Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
Directed by Fred Sears
Written by Curt Siodmak, George Worthing Yeats, and Bernard Gordon from a book by Donald E. Keyhoe
1956/USA
Columbia Pictures Corporation/Clover Productions
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Gen. Edmunds: When an armed and threatening power lands uninvited in our capitol, we don’t meet him with tea and cookies![/box]

Ray Harryhausen’s special effects lift this B space invasion movie over the average 50’s fair.

Dr. Russell A. Marvin (Hugh Marlowe) is a rocket scientist.  He has just married his secretary Carol, who happens to be the daughter of the General commanding the space program.  They are rushing to a rocket launch when they see flying saucers.  At the beginning, they can hardly convince anyone of this but then the General steps into say that all previous rockets launched by the program have either crash landed or disappeared into the sea.

It turns out that the aliens were trying to communicate with Marvin via a continuous motion translation machine but their timing was off so the words came out really fast and sounding like spaceship noise.  Anyway, they capture the General and finally persuade the Marvins to talk with them.  They drained all knowledge from the General’s brain and attempt to demonstrate the futility of trying to prevent the takeover of earth.  They instruct Russell to order the leaders of the world to gather in Washington DC.

The U.S. Army is not to take this challenge lying down and race to develop “magnitizers” and “solidified electricity” to defeat the enemy.

There is little to differentiate this movie from dozens of similarly themed movies of the 50’s. Little that is except for Ray Harryhausen’s awesome stop motion special effects.  The final scenes of the saucer attacks on Washington landmarks are pretty thrilling, especially when you think how many moving parts he had in play.  There’s also a  cool alien hidden under those blank robot looking shells.

Trailer