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"The strangest story a newspaperman ever covered" is an abstruse memory of the war, worked out amid thick fog and painted backdrops at the edge of the world. The bleak joke is not lost on von Trier, the planet heading towards Earth is studied from a rocky tower in Scottish moors with "a grim beauty of their own." (Before that, Edgar G. Ulmer transforms an early scene in the observatory into a class on modulatory lighting, complete with expository dialogue in complete darkness.) The American journalist (Robert Clarke) was a bomber, keen on the ideas of the Scottish scientist (Raymond Bond) as well as his daughter (Margaret Field). The glow in the mist turns out to be an astral spaceship described as a diving bell ("The only difference between water and space is a matter of density"), inside is the sawed-off alien with bubble suit and antenna and a rather Keatonesque visage. (His elongated nose and slits for eyes and mouth fill the screen in a startling close-up.) The unscrupulous assistant (William Schallert) craves the visitor's secrets, the result is a "village of zombies" from a trance ray and a looming invasion. "Your statement has the tinge of fantasy." A low-key apocalypse, even if, with its gnarled trees and enveloping vapors, the wasteland for Ulmer is already here. The universal language ("Geometry!") cannot compete with human greed, extraterrestrial ambiguity grows antagonistic as the giant orb whips across the sky. "Boogie doin's," the mystery of close encounters. In the year of The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still, the deeper kinship is to Tourneur's Night of the Demon. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |