The pith of conversation does not consist in exhibiting your own superior knowledge on matters of small consequence, but in enlarging, improving, and correcting the
It is entirely possible that this is the first science fiction movie I ever saw. I seem to remember seeing this on tv as a pretty young kid (maybe seven or eight years old). For that reason, it had a huge effect on my perspective on entertainment. Of course, watching this movie after all these years is a shock from seeing just how ridiculous the whole production is. But at the same time there is a fondness based on the nostalgia it inspires in me, even after all this time.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
David MacLean is a young grade school boy whose father is an engineer at a local factory doing top-secret government work. He’s also friends with the local astronomer Dr. Stuart Kelston. David has a small telescope in his bedroom. One night he is awakened about four thirty in the morning by what looks and sounds like a thunder storm but as he watches out his window, he sees a flying saucer land in a sand pit located adjacent to his family’s property.
David runs into his parents’ room and tells them the story. Out of a desire to find out what had scared his son George MacLean goes outside to the sand pit to investigate. And the aliens open up a hole in the sand pit and capture George. When George does not reappear by daylight Mary MacLean calls the police and reports her husband missing. Two patrolmen in a squad car show up and while searching the sand pit area they are also captured by the aliens.
A little later George returns to his house and we immediately see that he is no longer the same man. Whereas previous to his disappearance he was a friendly husband and father, now he is a surly abusive man who backhands his young son for insisting that he saw the space ship land. Also, David discovers that George has a small X shaped wound on the back of his neck near his shirt collar. After a few minutes the two patrolmen appear at the house and they obviously behave just as George is.
And this pattern repeats as through his telescope David sees a little neighborhood girl Kathy Wilson being captured. Later George pushes his wife Mary into the sand pit. And off camera, the town’s Chief of Police also ends up captured too. With all these people now controlled by the saucer-men, their diabolical plan begins to unfold. They are trying to sabotage the nearby factory that is building an atomic powered rocket along with the other plants that are supplying components. Kathy Wilson’s father; Dr. William Wilson is a physicist who is designing the atomic rocket (although how a physicist becomes a design engineer is beyond me). So, she attempts to kill her family by burning down their house. George works in the factory creating the rocket engine so he and his wife attempt to assassinate Dr. Wilson with a high-powered rifle. And the two police officers successfully burn down the engine plant.
At first no one believes David when tells his story and the Police Chief has him imprisoned in a jail cell awaiting his parents’ appearance and probably his subsequent death. But the desk sergeant is disturbed by his obvious fear and calls a medical doctor to look at him. Dr. Patricia Blake listens sympathetically to David’s crazy story and when she finds out that they both know the astronomer Stuart Kelson, she calls him up and is told that David is a very honest and serious child. And when his parents arrive to get David, she notices that they really are behaving abnormally and so she makes up a story about David having symptoms of polio to prevent them from dragging him away.
Now Dr. Blake takes him to Stuart Kelston and we get a crash course on the latest theories on Martian biology. And somehow Kelston intuits that Martians have gotten wind of the atomic rocket project and they are here in their flying saucer to sabotage the project. And Kelston trains his enormous observatory telescope on the sand pit across town just as George MacLean pushes General Mayberry, who is in charge of security for the whole rocket project, into the sand pit.
Kelston springs into action. He calls the Pentagon and a Col. Fielding orders a mechanized brigade of tanks and other weaponry to descend on this little town. Orders are given to arrest the MacLeans, the Police Chief, the two patrolmen and General Mayberry. Only David’s parents are captured alive and are sent to a hospital to attempt to remove the control devices in the back of their necks. The army surrounds the sand pit and eventually finds the saucer and use explosives to open up a tunnel leading to the ship. Fielding and his men descend down and attack the “mu-tants” that serve the super-intelligent Martian. The servants are about seven feet tall covered with green skin and have bug-eyes. They shamble around so slowly it’s amazing they get anything actually done. The master is this little homunculus in what looks like a glass bell jar that the mu-tants carry around. He’s got a humanoid face on top of a body that’s an immobile lump with a few tentacles sticking out here and there. He seems to have been spray-painted with bronze colored paint. He controls his servants by telepathy which we observe as him furrowing his brow. At some point, David and Dr Blake are captured when a hole randomly opens in the ground below their feet. And they have to be rescued by the army and Dr. Kelston (he seems to be in love with Patricia Blake).
The last scenes are of the whole human team running away from the sand pit as the space ship begins to depart with a bomb that the army planted in it about to explode. In the last scene David wakes up and runs into his parents’ room to discover that the whole thing was a nightmare. He goes back to his room and falls asleep. But at four-thirty he’s awakened by noise and sees exactly the same sight of the saucer landing in the sand pit. The End.
My thoughts on this movie. Where to begin? Okay, so the whole movie drips with 1950’s cold-war paranoia. Every character portrayal is over the top and the dialog is pretty hokey. The astronomer’s explanation why the Martians are aware of this atomic rocket project makes no sense at all. And the idea that a local astronomer can summon an army by calling the Pentagon is pretty hilarious. As for the aliens, the costumes and the scenery in the tunnels are laughably bad and the space ship looks like a 1950’s set designer’s idea of a 2000’s manufacturing space. The special effects, mainly, an infra-red “ray gun” is pathetic. On the other hand, the personality of the boy; David is sympathetic and Dr. Blake comes off as a compassionate woman which is always attractive. And the whole action of the army in their “war” against the aliens is ridiculous. The colonel leads his troops into the tunnels and he’s firing machine guns at mutants instead of his gunners doing that. But it’s a great bit of nostalgia. The terrible special effects and the vintage military clips from WWII training footage is wonderful. And all the B-movie and television actors like Leif Erickson, Hillary Brooke (The Abbot and Costello Show), Barbara Billingsley (Leave it to Beaver), Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson on the Superman Show) and Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley on the Dick Van Dyke Show) are so familiar and comforting. I highly recommend this movie for anyone who loves schlocky old sci-fi.
If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will let you alone. … For a lifetime I had bathed with becoming regularity, and thought the world would come to an end unless I changed my socks every day. But in Africa I sometimes went without a bath for two months, and I went two weeks at a time without even changing my socks. Oddly enough, it didn’t seem to make much difference.
In the words of Anthony Quinn in his portrayal of Alexis Zorba, “I’ve got a plan. A great big crazy plan. But I’ve got things to figure; angles, forces. Otherwise, it will be; catastrophe.”
So, I think I’m going to take the plunge and try to market my book with a professional campaign. And just as with Zorba it may turn out to be the full catastrophe!
But you only live once, you know and there is a certain satisfaction in throwing the dice. Of course, when the dice come up snake eyes that’s a tough moment. Especially if you’ve bet the bundle.
Be that as it may, I’m feeling pretty good about this and I want to try it. Of course, now there are all the details. I’ve got to put a cover on the book. Maybe I’ll hire a proofreader and I have to come up with a nom de plume. “photog” is kind of informal for a great author. Grok recommended the following:
T. Blackwood – Combines a sharp, classic feel with a dark, mysterious edge.
Grayson Holt – Sounds gritty and determined, fitting for gritty thrillers.
Silas Crowe – Evokes a brooding, ominous vibe, ideal for dark narratives.
Nora Kade – Short, punchy, and carries a sense of hidden danger.
Vincent Quill – Suggests precision and a knack for weaving intricate plots.
Damian Frost – Cold and calculating, great for intense, chilling stories.
Raven Locke – Mysterious and enigmatic, with a nod to puzzles and secrets.
Well, I’ll have to give it a little thought.
I can just see me now, with “The Sniper” on top of the New York Times best-seller list for three or four years and the royalty checks piling up in my mud room and Camera Girl forced to keep her innumerable diamond tennis bracelets in an antique bath tub in the laundry room and me building a giant garage on the Compound filled up with antique Dusenbergs and Rolls Royces that I’ll buy from Jay Leno. But I’ll still be “just folks” and I’ll still use my Sony 90mm F/2.8 macro lens to take pictures of spiders and flies. I’ll never become a photo snob and buy a Leica or anything like that.
But I will have to take on some eccentricities in order to capture the imagination of the reading public. I think I’ll take up big game hunting. But not just shoot boring things like elephants and polar bears. I’ll pay those guys who are restoring the wooly mammoth to name it after me and then I’ll shoot it and make it extinct again so I’ll have the only stuffed wooly mammoth in the world. Then I’ll have them bring back the Giant Rok bird and I’ll shoot that too and I’ll have my Michelin Four Star chef cook the drumsticks specially for me. And then I’ll commission Elon Musk to build me a moon ship. I’ll go to the Moon, set off a nuke and name the subsequent new crater after myself.
As I have whined interminably about, I am in the midst of a long, boring and exhausting project from which death would be a welcome release. But today I unexpectedly discovered that I have a two-day respite from this miserable existence. I have Friday and Saturday off. And just like that my heart is full of joy. I can sleep in tomorrow morning, maybe as late as 6:30 a.m.! “I’m as light as a feather! I’m as happy as an angel! I’m as merry as a schoolboy! I’m as giddy as a drunken man!”
Seriously, when some onerous burden is unexpectedly lifted off your shoulders, even if only for a little while, it changes your attitude. Because now the thing that you had seen as impossibly hard has been cut into a smaller piece. It can never now be what it was. It is diminished. Even if the diminution is minor, the psychological effect is great.
I will spend tomorrow weighing some decisions that I need to make. I have a lot of factors and unknowns that need to be considered and somehow weighed against each other. I have to perform the hardest of all tasks; think intelligently.
But all that is okay. This two day carve out of time is a perfect interval to look carefully at the problem and make some kind of decision. Maybe it won’t be definitive but at the very least I’ll be able to define the time parameters needed to answer all the questions. And to me that is an important milestone in any project.
I was watching a YouTube video from someone who argued that human colonization of other planets was highly improbably and interstellar colonization was completely impossible. For interplanetary human travel he pointed to the health problems associated with extended time in freefall and the damage to human health from radiation that permeates the environment beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. In addition to these problems, for the case of interstellar travel, he pointed to the issues that a twenty-thousand-year multi-generational space ship would create for the humans within. First off, he reiterated that all health issues would be magnified by several orders of magnitude over such an enormous length of time. But he also stressed that a flight of that duration would see a genetic selection among the crew for individuals with anti-social or even psychopathic tendencies. He predicted that well before arrival, the crew would have sunk into barbarism and cannibalism. Now that’s a scenario I can stand behind!
Anyway, it was very interesting, if a little bit depressing. One thing I learned is that mammals brought onto the International Space Station to test the effects of microgravity on reproduction had a 100% rate of birth defects due to developmental anomalies caused by the lack of gravity. Well, all this negativity sure puts a damper on a lot of my favorite science fiction stories from the golden age of science fiction. Where does that leave “Red Planet,” “Farmer in the Sky” and “The Rolling Stones?” Well, maybe we can find a workaround.
