UNEARTHLY STRANGER. An Anglo-Amalgamated Film
Distributors Presents An Independent Artist Production. United Kingdom, 1963. 1
hour 20 minutes. Aspect ratio 1.66:1
Director:
John Krish. Screenplay: Rex Carlton. Story: Jeffrey Stone. Cinematography: Reg
Wyer. Music: Edward Williams. CAST: John Neville (Dr. Davidson),
Philip Stone (Lancaster), Gabriella Licudi (Julie), Patrick Newell (Major
Clarke), Jean Marsh, Warren Mitchell (Dr. Munro).
Unearthly Stranger is an interesting low-budget science
fiction programmer from early sixties, badly dated in some respects, drawing
upon certain types of socio-political anxieties in the British society as it
was moving out of the phase of immediate postwar reconstruction and into the
era of the Mod and James Bond. John Neville
plays Dr. Davidson, a top scientist in a government research facility that
seems to be dabbling in a version of Remote Viewing practices. The science in
the film is terrifically confounded rubbish: the British scientists have
apparently located an energy source found in human brains that can be reduced
to a biochemical (or mathematical?) formula called TP91. In a Richard
Matheson-like conceit, TP91 is supposed to allow human minds to engage in an
interstellar travel without having to rely on spaceships or other types of
hardware.
When
Dr. Munro (Warren Mitchell), one of the team members working on the TP91, is
found with his brain fried from inside out, a jolly, sweet-toothed national
security agent, Major Clarke (Peter Newell, "Mother" from TV's Avengers series), investigates.
Meanwhile, Davidson begins to notice strange things about his beautiful Swiss
wife, Julie (Gabriella Licudi, who later became a producer after a series of
minor roles in TV and films like Casino
Royale [1967]): such as the fact that she does not blink her eyes, casually
takes out a burning-hot casserole pan from the oven with bare hands, and (in a
cheaply done but striking scene) streaks of tears leave furrows in the flesh of
her cheeks, as if her face is made out of clay.
Needless to say, Julie is an "alien" in both sense of the
word, and she has traveled to Earth precisely using the same method under
development by Davidson's team.
Severely
limited in budget (Dr. Davidson's lab looks like a drab office of any kind,
with a few extras seen walking around in white lab coats) and with no scene
involving special effects (not even rear projection cinematography), Unearthly Stranger tries to rope us in
by mobilizing powers of suggestion and by drenching the film in the atmosphere
of paranoia. From today's perspective,
the closest approximation as a viewing experience might be an early season, b
& w episode of Avengers (an
association strengthened by the presence of Newell), minus the latter's twisted
sense of humor.
John
Neville (The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen) is an unusual choice for what the
script calls for is an intelligent but naïve bookworm, hopelessly in love with
his wide-eyed, doe-like wife, even though she had literally dropped into his
life out of nowhere. Neville gives a fine performance, but lacks the kind of
dashing romanticism that could have brought out the dimensions of sexuality
into the fore in Davidson's conjugal relationship. Philip Stone (Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom) is his square-jawed colleague, and Jean Marsh, one of
the essential personages in the history of British SF TV, is his put-upon
secretary.
The gender relations
in the film are rather fascinating.
Julie makes for an unexpectedly sympathetic alien agent, although
infants and children sense something is wrong with her. In one scene, a bunch
of school-children simultaneously stop playing and silently gaze at Julie, and
then begin retreating in lockstep with one another, but the way it is directed,
the expression-less children come off as little Pod People and Julie a normal
person, baffled and disturbed that her welcoming smile is returned by dead,
cold stares. In addition, the film
throws in a fairly effective yet awfully anti-feminist plot twist at the end,
once more connecting it to the Avengers
series, this time a disturbingly wacky episode, "How to Succeed… at
Murder" (1966), which is admittedly more subtly ambivalent than this film
about the rise of the female workforce and what it could mean for the postwar
British society. I am not going to divulge the nature of the twist but its
gender politics is archaic by today's standard… I am tempted to say
"anti-suffragist," yet is historically fascinating for its conflation
of the foreign, the female and the insidiously monstrous. This twist comes too
late for us to call it one of the film's thematic concerns: had it been fleshed
out, Unearthly Stranger would have
made a great double bill with Burn,
Witch, Burn (1962).
Blu Ray Presentation:
Network/Studio
Canal. The British Film Series. BD-25. Region B. Video: 1080p High Definition
1.66:1. Audio: English Mono. Subtitles: English. Supplements: Original Theatrical Trailer,
Image Gallery, Promotional Materials in PDF.
Street Date: November 3, 2014
Network
and Studio Canal is releasing a bunch of interesting and somewhat obscure SF
and other genre films in the Region 2 DVD and Blu Ray market. I have never heard of Unearthly Stranger
before (unlike Amicus Production's Terrornauts which I had enjoyed
enormously as a child when it aired at AFKN) so it was a blind buy on my part:
while the film is definitely not a classic, I am glad I did.
