PHANTOM FROM SPACE (1953)

Radar tracks a UFO from Alaska to where it lands or crashes near Santa Monica, California. It leaves the radar screen but causes major radio and television interference in the area. A woman, her husband and a family friend are attacked on a beach by a figure wearing some kind of helmet, though no face is visible inside. The husband is killed, and at first the police suspect that wife and the friend have plotted together to kill him, but another such attack is soon reported. Soon, some cops working with agents of the "Communications Commission" link sightings of this helmeted phantom, whom they call the X-Man, with the UFO and the interference problem. Tracking him by the radioactive trail he leaves, they see him near Griffith Observatory. He takes off his suit and, sure enough, he is invisible without it. They take his suit and soon find out that the creature cannot breathe for long without his helmet. In an office in the observatory, the X-Man tries tapping out a message with a pair of scissors to Barbara Randall, an assistant to one of the scientists, and she discovers that his naked form can be seen in ultraviolet light. Ultimately, it seems that the phantom is just an alien who wound up here by accident and poses no threat to our planet, but still our poisonous air gets to him; he falls from up on the giant telescope, dies, and evaporates.

This B-film is part of the early wave of UFO/alien movies, and a relatively rare one in that the alien, despite killing a handful of folks, is not intentionally a threat to earthlings. When we finally see him fully naked in ultraviolet light at the climax, he resembles James Arness in 1951's The Thing from Another World but with smooth skin (and no genitals). At only 72 minutes, it still feels a bit long. The invisibility effects are fairly primitive, and though we feel some sympathy for the phantom by the end, we know nothing about him, not even how he ended up on Earth. There are a few too many actors running around accomplishing very little. The main characters are a cop named Bowers (Harry Landers), Barbara (Noreen Nash), her Germanic boss (Rudolph Anders), a military man at the observatory (James Seay), a pesky reporter (just like in The Thing) and a communications expert who spends the movie driving around in a car. I couldn't tell you if he is present at the climax because all those white men in uniforms and jackets--who all smoke a lot and chew quite a bit of gum--looked alike to me. The one who stood out is Barbara's husband (Steve Clark) because he looks like Clark Kent. One sequence near the end stands out stylistically and two groups of people holding a conversation in a room are photographed from below, for no apparent reason except maybe the cameraman got bored. [YouTube]