Category: Film Review

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 46 minutes, rated 6.3 by 191272 time wasters like me.
Genre: Sy Fy and Self-Indulgence

Verdict: Cut! Cut! Cut!
‘The Martians are coming!’ ‘The Martians are coming!’ ‘The Martians are coming!’
Got it.
What is worse they are just like the fraternity brothers, stupid, cruel, rude, ugly, and relentless. About twenty minutes too relentless.
One fine day an ensemble set of characters from a big cast list discovers that ‘The Martians are coming!’ and react to that in different ways. That is the first half. Some are afraid. Others hopeful. Some don’t notice. Others don’t care. Scholars rush to speculate. Talking heads do.
Then the Martians come and exploding heads follow. Many exploding heads. Many, many, many. And then some more. Second half.
In the first half a weak-kneed liberal president concludes they are coming in peace, though no one wonders why it takes so many of them to come in peace. Every courtesy is extended including overlooking the slaughter of the first welcoming party. There follows more slaughter and more forgiveness. Is there a parallel to the weak-kneed native indians who kept trying to cooperate with the white man and got slaughtered for their trouble. It seems an obvious comparison but it is not made here.
In the second half it is all out war. Except none of the weapons Earthlings use do any good. Not even the method acting of a geriatric Rod Steiger which killed any interest the fraternity brothers had in the film. Fortunately, the Martians are none too smart and it takes them a long time to murder everyone. What losers!
There are tropes from a host of other Sy Fy movies, including the bulbous noggins of the Martians and the flying saucers over D.C. A few of the vignettes are amusing; most are not.
While the actors are uniformly good, they have very little to do. The script after all was derived from bubble gum trading cards. The characters betray their cardboard origins. Viewers will long for the depth of insight of a comic book.
Martin Short as the slime-ball press secretary is great. That Jack Nicholson is president seemed a welcome relief in 2018 since he gives the role gravitas. Pierce Brosnan never looked more sure of himself than when he was totally wrong time after time. Perfect. Annette Bening lit up the screen. As always, Jim Brown brought dignity to the Las Vegas Egyptian costume (which one dolt, a professional reviewer at that, said was Roman) and Pam Grier evidently thought it was a drama and gives a fine performance that should have been in another movie. ‘I’ts not unusual’ that a big chunk of $70 million budget must have gone to the performers. The writing is less than Ed Wood standard. Much less.
On the plus side no one thinks the response to the Martians’ assault should be prayer. Regrettably Whit Bissell is nowhere to be seen at a lab bench concocting a double whammy to lay those Martians low as he did in so many 1950s Sy Fy films. On the minus side it is a long list but it always comes back to one thing: the lack of a narrative. We don’t care about the characters because they are so cardboard, and the situation is repetitive, and the denouement is nice but much, much too long time in coming. Way too long.
There are many loose ends. The apocalyptic opening scene with the stampede of burning cattle is never resolved. It occurred long before the first Martian left Mars. It seems to have been forgotten by the director, along with much else.
We never do find out why the Martians came. Sure, just for fun, but why then? Why not in 2016 when we really needed a diversion.
Are Kansans really as deplorable as they appear to be in this movie?
We have a lot of camera time with the first daughter and then she is seen no more. Moreover, she would seem to be more like a grand-daughter to the geriatric president.
Did Jack Black have to be in this movie at all? (This is always a question worth asking.)
The Martians seem particularly to dislike birds. Why? We’ll never know but a point is made of establishing it.
What colour socks do the Martians wear? (One of those searingly insightful media questions.)
As to any and all of the above, who cares?

IMDb meta-data: 1 hour and 2 minutes (it seemed much longer than that) and rated a generous 3.3 by 686 dopes.
Genre: Sy Fy and Bore.

Verdict: Two good things about it are: It does not star John Agar and Robert Clarke keeps his shirt on.
The stooges kidnap an heiress and head to the high Sierras for a spot of ransom. Sounds far better than it is. While this is played out in slow motion, or so it seemed, a flash of light in them thar hills occurs and then a woman in a skin-tight body suit with exaggerated eye brows walks from the woods to the out of focus camera. She stays out of focus. She walks like she has the OED balanced on her head. Carefully.
The inference is that she is an alien emanating a blurred aura. The fraternity brothers like the skin-tight part but not the blur. However the blur was probably necessary to get the picture aired in the time of the Hollywood code.
To sum up, she wanders around the woods killing everything and everyone she meets. A dog, a man, a bear, a woman, a butterfly, a fox, another man. Obviously she is an American diplomat come to make the peace of the dead. I kid not. Read on.
Meanwhile the three stooges have holed up in the aforementioned Robert Clarke’s mountain cabin where he practices taking his shirt off and on away from prying eyes in readiness for his performance — is that the right word? — in ‘The Incredible Petrified World’ (1959), reviewed elsewhere on this blog. Two of the stooges have gats and Clarkie has little choice but to comply. He complies. At times they combine to fend off Skin-Tight, but she picks them off one by one, until….. Spoiler coming.
The pollution in Earth’s atmosphere kills her. Whew! Thank you H. G. Wells for suggesting that in 1891.
But wait there is more!
The locket Skin-Tight wore was not an intergalactic fashion statement after all for it contained a message written in copperplate English handwriting, declaring her to be an ambassador who has come in peace! Pause.
Just think, someone got paid — not much we may hope — for writing this.
How will the home-world react to the death of this ambassador. Will another come? A bigger, a badder, a meaner one? The End. Was a sequel planned? Does it exist? Can it be avoided?
Does it sound like ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ (1951) without the depth? Yep a derivation which these days is called ‘reimagining,’ i.e., trivialising with CGI.
Nota Bene. This ambassador made no effort to communicate but her touch was fatal to everything. The opening voice over went on about cosmic retribution which was heard by the minority paying attention, but this is never squared with the peaceful mission revealed after the body count at the end.
The young heiress looks about fifty. The two goons and their moll look retarded. The direction looks zero. Once the actors are on their floor marks, they stand still to retain camera focus. There are voiceovers which indicate the lack of a sound engineer. Perhaps 90% of the film is in one nearly bare room. Cheapo. For the drive-in market where no one would see it.
Robert Clarke grew up in Oklahoma movie struck from a young age. He tried hard and seems affable enough on screen, and much more alive than say John ‘Oak’ Agar. Clarke’s other credits include ‘The Man from Planet X’ (1951), ‘The Incredible Petrified World’ (1959), and ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’ (1960), which are reviewed elsewhere on this blog. What a Sy Fy CV. He never made it in movies and like many other B-movie actors he went into television where he compiled many credits.
The fraternity brothers talked me into watching this one and they will pay for that when I read long passages from Martin Heidegger to them while they eat. Indigestion is sure to follow.

IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 46 minutes rated 6.8 by 5011 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sy FY, Empathy

Verdict: one of a kind. Roger Ebert liked it and that is always enough for me.
A being in a B movie space suit frantically hits controls as a craft steaks to a crash in New York harbor.  In shredded clothes the being comes ashore on Ellis Island where millions of other immigrants preceded him. He looks like a black man.
In the nocturnal silence we find out some things about him. He lost a foot in the crash and hops around but seems to find this loss only an inconvenience.  On the remaining foot are three enormous toes.  Later he will be referred to as ‘a three-toe.’  More important, he has psychic powers for when he slumps against a wall or sits on a bench he hears in the air words spoken there by others in the past in a jumble as though recorded on the surfaces. He is frightened by these voices.  But then as always he is mute.
After sleeping on the floor, in the morning mist he sees the city across the harbor and somehow gets on a scow that takes him to Harlem where he hops around…..until his foot regenerates.  He observes the animal life on the streets of Harlem, and proves to be a quick learner with some survival instincts and an NBA jump.
We also learn that he has a way with machines, cash registers, pin ball games, video arcades devices, and so on.  He meets a great many people most of whom ignore him.  He takes refuge in a bar where some of the bar flies are willing to help a brother through hard times.  A social worker finds a place for him to lodge, and gets him work repairing machines.
Brother discovers Earth women and…..   No spoiler.  
Then the men in black appear, just as strange as he is.  They are after Three-toe, as they call him.  I was never sure if this term applied to him in particular or was a reference to his kind as a whole.  They, too, have to adapt to an alien environment. However, they speak though not too well and are white-bread. 
There are some marvellous vignettes.  Two attendees at a communication workshop talk to Brother for hours without realising he is mute.  An administrator intimidates the men in black with endless forms to fill out.  At the moment of truth the bar flies go for it on fourth and one.  
Loved that Brother looks for messages in street graffiti, and finds one!

It has to be said that the denouement is limp.  Finding an end to this ride would be a challenge to anyone.  
It polarises the opinionators on the IMDb with many ones and fives.  The one-givers complained about all the things I liked about it.  Slow pace, no shot ‘em up.  A divergence into the world of drug users and suppliers, for whom ODs are an interruption to cash flow.  The opinionators did not seem to mind Brother’s vigilante justice, though I did.  One such opinionator went on about the gimmick with Brother’s eyeball, denouncing it as unrealistic.  Well, don’t try it at home, that is for sure. But really…it is science fiction Mr Inane.
John Sayles wrote, directed, edited, and swept up afterward. He is also one of the men in black. He financed the production with the payment for his dreadful script for the dreadful ‘Battle Beyond the Stars,’ reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  Forgive but don’t forget.
Director and writer John Sayles is a rarity, an intellectual in film-making. Moreover, he is a utility player, as they once said in baseball, he acts, he writes, he directs, he paints sets, he produces, he edits. He learned the craft and the values of economy and versatility from Roger Corman. Sayles often hires himself out in one capacity or another to raise money for own projects like this one.

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 19 minutes, rated 5.3 by 435 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Mixed. Good moments but no whole.
Two journalists mistakenly enter the Democracy of Gudavia and soon wish they had not done so. They are an odd couple, Brit Leslie Phillips is the photographer who plays the effete skirt chaser he made his own and burly and blunt and brash Paul Douglas is the American wordsmith.

They discover that once in Gudavia there is no way out for in the alpine castle is a mad scientist trying to develop super humans by dousing them with gamma rays.  He wants no publicity from these two. One of his prodigies is the piano playing Hedda who resists by being creative, and the other is the martinet Hugo.  These two are both about twelve years old.
They also find Eva Barton; that convinces them to stay.  ‘Amen,’ sighed the fraternity brothers.  
There are some nice scenes of the mountains on travelling mattes. A few scary moments with zombies from the mad scientist’s failed efforts. For, as he notes, mindless zombies have their uses, in a remark that anticipates the Tea Party. There is another scene that anticipates ‘The Village of Damned’ (1960).
But Hugo steals the show.  He is the super-kinder who does the Mad Scientist proud. His weakness at the end is finely judged and effective though his subsequent transformation is saccharine.  But the turning point is well done. He is played by Michael Caridia who was fourteen at the time.
The screenplay draws on many tropes, the micro state of Gudavia that appears on no maps, the mad scientist in the hilltop castle playing god, his hollow-eyed zombies, the Hitler youth uniform Hugo wears, the loving grandfather…… It has so many loose ends that none of them are tied. It is partly farce as with the comic opera military of Gudavia, and deadly serious when Hugo is a piano critic.
Eva helps Dr Mad in his experiments without a qualm until the journos arrive, and then goes all distressed. See, here is the evidence, and get a load of those condensers.

There is a nice scene in the telegraph office where the official is the perfect bureaucrat. Ever so polite and ever so pointless.
The project had a vexed production and at some point a young Albert Broccoli with Irving Allen took over production.  Yep, them.  Looking back from Chubby’s later career, one can see first drafts for scenes used later in the Bond films.  
It was made in England. Douglas was there with his wife Jan Sterling who was playing Julia in production of ‘1984’ (1955), which has its own version of little Hugo. ‘1984’ and this film were released as a double bill at the end of 1956, one dead serious and one not.
There are comments on Paul Douglas’s career in the review of ‘It Happens every Spring‘ elsewhere on this blog and also on Eva Bartok’s in the review of ‘Spaceways’ elsewhere on this blog.  He quit a successful career in radio sports journalism to try his hands in movies at age 42. She had more drama in her private life than in any movie she made, escaping Naziis and then Communists, and then a great many men.  

IMDb meta-data is a speedy run time of 1 hour and 43 minutes, rated 6.4 by 20,994 misers.
Genre: All, including Sy Fy.

Buck is a brain surgeon, rock star singer, and scientist extraordinaire, among other things. He can drive a car through a mountain, perceive the aliens amongst us, and sing up to New Jersey standards with the Hong Kong Cavaliers. Get it?
One of the aliens is there to help, but most aren’t. Did I mention satire? Shoulda.
The major defence contractor building the newest, fastest, most invisible warplane is in fact Aliens Incorporated which is using the appropriations to build a spaceship to blast the earth as they leave in it. Dastards! They have been there for years voting for ever large defence budgets. Obviously Republicans.
Dr Emmett Brown leads the alien field unit, while John Lithgow blows the lights out as Emilio Lizardo, the brains behind the operation. Did I say brains? This man can p r o j e c t.
It all centres around Grover’s Mill in New Jersey which still doesn’t exist. Turns out Orson Welles was right all along. To prove it Citizen Kane puts in an appearance.
Lithgow’s speech rallying the aliens to one final effort will remind viewers of many political speeches, but it is funnier, wittier, and delivered with more conviction than most.

The result is a pastiche and homage to Sy Fy films from the opening credits to the closing ones: ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Them,’ and many points in between. Hey, John, don’t forget ‘Terminator!’ Even Vincent Canby of the ‘New York Times’ seems to have stayed awake through this one. It bombed at the box-office. Such a genre mash-up is impossible to market, say the oracles.
No comment is sufficient without some vinegar: It is fast but not fast enough. If it had been edited more tightly it would reduce to 90 minutes, the length of feature film intended by Apollo. It is especially slow at the beginning, as if waiting for the audience to be seated. There are some dead spots later, too, that serve no purpose. One less punch-up would have been no loss.
The two women get vituraly nothing to do. One opens the door, twice. The other mopes around. Ellen Barkin demonstrated athletic ability in other films around this time, but here she just sits and chews her lip.

IMDb meta-data runtime 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 7.0 by 35 cinemtizens.
Genre: fictional docudrama. (You read it here first.)

Verdict: Unique but unavailable.
As Europe teetered on the brink of a great war, a large flaming object struck a forest in Bohemia. Investigators disappear. More are sent in. More disappear. The attack began. In no time Germany disappeared into the rubble. Then the giant and impregnable Martian war machines turn west. The Great Martian War was on!
The film uses archival footage (some of which was staged for propaganda films at the time) from World War I and integrates strategies and events from the Great War and its aftermath into this story of a Martian invasion that united humankind (except for Faux News viewers). It includes retrospective interviews with survivors and historians chewing it over in the 1970s and later in French, English, and German. There are also re-enactments contrived to look like original film from World War I. It is parsed like a typical documentary but with the fictional elements blended it nicely.
Just when things seemed hopeless, the remnant of the German army using the Schlieffen Plan with Kaiser Bill in the lead reinforces the French line in the North. While President Woodrow Wilson counted the votes, former president Teddy Roosevelt raised a volunteer force to pitch in. Wilson kept counting as long as no Martians landed on his voters.
There is no effort at communication by either Martians or us. Nor is there any praying.
European High Command’s efforts to fight the Martians were counterproductive. The frontal attacks, the massed artillery barrages, the tank support, these all exhausted and depleted humanity while feeding the Martian’s war machines, most of which were made on Earth out of the ordinance fired at them. Irony is inter-planetary.
There is a sting in this tail right at the end, but no spoiler on that here, but it winds its way back to the beginning.
Watch the sky! Indeed.
It borrows from H. G. Wells’s oft recycled ‘War of the Worlds’ in large and small ways, but offers a fresh and distinctive take on it. Chapeaux! It can also be viewed as satire on the stupidity of World War I and all others.
The History Channel (Europe and Canada) produced it. The You Tube version is hard to watch because it has reversed images, helium voices, and uses only one-third of the screen. This sort of thing is done to avoid copyright claims. The irony here is that the film is NOT available on DVD, Amazon Prime, iTunes, or any other provider within my ken. I did track down a better version on the internet.
Predictably the pygmies attack it for being — wait for it — unrealistic. Perhaps that is why it is called fiction.
A subsequent television series, one presumes, gave it the Hollywood treatment: trivial, inconsistent, derivative, puerile, hysterical, and inaccurate. Wait, that could be ABC news, too.

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 24 minutes rated 7.2 by 28542 raters.
Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Classic
In the hills of California far from Grovers Mill a large, flaming meteor lands with a mighty wallop. It starts a forest fire and the locals turn out to quell the fire, and marvel at the object. It’s big; it’s hot. Nearby reading the script is Top Scientist (perhaps on his way from ‘Atomic City’ [1952] and counting down to ‘The Twenty-Seventh Day’ [1957 ], both reviewed elsewhere on the blog).
Top puts on his professorial glasses. The yokels gasp in awe. Top figures out the meteor came from Mars. Probably he read the luggage tags on it.
Then the meteor hatches the first Martian weapons tripod. The three stooges approach it in peace with a white flag as they do in the westerns and are cindered from their trouble. A sky pilot muttering the Lord’s Prayer is likewise toast. More meteors arrive. More tripod war machines appear and lay waste to everything, houses, roads, baseball card collections, churches, tanks, firetrucks, cannons, vending machines…. Nothing is spared, not even World Series tickets!
These tripods did not come in peace. They are landing all over the world, Dubuque, Indianola, and elsewhere.
In desperation the ever reliable Lee Tremayne nukes them. Kaboom. Yet the tripods, now shined by the radiation, keep coming with their red heat rays.
There follows a flight, and a reunion, and the Martians die. Seems they were anti-vaxxers and had no shots before travelling to Earth.
There are some marvellous scenes, as when the first Martian is glimpsed through the window of a wrecked house, and then the tendril that reaches out later. There is an effort at science as Top and his colleagues at the Pacific Smarty Pants Institute examine the evidence.
There is satire of the media. When the Martians start to appear, the journalist wants to know what colour their socks are. As always getting right to the point is the press. The trivial and childish initial responses of the media are realistic.
None of the formidable weapons the Yankees can bring to bear even dent the Martians tripods. Not even Little Boy. They are powerless against this invader.
The panic is likewise realistic. The mob destroys the very science that might save them. Has a contemporary ring to it, doesn’t it.
Thanks to the science at Pacific Smarty Pants we know the Martians are unvaccinated puny little stick figures in latex. Hence when exposed to the pollution, FM radio, smog, haze, advertising, pollutants of California, they croak. The end.
What every one remembers who saw the original on the wide screen is the tripods, the periscopes, and the creatures, all and always in threes. Three eyes, three tendrils, three tripods, tripods. Made the fraternity brothers wonder what else they had three of.

The special effects were indeed special. They remain gripping even in the iTunes version I watched. The wire work was great, though over the years transfer from the original film stock to other media has revealed the wires at work in some versions. This has given a new generation of nitpickers no end of sanctimonious fun.
Producer George Pal included but did not himself understand the irony and satire in the original, e.g., the priest, the bacteria, the media frenzy, the rigidity of officialdom when faced with something new, and the irrationality of the anti-science response. He repeated the jokes without understanding the humour. He then overlaid these with a superficial, stiflingly, and sappy veneer of Christianity. When the local priest walks into the heat ray it is sheer stupidly in the original story, in the film is a noble sacrifice, pointless though it is. And so on.
Pal’s Sy FY curriculum vita is rich and varied, starting with ‘Destination Moon’ (1950). He is described as a happy soul who was also naive in the extreme. In his hands this satire became a warning of a Communist invasion that can only be stopped by praying and singing hymns. It also keeps the tigers away.
By the way the love interest for Top was included at the insistence of the studio executives, and so Pal complied. That late and forced inclusion may explain why she has so little to do.
That wizened H. G. Wells combined with the wunderkind Orson Welles made an enduring franchise out of ‘The War of the Worlds.’ Typing the title ‘War of the Worlds’ into the search box on IMDb will produce a confusing list of hits. Captain Nerd, that is, Thomas Miller, in ‘Mars in the Movies’ (2016) has counted more than a dozen direct replications of ‘War of the Worlds,’ and notes other more tangential derivations.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 20 minutes, rated 6.2 by 229 cinemitizens.
Genre: Old Dark House

Verdict: Gail Russell is the show.

Big Joel McCrea, before he devoted himself exclusively to westerns, is a reclusive business man with two young children. His wife, their mother, died a few years ago. He fired their previous governess for reasons not specified and hired the ingenue Gail Russell. A kindly doctor is much in attendance, Herbert Marshall of the Wooden Leg.

They live next door to …. an Old Dark House. Mac comes and goes at all hours. For a recluse he is out and about all the time, leaving Gail to cope with the rebellious children. ‘Make them obey,’ is his only advice to her as he slams the door. She does; they don’t.

Turns out a woman was murdered nearby years ago, and others since. At least one of the murders coincides with one of Mac’s nocturnal outings. Gail reads ‘Jane Eyre’ for some tips, as did the screen writers.

The dismissed former governess, retains an hypnotic hold on the boy who in turn dominates his little sister. This trio plots to undermine Gail, who makes it easy by falling into every trap set for her. Inevitably, Gail goes to the Old Dark House to find answers. Her survival instinct is less than a Girl Guide at a bus stop.

The fraternity brothers got some of the characters mixed up, and never did figure out what the Old Dark House has to do with Maxine. Or why reclusive Mac is always out. Or why any of it matters. But they did learn to beware of kindly doctors much in attendance.

Raymond Chandler got a writing credit along with three others on this, but I did not hear any Chandler dialogue. The story is from Ethel Lina White’s novel. She also wrote the novel used for ‘The Lady Vanishes’ and ‘The Spiral Staircase.’ Brava!

Gail Russell is eye candy but she fell on hard times, tripping over bottles, aged prematurely, got terminal stage fright, and disappeared from view. She was in a Randolph Scott film ‘Seven Men from Now’ (1956) reviewed elsewhere on this blog some years after this in one of several efforts at a comeback.

Lewis Allen directed to perfection, getting the most out of the script and the players. It is a miniature version ‘The Turn of the Screw.’

IMDb meta-data runtime is 55 minutes, rated 6.9 by 92 cinemitizens.
Genre: Docudrama.

An episode of the long-running CBS television program ‘Studio One.’ It combines narration by Murrow with re-enactments.

Verdict: When Ed Murrow speaks, I listen.

In this case it is a dramatisation of a CBS radio broadcast in 1938 of a story published 1898 in Great Britain. The result was headline news across the United States and the world. Huh?

On Halloween night, October 30, 1938, Orson Welles’s Mercury Players of the Air performed an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds.’ It took the form a news report, including a reporter in the field at Grovers Mill in New Jersey. We see all of this being simulated in the CBS radio studio.
Those who heard the broadcast and reacted included a teenage babysitter, card playing college boys, patrons at a neighbourhood bar, and a police officer at a switchboard. Some people went nuts. Others ran amok. Others loaded shotguns. Many hid under the bed. Some fled. Fleeing was hard since no one knew where Grovers Mill was. All of this in response to a radio broadcast.

The next morning the ‘New York Times’ thundered the news of the national panic caused by the broadcast!

Why the panic?

The program was advertised long in advance in newspapers and magazines. The newspaper radio listings, including those in the ‘New York Times,’ clearly identified the program as an entertainment. The on-air introduction made that clear, too.

However, ‘The Mercury Players of the Air’ was a sustaining program owned by the CBS network. It had no commercial sponsors so there were no commercial breaks. It ran straight through for one hour. Once it started off it went, and as later research found, many people were dial surfing and missed the introduction and had not read the listings but tuned in part way through.

Many a PhD has since dined out on the aftermath. Was there really a panic? Whoa, here comes the Four Horses of Definition. What explains the reaction? Sociological, psychological, dietary, demographic, ethnic, swamp gas explanations have all been seriously offered and seriously considered in PhD dissertations. Faux News denies it ever happened or Hillary did it. One or the other.

Murrow put the programming in the context of the news of 1938 from Europe and Asia. In the East Japan was devouring Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, China, and Shangri-la. From Europe the air fleets of Nazi Germany featured in every movie newsreel. It had re-occupied the Rhineland. Seized the Saar basin. Anschlussed a very willing Austria. Carved the Sudeten out of Czechoslovakia only a few days before with goose-stepping automatons.

Pundits were describing ever more terrible weapons of modern war beneath the seas and from the skies. These combined with memories of chemical weapons in the Great War. What a brew!

For some auditors, who missed the newspaper advertisement, the program listings, and the introduction, the descent on Grovers Mill might well have been the spawn of Naziism. To listen to the broadcast now there are only a few gasped, terse descriptions of the Martians and someone in distress might not fathom those. Or just conclude that these were the creatures of the Asiatic Japanese or Satanic Naziis.

That was one of the findings of Hadley Cantril’s ‘Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic’ (1940): Many who heard part of the broadcast were prepared for catastrophe by all the bad news that just kept coming.

These prepared people had endured the unimaginable for a decade: the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, armies of the unemployed, starvation, diseases out of control, along with the Asian and European political news. The times, they were apocalyptic.

The story is that Cantril in Princeton heard the broadcast and then read the ‘New York Times’ the next morning, and mobilised the research project within hours to identify and interview auditors. Quite impossible today with months of Ethics Committee vetting, budgets laid down years in advance, KPIs that suit research managers, corporate plans, the annual cycle of research grants, and more.

But now back to the film, there is a raft of new faces in the re-enactments, including Ed Asner, John Astin, Warren Beatty, James Coburn, Vincent Gardenia, and Warren Oates. Babysitter Susan Hallaran eats the wallpaper as they say in show biz, though this was her last credit on the IMDb.
Alexander Scourby is the radio announcer with the mellifluous voice, and he carries the show on radio. The son of Greek immigrants who learned English from Shakespeare.

But the star of the show is neither named nor given any lines: Orson Welles.
The wunderkind at work that very night.
He wanted nothing to do with this reprise. Whether the broadcast caused a panic, there was a sizeable reaction to it. CBS was cross-pressured because on the one hand it wanted the acclaim of such great influence (to lure advertisers in the future) but it wanted no part of the complaints. It did what every large organisation still does and delegated responsibility downward. The fact that Welles, for once, had done everything through channels and had approvals all the way to the top, was conveniently forgotten by the professional amnesiacs of management in CBS. Such amnesia is surely the subject of one McKinsey management seminar.
It was left to Welles alone to eat a lot of crow by way of apology. This was not something that came easily to this mercurial Zeus, and he had no wish ever to re-visit it. That is, he never wanted anything to do with CBS again, as Murrow obliquely noted.

The gossip on the inter-web is that H. G. Wells and Orson Welles met a year later in San Antonio Texas where each was on a speaking tour. Hope they stayed in a better hotel there than I did once upon a time.

Murrow’s documentary makes no mention of the 1953 film. Yet it would have come to mind for many in the audience. There are several other documentaries about the broadcast, one or two with similar titles.

IMDb meta-data runtime is 56 minutes, rated 6.2 by 103 cinemitizens.
Genre: Old Dark House

Verdict: Sly fun.
Perry White and Mrs live in an Old Dark House at the end of a very long causeway. Otranto mansion comes equipped with a black stereotype, the ever ready Will Best, and a vast garage.
Then one dark and stormy night a party of relatives knock on the door! Perry is a perfect host, and why not when one of the guests is the first Superman disguised behind a pencil moustache. The guests all have letters of invitation:

But neither Perry nor Mrs Perry sent any such invitations. That puts arrowroot into the plot.
Guess what! No sooner are they assembled than the lights go out, the telephone goes dead, the cars are immobilised, the weather turns violent, and then it gets worse. They are alone! They are cut-off! They are in an Old Dark House movie! [Gasp!]
Among the guests is the redoubtable Veda Ann Borg who plays a double role. That sounded good to the fraternity brothers since Veda is one live wire. Regrettably, one of the twin sisters she plays is snuffed at get-go, while the other reacts by locking herself in a room. Not even Veda can do much in those circumstances.
Also invited (by someone unknown, and it stays that way) is the ever thuggish Grant Withers who was the short-priced favourite as villain from the start. Mr Smooth insinuates himself in the party. Now and again faces appear at the window.
Smooth knows something the others don’t. Some dastardly cur has stolen the radium from the watches of the doctors at a nearby hospital and that thief is amongst the denizens of the Old Dark House, though how and why are never explained. How could it be stolen? Why come to the island with it? Who did invite all these people? To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, and how many times does that happen in a movie review, ‘whereof one does not know, one must not speak.’ In plain English that is ‘Dunno.’
Winsome Girl does not live up the the billing but how could she: ‘OUT OF THE FOGS OF FEAR! STORMS OF TERROR!…came this amazing person…to thrill you!’ However, she was cool-headed, resourceful, and capable of surprising even Mr Smooth. No screaming. No fainting. No tripping. None of the usual tropes for women to make snowflake men feel superior. She and Smooth combine in a neat deception at the end to reveal the conspicuous villain. The screen play breezes along. The direction is crisp.
Believe it or not the spindly Kirk Alyn played Superman in the first film in 1948. He must have gotten the job after posing as the 98-pound weakling in Charles Atlas advertisements and the casting director called the wrong guy.
As this picture travelled across the United States the yellow telegrams from D-Day started to arrive. Three thousand were sent in one day.