning in the studio sound department.” Mackle had been using his unique talents since 1934, reported McClary, “who could moan and groan better than any actor in the business.”

“You gotta start ‘em low and bring it up the windpipe,” Mackle explained with pride. “At the moment he is going full blast with his diaphragm didoes by dubbing assorted moans and groans for It Came from Outer Space, which, we are told is just loaded with weird sounds, not the least of which will be Mackle’s ghoulish groanings.”

After filming wrapped for the second time on It Came from Outer Space, and the studio’s embargo on the production was finally lifted, McClary was soon at it again with this >slightly< exaggerated report: 

“Behind the locked doors of a studio sound stage this week a Xenomorph was born.” said McClary (The Los Angeles Daily News, May 11, 1953). “He lived a brief lifespan of 10 hours and then passed on to a flaming Valhalla in a backlot incinerator.

“And how many people does it take to bring a Xenomorph to life? A gander at the call sheet on the day he lived and died shows conclusively that he was no little problem. For example, it took a 3D camera crew of nine men. A head electrician and 14 assistants. Four projectionists. Four camera crane operators. A sound crew of five. Eight prop men and five special-effects men. One plumber and one boiler operator. Two painters. Four members of the studio music department. Two trailers. Director Jack Arnold and four assistants. Four makeup men and a hairdresser. This polygot team of technicians, working from noon until 10pm, created the entire lifespan of a ‘star’ who will be seen, at most, for six-seconds on the screen.

“Sworn to secrecy about the physical appearance of the Xenomorph until he makes his debut on the screen, the entire crew attended his cremation services at the studio incinerator. And if there’s such a thing as a celestial Happy Hunting Ground, that's probably where old Xeno has gone.”

And while this whole thing reeks of studio publicity dictated horseshit, it should be reiterated that hardly any production materials of the alien Xenomorph actually survived -- paperwork, photos -- except for the rejected version, which would be later recycled and tweaked into a Metaluna Mutant for This Island Earth (1955). You can even catch a glimpse of the original mold in “The Sign of Satan” episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (S2.E27, 1964), where it appears in the final wraparound segment, menacing the titular host. 

I also managed to dig up an amazing still of Universal's second wave of monsters from the 1950s, where they try to pass off the rejected mock-up as one of the Xenomorphs by giving it a fright wig made of angel hair. Pictured in the photo are Bud Westmore (left) and Jack Kevan (right -- noticeably absent was Patrick, and we'll get to why in a sec), with a Metaluna Mutant, the Faux Xenomorph, and the Gill-Man sandwiched between them.   

Officially, It Came from Outer Space would wrap for the second and final time on April 23, 1953. Thus, as the film entered the post-production phase it nearly went through yet another massive overhaul visually when the studio announced it would now be tinted with the “scientifically perfected eye-resting Full-Sepia Mono-Color!”

Box Office Magazine (April 4, 1953). 

Probably the most famous use of the reddish or amber hued Sepia-Tone was the non-color segments of The Wizard of Oz (1939). Warners would use it to punch-up Beast from 20000 Fathoms (1953), too, and Columbia would use it on their 3D film Man in the Dark (1953), which was released early enough, and looked bad enough because too much light was lost through the polarizing 3D filters, that U-I quickly abandoned these plans. 

Meanwhile, Paul Weatherwax had been editing films since the silents, and his best work was probably on The Naked City (1948), for which he won a deserved Academy Award, and the kinky film noir The Prowler (1951). He’d worked with Arnold before on Girls in the Night, and there’s a nice momentum to the picture as things ramp-up to the climax.

Now, there is one tremendous gaffe that appears in the film’s first few moments that made it into the picture, and it's kind of hard to miss as the alien ship roars across the desert sky and then barrels right at the audience.

The prop ship was a metal framework molded into a sphere with mounted fins, all about the size of a bowling ball. It was filled with a magnesium powder for the flaming effect and ran along a wire. But when it came in for a crash landing, shot through a series of mirrors, the flare from the burning magnesium reflected off the mirror badly. One will assume there was neither time nor money for any re-shoots or perhaps a hope that audiences would be too busy ducking out of the way to notice -- though it should be noted this gaffe appears to have been edited out of most current digital releases.

But aside from that error, the work of David Horsley and Roswell Hoffman and their FX crew was impressive. I love the bit where we see Putnam and Ellen leave in their car from the Xenomorph's point of view as they drive out a frame. And when its view shifts, we cut to a miniature car going hellbent for the forced-perspective horizon. 

Special shout-out to those nameless technicians who worked on all the miniature sets in the film, which played splendidly. Also to all the craftsmen and set decorators who brought the desert indoors or the faux mineshaft. And I don't even want to fathom how hard it was to shoot the split screen sequences at the end in 3D during the film's climax when Carlson confronts his carbon copy. 

One of my favorite FX gags takes place in the mineshaft, when Putnam confronts Alien Ellen, who fires its weapon at him and the resulting impact as it burns and cleaves a scar into the rocks behind him. Sharp eyes will also note that the alien craft’s control panel began life as Queen Allura’s Visor Screen from Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953).

As for the soundtrack, like a lot of U-I Creature Features of the 1950s, it was provided by the three-punch combo of Irving Gertz, Henry Mancini and Herman Stein. According to the website Monstrous Movie Music (1996), “Universal’s collaborative scores could occasionally sound non-uniform; but because of the equality of the composers’ contributions in this film, as well as the way each of the composer’s cues are spread evenly throughout the picture, It Came From Outer Space’s score has a very cohesive feel to it. And despite the fact that Gertz still sounds like Gertz, Stein like Stein, and Mancini like Mancini, the composite score created by them has a very unified feeling, one that creates a moody and unearthly atmosphere filled with aural jolts to complement the 3D thrills of the picture.”

Dr. Samuel Hoffman. 

The soundtrack also leaned into the use of a Theremin, played by Dr. Samuel Hoffman -- mostly because he was the only one who could coax similar sounds out of it consistently. Usually used as an instrumental representation of "psychotic disorders," it would become a staple of science fiction films of the 1950s, with its eerie, otherworldly, and sometimes ear-splitting tones rattling audiences out of their seats in the new stereophonic process.

To lure audiences into the theater, the studio turned to artist Joseph Smith for the posters and ad mats. When it comes to movie posters of the 1950s, Smith only comes second behind the great Reynold Brown IMHO. It was Smith who cooked up that giant eyeball hemorrhaging goo or puss.

The Los Angeles Daily Mirror (June 10, 1953). 

Meanwhile, as theaters scrambled to install 3D projectors they were now also forced to widen their screens to match the new wider screen formats. And not only that, but speaker systems had to be updated for the new stereophonic sound, too. As reported in The Evening Vanguard (July 1, 1953), one theater reported “in the current remodeling alone more than $50,000 has been spent [on the upgrade].”

Thus, a film like It Came from Outer Space was a big gamble all around. Would it pay off? U-I would get their answer quick enough after a sneak preview at the Leimart Theater a mere 11 days after the film wrapped. The audience reaction was, well, out of this world.

The film would hold a dual World Premiere on May 26, 1953, at the Pantages and RKO Hillstreet Theaters in the heart of Hollywood. U-I would charter a helicopter to fly Carlson and Rush between the theaters, though Rush had no memory of this. It was a star-studded affair, with attendees including Edward G. Robinson, Dana Andrews, Jeffrey Hunter -- then Rush’s husband, Joel McCrea, Yvonne DeCarlo, Maureen O’Hara, Donna Reed and Mickey Rooney.

To add a little extra punch, Arnold conspired a surprise. “It occurred to me that we should have some fun,” said Arnold (Weaver, 2017). “I took my property manager and some people from the team into my confidence. In the film there's the scene where [Putnam] discovers the spaceship and then a rock avalanche comes down that almost buries him. My plan was to build a catapult in the premiere cinema and load it with boulders made of Styrofoam [and] shoot them off when the avalanche comes down.

“And at the point where the boulders are flying -- in 3D, mind you -- I gave the command for the catapult. You could hear the screams, as the spectators were hit by the Styrofoam stones. They believed the rocks came directly from the screen. You should’ve heard the screams! This gave the film some publicity, and there was a lot of talk about it. People flocked to the cinemas and were very disappointed when no rocks were flying around their ears. We could not set this up every time as we had at the premiere.”

When it went into wide release, rocks or not, the critical response for It Came from Outer Space was overwhelmingly positive from what I could dig up -- though most of the praise was heaped on the effectiveness of the 3D technique, mostly in terms of restraint, more than the quality of the film itself. 

“I never thought that I’d let somebody throw rocks at me -- and enjoy it, yet that is exactly what happened when I saw It Came from Outer Space,” said Hazel Flynn of The Evening Vanguard (May 29, 1953). “My compliments to the studio special-effect boys. They certainly came through in a manner calculated to bring on mass delirium tremens. The sound man deserves a hand, too, for devising a weird noise theme which you hear every time the glorified globule with the cyclops eye is due to show up. This movie is loads of fun though, and if you miss it you’ll pass up the most entertaining and exciting showings in years.”

“What’s most important is the fact that the film cuts the buck as far as being top entertainment is concerned without resorting to tricks,” reported McClay for The Los Angeles Daily News (May 27, 1953). “Rather, scenes that make maximum use of 3D photography are presented in a logical manner, have a definite place in telling of the story and are not merely put there to take advantage of the stereo process. The crash of the space ship, the subsequent avalanche, and the use of the helicopter and telescope, are all necessary elements of the story. The fact that they are emphasized by the use of 3D only serves to enhance the action. The ectoplasmic sojourners are not on the warpath but merely here by mistake. They just want time to repair their damaged ship and take off.”

The Grand Island Independent (June, 1953). 

Meanwhile, Luther Nichols of The San Francisco Chronicle (June 6, 1963) had one of my favorite descriptions ever encountered for the Xenomorphs: “A space ship plops into the Arizona desert in It Came from Outer Space and it brings with it all the excitement any science fiction fan could want. Seems [the aliens] made a slight navigational error; hadn’t meant to land on Earth at all. Besides, they’re sensitive about their looks. You won’t blame them after you glimpse one in a scary portion of the film. He looks like a one-eyed, kelp-festooned jelly fish after a bad night … Director Jack Arnold and producer William Arnold have managed to make the fantasy seem fairly plausible … This Universal film is the best of its kind we’ve seen since The Thing.”

Elsewhere, “The existence of 3D films has been justified by the Universal-International adaptation of the Ray Bradbury fantasy about creatures from another world,” said Warren Wolfson for The Daily Illini (June 11, 1953). “Throwing relatively few objects at the audience, U-I’s first 3D attempt combines the stark originality of Bradbury with a surprisingly effective new third dimension process. Unlike previous 3D attempts, the photography aided the plot rather than being an excuse for it … The plot could have been silly; it was not. The characters could have been poorly portrayed; they were not. The film could have been effective; it was.”

The Southwest Wave (June 5, 1953). 

Hedda Hopper, meanwhile, could barely contain herself, saying (The Visalia Times Delta, July 7, 1953), “Even as a conventional flat movie, It Came from Outer Space would be a top-notch science fiction thriller and excellent entertainment. The picture emerges as a dramatic, suspense filled entry that holds your interest every second and sometimes scares the daylights out of you. I’m so sold on this picture that I’m throwing away those danged cardboard viewers and ordering permanent Polaroid glasses! This movie is so very much better than most of its 3D predecessors that it definitely indicates that third-dimensional movies are here to stay.”

Now, I reread Dorothy Scolfield’s review in The Santa Barbara News-Press (June 8, 1953) three times and I’m still not sure if she liked the film or not. “So far, the imagination of the authors of science fiction moves in a world in which the terrors of delirium and drugged nightmares become the source material out of which they people the planets in outer space. Only the inanimate devices and mechanisms are carefully worked out with a technical finesse," said Scofield in a wild batch of word salad. She then continued, "This latest three-dimensional film is something of an improvement technically over its predecessors, and the story itself is sounder and more consistent within the limits of its theme. But there is one aspect of all these pictures adapted from science fiction that troubles me: the beings who inhabit other worlds and who visit Earth are always things of horror, or malformed.

The Louisville Times (June 10, 1953). 

“They are robots, or creatures bred for gigantic height and brute strength, or else scientific mutations in which one aspect of the physical body as we know it has been developed to monstrous proportions -- a great eye, or a huge head with several ear-like antennae. This accepted and established [trope] is taken to task in this picture. The haste to kill or suppress the thing one fears or does not understand, is the theme around which It Came from Outer Space is fashioned.”

And Mildred Stocker of The Houston Chronicle (July 19, 1953) had an interesting take on the film, calling it “a modern ghost story, [where] its ghosts arrive in a glowing spaceship. They appear as transparent glass bubbles that envelop their victims until they can take on their bodies. They then stalk, zombie-like, talk with measured, unaccented speech, and leave behind a phosphorescent trail. As themselves, they look like a surrealist nightmare, with an exposed brain and monstrous eyeball. For its background, it has a bleakly menacing desert ... If you like science fiction movies, this will be the dish for you.”

The Omaha World Herald (July 12, 1953). 

“Want a good scare? Then catch It Came from Outer Space,” reported Dick Williams for The Los Angeles Mirror (May 27, 1953). “I haven’t been too excited about stereophonic sound to date, which has seemed primarily louder. But with the multiple speakers in this one, the screams, howls, and weird theremin music seems to float right up out of the seat behind you. The 3D process is the best to date, too … This time there are very few 3D gimmick effects. There’s virtually nothing left to throw at you from the screen after the previous pictures, which is a relief.”

As for the acting, “Carlson benefits the film considerably by lending it an air of credibility through his excellent performance,” said Williams. “Rush, with a mint-julep freshness, is also convincing and suitably terrorized as his girlfriend.”

The Terre-Haute Tribune (July 14, 1953).

In rebuttal, a reader named Alan D. Yorkin wrote in and took Williams to task, saying (The Los Angeles Mirror, June 1, 1953), “Your review of It Came from Outer Space was absolutely nauseating. How much did they pay you to write it? This cinematic atrocity was the worst piece of unmitigated claptrap I have ever seen. The lighting was so bad they should have given seeing-eye dogs to the hapless patrons as they walked out. It was static, slow-moving, and a stupendous bore. May I suggest that you and everyone connected with this dismal fiasco take the next space ship and return to Mars?”

There was also little doubt as to how May Tinne of The Chicago Tribune (July 17, 1953) felt about the film in her brief write-up: “This one is drivel in any dimension. Even as a fright feature, a label concocted by the trade press, it doesn’t add up to much.”

The Los Angeles Daily Mirror (June 18, 1953). 

And Philip K. Scheuer of The Los Angeles Times (May 27, 1953) didn’t think much of the film either, saying, “Its mission is to shock, scare and stupefy, and its mission is accomplished. The picture is so surrounded by alarms and confusions that, like House of Wax, it cannot be gauged apart from them … The tremolo effects have been hopped up to such an extent -- by means of a caterwauling Theremin, female screams and a camera which keeps going “boo!” at us -- and these effects assault us from so many unexpected and unreasonable quarters that the inevitable reaction sets in."

But It Came from Outer Space would essentially prove bulletproof and did very well at the box-office -- and it might’ve even been more successful if the studio hadn’t insisted on releasing the film, at least initially, only in 3D.

The Morris Herald News (June 27, 1953). 

“Hollywood’s 3D boom keeps getting dire,” reported Erskine Johnson in his column Hollywood Today (The Evening Telegram, June 16, 1953). "‘It can’t last’ predictions from film industry leaders. But every new depthie hits the box office jackpot. The latest, It Came from Outer Space is U-I’s biggest money maker in years. Six more films for the Polaroid glasses will be released in the next two months.”

After running through the main theater chains the film would eventually be released flat in late November, 1953, for those smaller theaters and fleapits who chose not to convert over cost considerations. A wise move as, despite Johnson and Hopper's predictions, 3D would prove a fad and fleeting and be gone in less than six months.

The San Francisco Call Bulletin (June 5, 1953). 

“It Came from Outer Space made a tremendous amount of money,” said Alland (Weaver, 2017). “First of all, in spite of the fact that it was in 3D (which it didn’t start out to be!), it did very well. It was then re-released without 3D, and it did even greater. It made a lot of money, considering the thing only cost four or five hundred thousand dollars.”

The total budget for It Came from Outer Space, with studio overhead, came in at $703,570. It would be tops at the box-office for the weeks of June 17 and June 24, 1953, before getting knocked off its perch by Bradbury’s other film, Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

3D images courtesy of MonsterKid.com. 

All told it would pull in over $1.6 million, not enough to crack the Top Ten that year, not even close, but respectable business. The top box-office that year went to Fox’s biblical epic The Robe ($30 million), From Here to Eternity ($12.5 million) and Shane ($8 million). U-I would also lose out to Warners and House of Wax again, which not only beat their 3D film into theaters but raked in over $5.5 million.

Still, I would say the film definitely accomplished its goal. Said Alland (Weaver, 2017), “Most of my films, if you’ll examine them, have a plea for humanity, for decency. For being human, so to speak. … [It Came from Outer Space] certainly did talk about hysteria, paranoia, all these things -- that was the whole point. The point was that human beings destroy when they don’t understand what the hell they’re confronting. Human beings are so terrified of the unknown that, instead of facing it, they deny its existence.”

U-I were pleased with the end results as well. So much so that they immediately teamed up Alland and Arnold again for some pent-up passion from the Devonian Age in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) -- only this time, there would be no question or argument on whether to show the monster or not as the Gill-Man became one of the most iconic monsters of the 1950s.

Along with Carlson and Essex, Patrick would return on that film, too, designing and refining the Creature’s signature look. U-I would then send her off on a publicity tour, promoting her contributions as the 'Beauty who Made the Beasts.' 

Westmore and Patrick.

Sadly, this did not sit well with Westmore. And once the tour ended, Patrick was out of a job. I go more into the reasons and fallout over this in our review of Monster of Piedras Blancas (1958), directed by Irvin Berwick, who served as a dialogue director for Alland and Arnold on several films, including this one, for those who would like to know more.

“Since I claimed to be a science fiction and effects expert, and there were no experts and no one around to contradict me, the studio left me alone and It Came from Outer Space turned out to be a good film that made a lot of money,” said Arnold (Reems 1988). “From then on I made all their science fiction films. And the more of these films I made the better I liked it because the studio left me alone and didn’t argue with me, no matter what I did.”

Now, while everyone tends to associate the team of Alland and Arnold with all of U-I’s Creature Features of the 1950s the two would only collaborate on two more U-I films together: Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Tarantula (1955) -- though rumor has it that Alland brought Arnold in for some ghost directing on This Island Earth (1955) when Joseph Newman struggled with the FX sequences once they reached Metaluna.

Arnold would also direct The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) for Albert Zugsmith, and Monster on Campus (1958) for Joseph Gershenson. Alland, meanwhile, would produce The Mole People (1956), The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), The Deadly Mantis (1957), and The Land Unknown (1957). I, personally, was quite surprised when I finally realized that neither had a hand in The Monolith Monsters (1957), which is probably my favorite of the lot that doesn’t take place in a Black Lagoon.

But Arnold and Allen would reunite one last time on a Creature Feature at Paramount, after leaving a struggling U-I during the studio’s insolvency purge of 1958. In The Space Children (1958), they essentially came full circle with another allegorical tale of a misunderstood alien, mind control, juvenile civil disobedience, and the nuclear arms race.

Look, nobody made the desert as creepy as Jack Arnold, who could make something so desolate, so wide open, feel completely claustrophobic. And there are plenty of scenes where he pulls the rug out from under you when things suddenly pop-up out of nowhere only to just as quickly disappear again. He was also a master at utilizing the 3D format, giving a clinic on why it was more about layering than thrusting things into the camera.

I've never seen It Came from Outer Space in 3D, but the one thing you can't help but notice, in whatever dimension you view it, was the total lack of any scenes where things were deliberately thrown out at you for no apparent reason -- aside from that aforementioned rocket-bra. Wowsers. Meaning the crashing spacecraft, Putnam's telescope, the avalanche, or the posse throwing flares into the road don’t count. A film that relies solely on a gimmick to get it over the cinematic hump is just a bad idea. Believe me, I've seen more than a few that tried with very little positive to report; so credit to Arnold for eschewing the notion altogether.

“The 3D in It Came from Outer Space was extraordinary,” observed Vincent DiFate in the supplemental features of Universal’s 60th Anniversary DVD release in 2013. “There are scenes where there is enormous depth. The whole film was composed in three-dimensional space with distinct foreground elements, middle-ground elements in which most of the action takes place, and distant background elements.

“The depth of that mineshaft is virtually meaningless in a two-dimensional image but in a three-dimensional image it’s extraordinary. You’re looking at this deep cavernous space and this creature literally emerging out of the darkness, so that depth is something you are being constantly reminded of by the cinematographer by the placement of objects within the frame and the movement of objects in the frame.”

I agree 100-percent with DiFate. One of the film's eeriest images is when the camera stares straight down into the gaping maw of the darkened mine, which seems to be swallowing all existing light -- you’ll even catch yourself leaning toward your screen, trying to make out if anything is moving around in the inky blackness until the Xenomorph comes into the light.

With an assist from 2nd unit director Joseph Kenney and editor Weatherwax, probably my second favorite sequence is when Putnam chases the Phantom Ellen over the dunes until he’s lured into that mine. It’s so well executed you don’t seem to mind how it switches from location shots to interior shots, or to contemplate the alien Ellen’s peculiar choice of wardrobe.

Speaking of aliens and choices, I honestly don’t have a problem with the inclusion of the Xenomorphs on screen. I think the Glob was competently realized and its sequences were well executed given its slapped and dashed, and by the sound of it, half-assed origin. I love how it moves, undulating forward as if struggling to adjust to Earth’s gravity. But what I love most about these shape-changing blobs is that they were so alien in appearance and not some Frankenstein's monster surrogate.

And if the film makes one tactical blunder, they revealed it way too early after the ship crashed. I would have left that scene with just its glowing eye hovering in the darkness before switching to its POV instead of the full frontal shot we got (-- shown above), which steals a massive amount of thunder from the later scene at the mine, when Putnam finally gets it to reveal itself.

Now imagine the impact if that was the first time we really got a good look at them aside from those fleeting glimpses on the highway? Yeah? Yeah. Thus and though, even already spoiled, it’s still my favorite scene in the whole movie.

For years I had only seen this film on a shitty Goodtimes Home Video VHS tape. When I finally upgraded to a DVD, restored and in the right aspect ratio, I finally got to see the alien in full effect. I had no idea it had arms that reached out to envelop its victims before it globbed them. I remember rewinding it several times to watch it pounce on poor George over and over again. And I love that articulated eye!

And I hold out hope that someday Universal or the 3-D Film Archive will release It Came from Outer Space in an anaglyphic 3D format that doesn’t require a special player or TV like they did with the 70th Anniversary release of Robot Monster (1953), because if you’ve only seen that one flat, you haven’t really seen that gonzo film yet. And I would love to have the same experience with It Came from Outer Space.

Initially put into production to ride the wave of the flying saucer craze and cash-in on the 3D boom before it flamed out, It Came from Outer Space was a nice change of pace for those of us who thrive on hostile alien invasion films. No (overt) Red Scares. No mass disintegrations. And no attempts to steal our womenfolk for seedy breeding purposes.

Just some rubber-neckin' blob-aliens, who missed their turnpike, threw a rod, and crashed on Earth, who want nothing more than to fix their jalopy and vacate the premises as fast as inhumanly possible. And really, Who could blame them?

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