Day Mars Invaded Earth, The
Entry updated 1 May 2023. Tagged: Film.
Film (1962). API/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Maury Dexter. Written by Harry Spalding. Cast includes Betty Beall, William Mims, Kent Taylor and Marie Windsor. 70 minutes. Black and white.
Film (1962). API/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Maury Dexter. Written by Harry Spalding. Cast includes Betty Beall, Lowell Brown, William Mims, Gregg Shank, Kent Taylor and Marie Windsor. 70 minutes. Black and white.
Scientist David Fielding (Taylor), with the help of associate Web Spenser (Mims), has overseen the pioneering landing of the first unmanned probe on Mars, which emitted a strange radio beam before becoming inactive. His wife Claire (Windsor) is unhappy because she has been neglected during his preoccupation with the project, so he agrees to go with her and their children, teenager Judi (Beall) and young Rocky (Shank), for an extended sojourn in a mansion owned by Claire's family. There, they begin to encounter duplicates of family members acting strangely; when challenged about their apparent behaviour, the originals of course deny everything. Among other incidents, a duplicate of Judi leads to the death of her boyfriend Frank (Brown). Soon, Fielding confronts his own duplicate and receives an explanation: Martians are beings of pure energy (see Transcendence) who travelled to Earth by means of the probe's transmission. They can manifest themselves as duplicates of human beings, and they are determined to thwart any humans endeavouring to travel to Mars by attacking the people who are leading such efforts; despite the film's alarmist title, they express no interest in invading Earth, but simply want to ensure that humans do not invade Mars. Finally, they disintegrate Fielding and his family, now represented only by human-shaped residues on the ground, and their duplicates leave the mansion, presumably intent upon preventing further explorations of Mars.
Sometimes dismissed as a pale imitation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), this underrated film commands attention for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is one of the few films – perhaps the only film – correctly predicting that human investigations of Mars would begin with an unmanned probe. It also anticipates Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) in effectively generating suspense by having characters moving around within a vast, largely uninhabited dwelling, and even though they kill the family of the man responsible for a space probe, the Martians can be sympathized with because they only want to be left alone, as is true in other films like The Angry Red Planet (1959). Some aspects of the Martians' behavior are puzzling: why did they not immediately eliminate Fielding and his family instead of allowing them to live for an extended period of time and coexist with their duplicates? And if they are immaterial and presumably invulnerable to efforts to harm them, why are they so hostile to a human presence on Mars? They contrast with the other Martians made of pure energy who appear in Isaac Asimov's David Starr, Space Ranger (1952 as by Paul French; vt Space Ranger 1973), a possible influence on the film, since Asimov's Martians, happily living Underground and devoted to philosophical contemplation, are not opposed to humans colonizing the surface of their planet. [GW]
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