STRANGER FROM VENUS

In my half-hearted attempt at getting around to watching readily-available-for-free old Brit stuff I'd never seen before, I stumbled upon this little curio. It's on Dailymotion, with French subtitles (as is YT's upload of DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS, although the VENUS print on DM isn't quite as good).

As all you film experts know (I didn't), this is very similar to THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, only scaled down to a few Home Counties country roads, a field and a pub. Ah - DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS, only "not in Inverness-shire". Where the feck it's actually meant to take place is anybody's guess. And your guess. Is as good. As mine. Oh, Patricia Neal's in it. I wonder if she was conscious of a certain step down in quality from her co-starring role in the earlier classic. Having said that, I might slightly prefer STRANGER FROM VENUS over the overly-pompous and somewhat pretentious "better" film from a couple of years before. Nobody could accuse this one of being too pompous.

So yeah, in a nutshell, stranger from Venus arrives, causes Patricia Neal to have a car accident, heals her (and the landlord's gammy leg), drinks water instead of beer, tries to reunite big political knobs from around the globe (in the pub), fails, almost has an affair with Pat N, reveals that his planet is in danger because of what we're doing on Earth, threatens it, is betrayed, a big spaceship (something found in the garage) appears from millions of light years away (?) and... but that would be telling.

For almost a whole hour I was thinking "WTF's all this about?", or more kind of "When's something going to happen?" But I was never bored. It's fascinating to watch, and the too-dark Dailymotion upload really brought out the dinginess of the pub, the grime on the walls etc. The plot doesn't really make any sense, and the script's full of howler's, many of them so clichéd that you find yourelf saying them before the characters get round to it. One line I did like came from one of the boffin/government types - something like (speaking of the Stranger), "I like him. He makes us look like morons". Other "miscalculations" - wouldn't scientific people have known, even in 1954, that apart from the pressure on Venus (which they mention), it's too hot (which they don't)? And it's not millions of light years away either. Just as well they didn't say "Millions of light years ago".

Oh then there's the whole point of the thing - Stranger is here to warn us to stop our nuclear experimenting, because if all the bombs "went off at the same time" (?) it would cause the Earth's axis to shift an inch, which might not seem much, but would eventually be really quite big. All that doesn't hold any water, and I'm glad I never even thought about plots that much.

So much to enjoy. We have an uncredited role for John Le Mesurier talking to a phone, a larger but rather thankless role for Nigel Green (his first?) as a "bobby"... or is he? That's part of the charm of the film - it doesn't seem to specify where it takes place. Helmut Dantine as the Stranger retains his German accent while the others are a mix of Yankee and non-specific Brit regional talk. Uniforms for who-knows-what police force, politicians in positions which don't exist (in Britain), a pub with none of the usual adverts on the walls... It's all very oddball and strangley compelling, I don't know if by accident or design. If it's by accident it's a happy one, and if it's by design - well that's jolly clever of them. Thankfully the potentially romantic subplot fails to sizzle, so we are spared such rubbish as, "Love? What is love? I do not know the word."

I was almost as hypnotised by this as by Ivan Barnett's THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, but not quite. STRANGER FROM VENUS is much more plodding and pedestrian in its handling (and in its much LARGER budget, compared to the Barnett home movie) but it's still got a lot going for it.

Did you all like STRANGER FROM VENUS as much as I did? Why? Why not? Is this not a forum? A discussion board if you will? Then out with it.