Stranger from Venus

...as the British attempt to duplicate The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Patricia Neal plays the lead, but mostly appears as window-dressing. The alien looks like Helmut Dantine. In fact, he is Helmut Dantine. For the first fifteen minutes, we only get to see the back of his head. Unfortunately, at some point he turns around. He wears the same expression on his face throughout the entire film. I couldn't tell if it was boredom or disdain, both of which I felt watching his performance. It's hard to believe that men from Venus speak with Austrian accents - then again, it was hard to believe Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Hercules.

Dantine lands in the British countryside, although we don't get to see his ship. Neal has an accident and he miraculously heals her. He also heals a guy with a limp. Dantine strolls into the first bar/inn he sees and orders something to drink. We discover he does not like beer, but he loves water. He wears what look like jogging pants and some kind of pullover jacket. Fortunately, he is not wearing a spacesuit. I shudder to think of Helmut in a helmet.

Dantine is here to confer with our world leaders about, you guessed it, atomic energy. Of course, that's why he picked a farmhouse in which to stay. Meanwhile, two more ships are on the way to pick him up.

Neal's fiance, played by Derek Bond, is a bit of a pain, kind of like the Hugh Marlowe character in Day, just not as good-looking and not as obnoxious. The rest of the cast just go through the motions. Look for Nigel Green in one of his earliest screen roles.

Stranger From Venus is a nice little film, but really has not much to recommend it. Obviously it is adapted/stolen from the Robert Wise classic, The Day The Earth Stood Still and even has Patricia Neal as well as the female star. But even for a fifties science fiction film, there is a serious lack of special effects...especially in comparison with the other movie. The few shots of the Venusian spacecrafts look to be very childishly done and do not mesh well at all with the other footage.

This film is one of the precursors of the wave of excellent British science fiction that was heralded in by Terrence Fisher, Val Guest and the rise of Hammer Films. The script for Stranger From Venus does have some of eloquence of the films to come, but the ideas just don't gel properly.

Patricia Neal had recently turned her back on Hollywood for the New York stage and married Roald Dahl (with whom she settled in Buckinghamshire to raise a family) when she was offered this cheap, cheeky and stultifyingly humourless British rehash of 'The Day the Earth Stood'.

Helmut Dantine - like Michael Rennie in the original - performs Christ-like miracles like healing the sick and speaking in tongues; but like this film lacks a pulse. Instead of Bernard Herrmann's eerie theremin we occasionally get twee musical contributions from Eric Spear (later immortalised by the theme for 'Coronation Street'). The agreeable Hertfordshire exteriors compensate for director Burt Balaban's stilted interiors, and since it's only 76 minutes long you keep watching.

It's obvious that the people making this film were trying to do a remake of the classic sci-fi film THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL only three years later. Not only is the plot very similar but it also stars Patricia Neal--the same lady who starred in the original film! Like THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, this film is about an alien coming to our planet to deliver an ultimatum concerning our ill-advised use of nuclear weapons. Oddly, however, he lands in the middle of no where in England--probably because it's obviously they have no budget and couldn't set the film in London or any other big city. You hear about the military, but you only see a few assorted guys in rather generic uniforms with no fancy equipment.

Despite the many limitations due to budget, however, the film is still very entertaining--even if you've seen the superior prior film. I think part of it is because the alien, played by Helmut Dantine, seemed a lot more like an alien than Michael Rennie from THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. This isn't saying Rennie was bad--just that Dantine offered a unique interpretation. The other thing I liked is that instead of the humans attacking by mistake, in this film the leaders from the UK are real jerks. Despite the Venusians coming with openness and peace, the officials responded with lies and a foolish attempt to steal their space ship!! As a result, this film takes an even more cynical view of human nature. In the original, humans were scared and a bit dumb. Here, they're just jerks! The final thing I loved about the film is that they didn't try too hard with the special effects. Other than a model of a space ship, the film has no bug-eyed alien or silly ray gun--just a dandy story.

So, despite being extremely derivative, the film still is entertaining thanks to good acting and a few interesting twists.

By the way, in a silly little scene, one "expert" said that Venus is "many light-years away from the Earth". No, dude, it isn't. A single light year is about 6 trillion miles. Venus is actually about 25 million miles. So, a light year is 240,000 times greater than the distance to Venus AND they said "many light-years"! I am surprised the writers didn't notice this discrepancy. Wow. I now feel like Mr. Wizard!

I'm always amazed at how emotion some people get. This movie (which few if any people have heard of) is a neat little slice of life thing. Once again Patricia Neal is paired up with an alien who looks more Aryan than Venutian. Once again, he holds the power to do great harm to the earth unless the military posturing stops. I guess this town is too big for the both of them. This is a gently done offering with few sparks or special effects. The point is that despite all he proves to them and the kindness of his actions, the people decide he needs to be destroyed. I don't put it quite in the same cinematic league with "Citizen Kane" and "Lawrence of Arabia" but it's no worse than hundreds of other films of the early 1950's. For those that consider it boring, I never lost interest in some rather neat characters who interact throughout. Please relax.