O Monstro da Era Atômica

"The Cosmic Man" is a charming attempt to make a $5.00 version of "The Day the Earth Stood Still". It's an extremely low-budgeted Sci-Fi movie from the late fifties, so this generally means there are stern scientists talking a lot of pseudo-philosophical gibberish and asking themselves way too many rhetorical questions, villainous looking military men fantasizing about weapons of mass destruction and mysterious alien forces with minds that are immeasurably superior to ours. When a spherical UFO – a gigantic golf ball actually – is discovered in a small Californian canyon community, the army wants to nuke it and a local scientist wants to study it. Meanwhile, the alien passenger sneaks out of his interstellar golf ball and begins exploring the earthly habits, rites and inhabitants. This is where our cute and cheap little B-movie rips off "The Day the Earth Stood Still", in fact, as the alien witnesses the imbecility and self-destructive nature of the human race. How come aliens get such a kick out of observing how stupid we are? Like in a few hundred of the films he starred in, John Carradine receives top-billing even though he appears all together perhaps for a whole five minutes. "The Cosmic Man" is often rather dull and doesn't contain any real action, but it certainly has good intentions and an earnest supportive cast.

An unidentified object is tracked going at extreme speeds around the globe. A mysterious object is found in Bronson Canyon (a real location used in the filming of "Robot Monster" 1953). Naturally, the military is antsy and requests a top scientist Dr. Karl Sorenson (Bruce Bennett) investigate.

All the elements are there with the three-way love interest between the widowed mother Kathy Grant (Angela Greene) of a crippled kid Ken (Scotty Morrow), scientist Dr. Sorenson and military Col. Matthews (Paul Langton.) They must speculate on the good bad and ugly of their mysterious invader (John Carradine).

An added plus is the fun of seeing the technology of the time this film was made. And a vintage look at the Griffith Park Observatory. Too bad they did not show the inside as there is a nifty pendulum that swings with the rotation of the earth.

We are in luck as we get two space speeches before the conclusion. Will we heed the warning or is this the end?

You can say a lot about John Carradine but dull he isn't except, of course, in THE COSMIC MAN. He has very little screen time and when he does appear it's behind the darkest pair of goggles this side of The Invisible Man. His affected, halting "alien speak" hampers him even further so he's not a exactly ball of fun and neither is the movie. I know it's a personal quirk but even as a kid I never liked genre films with child actors as major characters and when they play for sympathy (the boy has polio) it gets even more cloying.

On the plus side, there are atmospheric touches in a couple of scenes with Carradine printed "in negative." This, however, is more than balanced by scads of talking head scenes, some of which includes the leading lady wavering between her two oldish, low-charisma suitors Bruce Bennett and Paul Langton. It's a very slow go.

I recall back in the seventies when THE COSMIC MAN seemed to be a lost film, a friend of mine, a die-hard science fiction fan, was determined to track down a copy. He finally got his opportunity when the film suddenly became available on home video. Even he gave it a big Thumbs Down.

Cosmic Man, The (1959)

** (out of 4)

An alien (John Carradine) lands on Earth in what appears to be a large ping pong ball and tells us Americans how stupid we are and how the world will come to an end due to our dumbness. This is clearly a rip off of The Day the Earth Stood Still and it's poorly made but this leads to a few decent laughs. Carradine sleepwalks through his role, which isn't good considering this was a man who could make Billy the Kid vs. Dracula entertaining. The supporting cast are all rather bland and corny. This is far from a classic but it's enjoyable enough if you have 70-minutes to kill.

Not expecting much at all, I was a little surprised at how much I enjoyed this very small budget take on Day the Earth Stood Still. For all the plodding along and pretty miserable effects, the story is quite literate and even has some elements of HG Wells First Men In the Moon, that being the idea of space travel via an "gravity" repelling shutter device. The lead scientist does his part well, in a role that would have been Peter Graves' had he not been busy on Beginning of the End. He has a certain combination of ease and comfort in his role and it comes across as very realistic, the best of the cast, and livens up all the scenes which he is in. John Carradine puts in a typical decent performance but has to do double-duty since there is no Gort available here. Unfortunately, this weakens the film, and we wish there were more of a menace on his part, or more of some kind of ultimatum, but then that's why we return to view Day the Earth Stood Still again and again. Yet you can watch this "version" at least one time and not feel disappointed.