randy_byers | Invaders from Mars (1953) (Reply)

Is Invaders from Mars the first of the paranoid alien invasion films of the '50s? It's the same year as It Came from Outer Space and three years earlier than Invasion of the Body Snatchers. What it shares with those two movies is the paranoid fear that your normal-looking neighbors and loved ones are actually the embodiment of an alien evil that is trying to take over not only the world but your very self. Invaders from Mars explores this paranoia from the point of view of a child whose parents have been taken over by invading Martians, giving it a very primal nightmare quality. It works on some of our deepest fears of isolation and abandonment and abuse.

The movie was directed by William Cameron Menzies, who is a fascinating figure in the classical Hollywood era. He has recently gotten love from Dave Kehr and David Bordwell. (Bordwell is strangely dismissive of Invaders from Mars. Maybe he just doesn't like science fiction.) Menzies is mostly known as an art director and production designer, perhaps most famously on Gone with the Wind. He only directed a few films, including an earlier science fiction film Things to Come (1936), based on the H.G. Wells novel. Menzies hit his stride in the late-silent era, designing several of Douglas Fairbanks' big budget spectaculars amongst many other great films, and what's striking to me about Invaders from Mars is how much it looks like a silent movie, particularly the Expressionist films of Weimar Germany.

Others have pointed out the influence of The Cabinet of Caligari (1920) on the film. Not only does the trail leading to the Martian-occupied sandpit look like the trail that the somnambulist murderer takes through the artificial forest in Caligari, but the paranoid plot owes much to Caligari as well. There's nothing naturalistic about the film. Everything is setbound and artificial. The police station looks like the one in Caligari as well, with forced perspectives, spare, hyperstylized sets, and elongated forms.

The camera never moves. Instead we get constantly shifting angles on the hyperstylized sets. The camera pulls back to show unnaturally tall doors that rise above the frame -- a favorite motif for Menzies, which you can see in movies like The Bat (1926) and Alibi (1929) as well.

Then the camera shifts to a startling close-up to tell us that Mother is no longer herself. All of this coming from the boy's low angle, looking up at the frightening adult world.

In 1953 the film already had an archaic quality, harkening back to a forty-year-old film language that had been left behind. It reminds me of another film of the '50s that feels archaic and artificial in a similar way: The Night of the Hunter (1955). Alas, unlike that movie it doesn't have a script by James Agee, and the dialog is one of the big weaknesses of Invaders from Mars. Again, I wonder if Menzies wouldn't have preferred to use silent intertitles. Stiff dialog isn't unusual in '50s science fiction films, but here it seems of a piece with the static camera. And what's a '50s science fiction movie without a dull expository lump delivered by a clean cut scientist? But I love the glittering starfield backdrop.

Menzies also uses silent era masking techniques to mimic telescopes and focus our attention on details. Even the design of this missile looks like something out of one of Fritz Lang's science fiction films of the '20s. (Things to Come certainly shows Lang's influence as well.)

Swing the telescope in the other direction and you see a menacing scene out of Magritte.

The weakest part of the film is probably the descent into the Martian warren. I actually love a lot of the design work here, which clearly had an influence on many films that came after, from Forbidden Planet (1956) to Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires (1965). One problem in the design, however, is the hulking Martians in bulky body suits. Menzies wisely keeps them hidden in shadow, but they still look pretty dorky. Far worse is how much of this sequence consists of soldiers and aliens running back and forth in the same three pitch black tunnel sets for no apparent purpose. It's never a good sign when a 79 minute movie begins to feel like it's going on too long.

You can see the influence on Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! (1996) in the underground lab of the Martians, where people are turned into aliens. This shot shows how Menzies was leading the way for Bava in his use of color.

I think paranoid thrillers are the one genre where "it was only a dream" actually works much of the time. That's partly because paranoia is a kind of dream to begin with, but also because the uncertainty of what is real and what is not makes reality itself seem like a dream. Menzies exploits this metaphysical uncertainty with a wonderfully loopy ending that tells us the nightmare is not over.